3:57am December 28, 2012

➸ Flutterfly Invasion: On the word "cripple," rebloggable by request

Anonymous asked: I was wondering about the use of the word cripple (or crip). To me, that seems like an offensive word but I see that it is used a lot by bloggers that have a disability. Is it the preferred word to use (rather than to say disable, for instance), is it a word that…

Interesting.

I’ve actually heard people use terms like mental cripple, social cripple, and emotional cripple, sometimes referring to disabled people and sometimes not. But I still wouldn’t reclaim them for my cognitive or emotional disabilities.

My personal feelings on crip and crippleare complex. The most commonly used categories my things fall under are physical, cognitive, developmental, emotional, psychiatric, learning, chronic illness, and chronic pain. They include things that I was born with, things I acquired or had triggered later, stable things, fluctuating things, progressive things, and one or two things that are no longer. And many of them are intertwined at a deep level. That’s just by way of introducing where I’m coming from when it comes to disability.

I also see disability as a natural part of human variation. That doesn’t mean it’s always a good or pleasant thing – whoever thinks natural means pleasant should try taking a shit in a nettle patch. It just means it’s deeply ingrained in the human condition for both better and worse. It’s good, bad, and neutral all wrapped up in one, and in a society that sees it as all horrible it can be hard to tease out where the bad parts really come from. What seems obvious, isn’t.

So given my disability status and my opinions, my relationship to crip and cripple is complicated. There’s something about those words that Cheryl Marie Wade described as “bone true, way in beyond the reach of the cliché.” I wholeheartedly agree, and love her monologue on the complexity of the word. It’s a word that seems to show disability embedded deeply within humanity – but I couldn’t explain why.

As a slur, of course, it just causes pain and suffering among many other things. It doesn’t cut me to the bone like retard does – a slur so bad few who’ve been subjected to it ever want to reclaim it except in very private situations that are hard to describe. But it does draw blood nonetheless. And I sure as hell wouldn’t want to use crip in a way that gets anyone confused with gangs.

I actually find it funny that so many disabled people are bothered that non-physically disabled people are using crip and cripple to describe themselves. Funny strange, not a joke. Because my experience over the years is that purely mobility-impaired people tend to be really bad about referring to the whole disability community as gimp, crip, and cripple. And insist that this means all disabled people and everyone should accept those words apply even if what they have is dyslexia. While meanwhile, often, either deliberately or inadvertently making it hard for people other than physically disabled people to participate in a community they think is theirs and theirs alone. People who are both physically and cognitively disabled are sometimes best placed to watch this happening to us in a community that only welcomes us in name, if that:

You know, they told me, I don’t look – Nobody would have to … I could be just another crip. And as if I were just another crip, they started with the jokes and comebacks.
“She asked me whether my toenails still grow; I asked her whether her hair still grows.”
“They want cognitive disability representation? Why don’t they just ask ‘SuperChris’: he’s cognitively disabled.”
“They may be able-bodied, but we’re able-minded.”
They didn’t mean me, of course. I wasn’t like that, wasn’t like them. They meant no offense.
Perhaps it is enough to say that my vision of “the disability community” and theirs does not coincide.
—Cal Montgomery, Critic of the Dawn - can’t recommend it highly enough.

I know many people who are both cognitively and physically disabled, like Cal, or like me, who refuse to use the word crip for themselves, or only in certain limited circumstances use it. Because to many of us it represents a community that has done its level best to exclude us. A community where they expect us to go by crip but don’t think of what that means. A community where, as one friend of mine puts it, “cross-disability means both Quickie and Invacare”. (Two common wheelchair brands. Mine’s a Permobil. :-P )

I’ve always found it weird. That simultaneous exclusion of everyone not meeting a certain standard, and insistence that crip should work for every disabled person. So should people wonder when non-mobility-impaired disabled people use it on themselves? They’re being encouraged to do so. That to me is a far worse problem than the fact that some people go ahead and use it.

So how do I, personally, feel comfortable using crip? I am only really comfortable using it around certain people. Using it around most purely physically disabled people generally makes me feel like a conformity is being forced on me that I can’t possibly live up to. That expectation to be a crip and only a crip and nothing more hangs in the air when it isn’t stated outright.

But around people who, like me, are both cognitively and physically disabled, crip feels comfortable again. It’s implicitly understood that we are only using it to describe one piece of our disability experience. And in those circumstances I’ve never hesitated to use gimp, crip, or cripple. Because I know the other person will understand precisely what I do and don’t mean. I don’t have to fear that crip will mean pretending I’m nothing but a crip.

So leaving aside its use as a slur – I actually like cripple and similar words a great deal. As words, they tell a deep story about physical disability, a story that doesn’t exist in the more sanitized words we have. Not just for wheelchair users either – the word was also used for people who limped or needed crutches.

But. I feel cautious using it around people who don’t understand that my disability experience isn’t limited to my using a wheelchair. Especially people who refuse to understand. So I mostly only use words like this among other people who are both cognitively and physically disabled and aren’t in denial of the cognitive part. If that makes any sense. Because that’s the only times I know I’ll be understood.

Notes: