Special Issue of Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies (JLCDS)

Call for Papers:
Cripistemologies
Special Issue of Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies (JLCDS)
Guest Editors, Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer

“Does having a disability in itself give a person a particular point of view or
a less distorted and more complete perspective on certain issues? No. . . . But

I do want to claim that, collectively, we have accumulated a significant body of

knowledge, with a different standpoint (or standpoints) from those without
disabilities, and that that knowledge, which has been ignored and repressed in
non-disabled culture, should be further developed and articulated.”

-Susan Wendell, The Rejected Body:
Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability

“A queer phenomenology might involve an orientation toward what slips, which
allows what slips to pass, in the unknowable length of its duration. In other
words, a queer phenomenology would function as a disorientation device; it would

not overcome the disalignment of the horizontal and vertical axis, allowing the
oblique to open another angle on the world. . . . Queer would become a matter of

how one approaches the object that slips away, a way to inhabit the world at the

point at which things fleet.”

-Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology:
Orientations, Objects, Others

From foundational statements in feminist disability studies to more recent
meditations at the intersection of queer theory and disability studies, the idea

of what we might term cripistemology—a theory of knowledge based in crip
embodiments, a theory of analysis predicated on crip deconstructions—is poised
on the tip of our tongues, called for, yearned for. What new forms of knowledge

might be produced through cripistemology? What are crip perspectives and
phenomenologies, and how might theorists in the humanities come to know
differently from a crip perspective? What epistemological innovations, as well
as epistemological problems, arise from cripistemological standpoints?
Following Sara Ahmed—whose work on queer phenomenology bears the implicit
imprint of the crip body as it slips or refuses to overcome disalignment, the
crip mind as it becomes disoriented and allows the oblique to open another angle

on the world—might crip as a critical positionality not also produce new
horizons of thought about objects, orientations, and others?

In asserting a crip analytic—one that is as contestatory and playful as the best

queer theory—do we risk losing our grip in a tug-of-war with medical authority?
Do identification and disidentification work the same way in crip theory as
they do in queer theory and in disability studies more generally? How do we
invoke labels of disorder, illness, and stigma without also making ourselves
subject to the structural inequalities that produced them? How might crip
theory avoid becoming ‘respectably crip’ (to redirect a phrase from Jane
Ward)—contained, in other words, by neoliberal rhetoric about diversity and
corporate multiculturalism? How might attention to cripistemologies forge a path

out of the ruts of conservative and liberal ‘options’ for thinking about
disability (and about difference in general)? What are some other routes of
thought apart from difference good, difference bad? What would move us towards
a radical reconfiguration of the question beyond the bigoted formulation of
difference as despised and the neoliberal formulation of difference as the
superficial skin covering everyone’s inherent sameness?


With such questions in mind, the co-editors seek essays that articulate a
philosophy of crip epistemologies or phenomenologies, and invite proposals on an

array of topics related to the task of defining ‘crip’ as standpoint or horizon,

which include (but are not limited to) the following:

· standpoint, sitpoint, and crippoint theory

· thinking crip, thinking black

· crip subjectivities—beyond ‘managing’ the spoiled identity

· cripping disidentification

· revealing the intersicktional, or cripping intersectionality

· cripping the Parsonian sick role

· cripistemologies of ignorance

· crip dis/orientations

· insult and the making of the crip self

· disabilinormativity and cripping the queer call to defy ‘diversity as
usual’

· crip affect—beyond the binary of crip pride/crip shame

· crip utopianism, crip nihilism

· memoirs as named or unnamed sites of cripistemological innovation

· crip ruralities and rural cripistemologies


Discussions of specific literary and cultural texts are invited, but consonant
with the philosophical flavor of this issue, preference will be given to
projects that use individual texts as vehicles to address broader cultural
debates and theoretical inquiries. A one-page proposal and a one-page
curriculum vitae should be emailed tomjohnson@uscupstate.edu
andmcruer@gwu.edu by
August 1, 2011. Finalists will be selected by November 1, 2011, and full drafts

of articles are due on May 1, 2012.