Chronically Ill, Critically Crip?: Poetry, Poetics and Dissonant Disabilities

Abstract

In this hybrid critical-creative paper, I explore disability poetry and crip poetics via my manuscript, Body Work. Poetry provides a site to explore crip experience because, as Petra Kuppers (2007) argues, "poems and their performance of meaning clasp something of crip culture's force" (p. 103). Here, the "instability of language" (Kuppers, p. 89) provides a way of understanding chronic illnesses as "dissonant disabilities" (Driedger & Owen, 2008). In placing chronic illness in a disability studies framework, and via crip theory, which critiques the common sense naturalness of ability and heterosexuality, I investigate how chronic illness demands ways of understanding that intelligently address mind and body unpredictability. In close, I will revisit Robert McRuer's notion of "critically crip" arguing that any claim to crip be enacted with intentional criticality.

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