Prologue: The Impossibility of Pain

I spend almost every day in pain. I'm never sure how bad it will be, since it changes day-to-day, sometimes hour-to-hour. Taking the form of chronic headaches, the pain arises from a rare neurological disorder called occipital neuralgia, which manifests differently than more common types like migraines and stress headaches. There are no auras, no sensitivity to bright light or loud noises, no nausea, no throbbing behind the eyes, no vise grip around my forehead. Instead, my pain feels like I'm being repeatedly stabbed in the back of my head with a sharp object. I feel not only the stabs, but the burning and aching each one leaves in its wake, sensations that radiate from the base of my skull and fan out over the entire right side of my head. I have an abnormal curvature in my cervical spine called kyphosis, which my doctors suspect may contribute to the condition.

After years of navigating the U.S. medical system, I've come to realize that diagnosis is more an art than a science, based on educated guesswork more than objective reality. "Occipital neuralgia" and "kyphosis" are not simply truth claims, but rhetorical claims. As Eli Clare points out, such terms set things in motion, useful things, but "useful to whom and to what ends?" (48). I recognize the limitations of diagnosis, its imposition of discipline and justification for inhumane and violent treatment. Yet it (along with decent health insurance) opens doors, provides access to specialists and community, helps make sense of what can otherwise seem senseless. I've spent over a decade navigating this tension. I've visited so many doctors and specialists that I've lost count. I've tried neurologists, rheumatologists, headache clinics, pain clinics, physical therapy, traction, aqua therapy, and therapeutic massage. I've enjoyed brief periods of relief after visiting a chiropractor, having a neurostimulator implanted, taking pain killers and Lyrica, and undergoing several surgical rhizotomies. But these periods never last.

In the summer of 2016, my neurosurgeon performed a rhizotomy to cut some of the offending nerves. Afterwards, I awoke to post-surgery pain so excruciating that remembering it even now makes my heart pump faster and my breathing come quickly and shallowly. I remember the recovery nurse telling me to settle down because my vocalizations of distress were disturbing the other patients. I remember her telling me to stop fighting the pain meds, as if the real problems were my stubbornness and recalcitrance, as if I were bringing this whole predicament on myself. These chastisements made me angry, for sure, but they also hit a nerve, inciting one of my deepest insecurities: was I being selfish? I've worked my entire life not to be bothersome, not to be a pain, but my own pain—acute or chronic—doesn't much care about that. It makes me scream when I want quiet, cry when I want composure, crawl out of my skin when I want peace.

During my stay in the hospital, I invented a mantra, which I still repeat to myself in difficult situations. It's a phrase that encapsulates my contradictory experiences with my disabilities: "this pain is impossible, yet here I am." I grabbed onto this saying again when, after a decade of chronic pain, depression, and an abusive relationship with my ex-wife, I collapsed at the start of 2017. I lost my beloved job as a faculty member at a small liberal arts college and, most importantly, I lost myself. A year later, in the latter half of 2018, I experienced a significant turnaround, thanks to anti-depressants, a RFA (Radio Frequency Ablation), lots of self-care, and my critical-political commitments. This turnaround itself is impossible, yet here I am doing it and living it. Despair and hope live together, side by side, experienced via awe (both wonder and terror) in the face of survival.

Introduction: Complicating Anti-Cure and Anti-Relational Approaches

Given my experiences with chronic pain and depression, I feel ambivalent toward the primary counter-narrative offered by disability studies/activism and based on the social model. I simultaneously see the benefits of the social model and agree with its critics, who point out that it fits more easily with mobility impairments than with chronic illness (Williams 812). 1 Indeed, I feel no compunction to applaud or romanticize my disabilities, and loss, suffering, and lack do accompany them, even as I reject ableist logics that characterize all disabilities in such narrow terms. I recognize the problems with medicalization as the dominant paradigm, yet medicine also provides me with significant relief from physical and psychological pain. Without medical intervention, alongside the critical-political work of feminism, disability studies, critical race theory, and queer theory, I could not have written this essay in the first place. Far from always acting in league with dominant culture, then, treatment can sometimes facilitate efforts to contest dominant culture.

This essay explores such ambiguities, engaging directly with the anti-cure strand in disability studies and activism. I argue that this strand mirrors the so-called anti-relational strand in queer theory insofar as both rely on the View from Nowhere for their structuring fantasies. Susan Bordo describes the View from Nowhere as the privileged site of knowledge and existence within Western philosophy and culture (4). It proposes an objective, rational, and universal space of pure mind that transcends the particularities, deceptions, and imprisonment of the body. The body, with its excessive emotionality and base appetites, stands "apart from the true self" (represented by the mind) and "undermines the best efforts of that self" by thoughtlessly pursuing sex, food, and pleasure (5). Lest such impulses overwhelm the pursuit of order and truth, they must be subject to mental control and discipline through the exercise of willpower.

The View from Nowhere ultimately seeks to liberate the mind from the "located-ness" represented by the body (4). It justifies systems of oppression by associating the positive qualities of the mind with masculinity, whiteness, and other unmarked positions, while relegating marginalized subjects to the negativity of the body. If the mind must master the body on an individual level, then heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and ableism promise to do the same on a societal level. Edward Said, for example, points out how the West comes to understand itself as the West (i.e., the normative center of civilization) by projecting such negativity onto the East through tropes of barbarism, racial inferiority, and femininity (10-11). European imperialism and settler colonialism consequentially seem necessary, natural, and benign. Black feminists in the U.S. like Patricia Hill Collins and Brittney Cooper note how attributing bodily excesses like emotionality and hyper-sexuality to black women emerges from historical legacies of slavery and segregation and continues to inform contemporary practices, policies, and representations (70-71; 22). Bestowing personhood on some at the expense of others via the mind-body dualism, then, is a linchpin of domination and subordination.

In the first section, I argue that the anti-cure strain in disability studies evokes a fantasy of the naturally impaired body-mind, a kind of disabled normate, which abjects those who cannot overcome their disabilities in the proper way. This critique might seem counter-intuitive, given that anti-cure politics explicitly rejects the transcendence offered by medical cure and reframes disability in terms of human variation, adaptability, and alternative modes of being. It nonetheless belies a desire for the View from Nowhere, a space outside of and above the contaminating influences of dominant culture and medicine, a space where disabled people are free to be their naturally impaired selves. This disabled normate is contrasted with and constituted by its abjected others, trapped by their suffering body-minds and desperate for a cure, unwittingly seduced by Western medicine's promises of comfort. After outlining how the disabled normate appears in Eli Clare's recent book Brilliant Imperfection, I suggest that queer theory's willingness to embrace negativity provides a useful counter-point to the anti-cure vision of liberation.

In the second section, I address how queer theory's turn to negativity produces its own problems, most clearly articulated in its anti-relational strand. Represented here by the work of Lee Edelman and Leo Bersani, this strand relies on psychoanalysis, which becomes a closed symbol system divorced from history, politics, and materiality. By framing self-annihilation as revolutionary, it arguably fetishizes disability and the death drive. It justifies this fetishization by treating disability and death as primarily symbolic and somehow separable from lived conditions. I argue that such desires for obliteration, despite their claims to trouble the notion of the human, ultimately construct a fantasy not that different from the one at the heart of Western liberal humanism.

Like the disabled normate, the self-annihilating queer is envisioned as the privileged site of new and subjugated knowledges, radical and revolutionary impulses, and liberation from oppression and domination. Both figures thus risk replicating the mind/body dualism that undergirds the View from Nowhere and liberal humanism's sovereign subjectivity, the very thing these strands wish to challenge. 2 Although sympathetic to this wish, I argue for turning instead to non-traditional conceptualizations of the self developed by other strands of feminism, critical race theory, queer theory, and disability studies.

Inspired by concepts like the queer art of failure, dignity in shame, the feminist killjoy, and cruising utopia, I conclude by suggesting the figure of the "surviving crip" as a generative alternative to dominant culture's super-crip, anti-cure's disabled normate, and the anti-relational, self-annihilating queer. If the surviving crip is a figure, then my mantra from the hospital is its refrain. They both dance between positivity and negativity, between cure and death, between self-acceptance and self-destruction, between loss and adaptation. Neither attempts to resolve any of these terms into the others, but rather gets its power from the play between them.

I pay close attention to these paradoxes in the hopes of sustaining alternate notions of the self and the world, ones that do not revert to the governing Western fantasy of the View from Nowhere and the social hierarchies it authorizes. I advocate for a careful reckoning with how the View from Nowhere animates oppositional projects like the anti-cure and anti-relational strains. The surviving crip does not represent some ideologically pure approach "outside" such logics, which would merely repeat the same mistake. Far from a perfect solution, the figure of the surviving crip is a starting place, a heuristic for critical-political ethics. In the spirit of reworking the super-crip, it invites other reworkings and other reckonings.

Disability Studies: The Naturally Impaired Body-Mind, the Disabled Normate, and Embracing Queer Negativity

Disability studies in general articulates an ongoing and thorough critique of Western culture's pre-dominant medical model, which asserts medical expertise and authority over body-minds it deems defective, casts disability as individual tragedy and burden, and fetishizes cure and elimination. It subjects marginalized populations to surveillance, discipline, and violence, all the while funneling resources away from helping disabled people in the present in the name of discovering a future cure.

The anti-cure strand resists medicalized tenets by turning to the aforementioned social model. It locates "the problem" not in personal deficits, but in a society that fails to accommodate, include, and humanize those with natural or biological impairments (Shakespeare 268). By hailing disabled people as a minority group with rights, the social model advocates changes to ableist conditions and attitudes, rather than changes to individual impaired body-minds. It insists on the value of human variation, finding merit in body-minds that Western medicine declares disposable and re-conceptualizing what it means to have a life worth living.

By interrogating the normal/abnormal distinction drawn by Western medicine and culture, the anti-cure strand critiques what Rosemarie Garland-Thompson calls the "normate." This term refers to "the veiled subject position of the cultural self, the figure outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate's boundaries. [It] usefully designates the social figure through which people can represent themselves as definitive human beings" (8). This concept resonates with feminist, queer, and anti-racist work that notes straight white masculinity's position as the generic, the default, and the just human. Audre Lorde dubs this position "the mythical norm," which Western culture invests with power (Sister/Outsider 116). Lorde attends to the ways in which the mythical norm influences the women's movement, seen in white women's tendency to assume the universality of their experiences and the place of gender/sex as the primary site of oppression. Women of color, then, become the other, "the outsider whose experience and tradition is too 'alien' to comprehend" (117).

Although the anti-cure strand pays close attention to the functioning of the normate, it risks constructing its own disabled normate, its own mythical norm, in the process. The disabled normate performs the rhetorical work described by both Garland-Thompson and Lorde, acting as the standard against which all disabled body-minds are judged and granting personhood only to those whose body-minds can be recuperated as "naturally impaired." By naturally impaired, I mean unsullied by medical intervention, cultural oppression, and suffering, now celebrated and romanticized as the source of new subjugated knowledge, strength, and power.

Just like Garland-Thompson's normate relies on the abjection of its "deviant others," the disabled normate relies on the abjection of those who cannot meet its strict standards. Too close to bodily sensations and tempted by bodily comfort, these "others" get tricked into falling for medicine's promises. This suspicion of the body marginalizes those, like women and people of color, already conflated with the body and excluded from liberal selfhood. By proposing an idealized disabled person who resists ableism through an association with the mind and its implicit whiteness and masculinity, the disabled normate risks reproducing troublesome gendered and racialized hierarchies within disability studies and activism.

Although the figure of the disabled normate appears throughout disability studies, I engage specifically with Eli Clare's recent book Brilliant Imperfection as a representative example. I focus on this book precisely because it grapples with challenges to the social model, even as Clare explicitly identifies himself with anti-cure politics. My own piece adopts many of Clare's critiques of medicalized cure, especially its governing fantasy: a return to the non-disabled body-mind, a future without disability, an erasure of all traces of mind-body difference. Despite his explicit rejection of the mind-body dualism, I remain troubled by the fantasy of the naturally impaired body-mind and the disabled normate that haunts his work (xvi). I use the term "haunt" deliberately to suggest that the social model and anti-cure strain do not set out to construct this normate. In fact, some of their insights push against it, as seen in Clare's attempts to incorporate critiques of his own politics. Despite this more nuanced approach, the disabled normate nonetheless informs his work, popping up again and again, often veiled in the way Garland-Thomson suggests.

Aware of the social model's tendency to center certain kinds of mobility impairments, Clare confronts chronic illness directly, recognizing the difficulties faced by people who long for relief but cannot even convince their doctors of the seriousness or reality of their pain. He describes a conversation where a colleague questions his insistence that there's nothing wrong with disabled body-minds. His interlocutor says: "we need to resist the assumptions that our bodies are wrong and broken. But at the same time, the chronic fatiguing hell pain I live with is not a healthy variation, not a natural bodily difference" (53). This interaction prompts Clare to reflect on the meanings of natural and unnatural:

the moments and locations where disability and chronic pain occur—can we consider them natural, as our fragile, resilient human body-minds interact with the world? Is it natural when a spine snaps after being flung from a car or a horse, when a brain processes information in fragmented ways after being exposed to lead, mercury, pesticides? Can a body-mind be deemed both natural and abnormal? I ask because I don't understand. And when are those moments and locations of disability and chronic pain unnatural—as unnatural as war, toxic landfills, childhood abuse, and poverty? (53).

Questions like these punctuate the entire book, with Clare repeatedly describing how they "jostle" him and his anti-cure assumptions (62). They jostle the book's structure, as well, interrupting the narrative, disrupting clear-cut or pat answers, and inviting readers to contemplate the dilemmas Clare raises. Yet we must stay attentive to the ways in which the questions themselves set the terms of any answers we might devise.

The passage quoted above, for instance, rests on a cause-effect framework that tries to determine which comes first: natural impairment or unnatural disability. Western medicine also fixates on the search for a cause-effect relationship in its efforts to discover the "truth" about illness and injury. It posits an originally non-disabled and presumably superior state to which disabled people should be returned. However, Clare asks, "how would I, or the medical-industrial complex, go about restoring my body-mind? The vision of me without tremoring hands and slurred speech, with more balance and co-ordination, doesn't originate from my visceral history" (15). He thus calls into question the assumption that disability is an unnatural deviation in need of fixing, but does so by substituting one authentic, originary state for another. If the normate's fundamental state is naturally non-impaired, then the disabled normate's fundamental state is naturally impaired (signified by the phrase "visceral history"), and it must be preserved in the face of outside distorting forces (i.e., the medical-industrial complex).

Another attempt to parse the line between internal, authentic desires and external pressures appears in a section where Clare and one of his friends heatedly debate his top surgery and her bariatric surgery (181-82). Their respective surgeries have brought them both a great deal of comfort, but they struggle to reconcile these feelings with their "change the world, not our body-minds" politics (181). Increasingly critical of this strict stance, Clare rejects the born-this-way logic sometimes deployed to explain transgender identity because it relies on a clear separation between body-minds and cultural forces (176). Yet he still conflates such forces with "oppression and privilege, stereotypes, and shame" (177).

This move returns him to the chicken-or-egg dilemma of trying to determine which should come first: the self or the world. Not only does this paradox rely on the self-enclosed individualism characteristic of liberal subjectivity, in which the real self exists independently of its environment, it assumes that the environment only consists of "oppression and privilege, stereotypes, and shame." 3 Reading this passage, I ask myself why critical-political ethics, activism, and social justice don't also count as cultural forces that influence—and construct—the self. We could then understand Clare's post-surgery sense of "body-mind rightness," not as an expression of an originary self nor as a capitulation to medical norms, but as informed by non-binary conceptualizations of gender (176). Similarly, we could see his friend's bariatric surgery, and her struggle over it, as evidence of the fragmented nature of a self constructed in and through fatphobia and anti-cure politics.

Reliance on an internal/external binary shows up again in Clare's exploration of choosing and un-choosing disability. This chapter examines how disabled people navigate the contradiction between the normalizing demands of medicine and a desire for more livable lives. In the end, it favors the act of choosing disability, such as when people get rid of hearing aids, prefer to use wheelchairs, and refuse psychotropic drugs. Clare contends that "to many non-deaf people, nondisabled walkies, and people without psych disabilities or psych labels, these choices seem unimaginable. But from the inside, they make all the sense in the world. They pave the way for finding community and connection. They allow for greater and easier mobility. They allow us to be ourselves" (131; emphasis mine). Imagined as an act of willpower, choosing disability represents a triumph of the authentic self over ideology and oppression, proof of enlightenment and moral authority, and the path to self-actualization. Those who un-choose disability make things worse for themselves, succumbing to dominant ideology, siding with the inauthentic and unnatural, and disabling themselves even further.

Furthermore, Brilliant Imperfection creates a moral hierarchy among various strategies for living with disability, with cure at the bottom, treatment in the middle, and adaptation/acceptance at the top. Clare characterizes treatment as far less problematic than cure, but this distinction does not completely hold; instead, the two tend to collapse into one another, making up a morally compromised zone inferior to adaptation and acceptance (61). In a chapter on his experience with cerebral palsy, for instance, he discusses the orthopedic equipment coerced onto him during his childhood, which he eventually rejects as too painful and shameful (38). Explaining how he learned a different way of typing and writing, he argues that "adaptation carries far more appeal than treatment" (38). The book repeatedly privileges this kind of "acceptance" as the best way for disabled people to live their lives, calling on us to resist the "seductive assurances" of medical intervention (166; 180).

I agree that a certain degree of skepticism towards treatment makes sense. As Clare rightly points out, it doesn't necessarily alleviate suffering and can produce its own violence and trauma, which often play out along racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed lines (28). Framing such critiques in the language of self-acceptance and choice (not to mention seduction), however, unfortunately resonates with the mind-body dualism. Self-acceptance presupposes that disability exists out there somewhere; although we may be locked into struggle with it, it remains fundamentally distinct from our true selves. Whether resisting bodily urges or coming to accept natural impairments, the true self is posited as separate from—if inextricably yoked to—the body. It is the active, dynamic subject responsible for resisting or accepting, while the body is the passive, static object to be resisted or accepted. This logic also underpins the dichotomy between choosing and un-choosing disability. Although choosing disability flips the typical script, it still rests on notions of volition and willpower associated with the mind. The term "seduction," meanwhile, indexes a white heteromasculinist suspicion of bodily urges, desires, and comfort, seen as distractions from liberation and the acquisition of subjugated knowledge.

All of these threads come together to form what I've been calling the disabled normate. Susan Wendell contends that, motivated by fear of the suffering, out-of-control body, ableist logics create a "world structured for people who have no weakness" ("Toward a Feminist Theory," 336). They thus produce the "negative body," the disabled body that "the able-bodied are trying to avoid, forget, and ignore" (343). Under the social model and anti-cure politics, disability studies risks producing its own "negative body," the one who cannot accept suffering as natural, whose mind is not strong enough to cope with bodily weakness, and who succumbs to bodily temptations.

By echoing the mind-body dualism at the heart of ableism and a host of other oppressive structures, the disabled normate repeats a vision of personhood against which non-persons have long been defined under white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and colonialism. It enshrines sovereign subjectivity as the telos of anti-cure politics, but sovereign subjectivity is—and never has been—equally available to everyone. Restricted to those imagined as capable of reason, self-ownership, and individuality, it is built on the abjection of those excluded from the same terms, including women, people of color, queer and trans folks, indigenous people, poor people, and disabled people.

Despite these problems, we cannot simply avoid the mind-body dualism, since it's baked into Western structures and systems. But what if we leaned into the negativity associated with the body while refusing to detach it completely from the mind? Much of disability studies understandably runs from the negative stigmas heaped on disabled people by dominant culture and medicine, so it could learn a lot from queer theory's embrace of negativity in this regard. If heteronormativity contains the seeds of its own queer destruction, then leaning into that space of negativity is a politically viable strategy. Hence the "queer" in queer theory is less about purifying a slur and more about signaling a critical-political orientation to dominant sexual and gender norms. Like the term "crip," it gets its critical edge from the negativity of the slur, without which it would lose its rhetorical force.

Leaning into negativity and finding its critical-political potential undergirds, for instance, J. Jack Halberstam's concept of "the queer art of failure." He acknowledges that dominant culture has historically associated queerness with loss, emptiness, confusion, alienation, misery, suffering, and unbecoming (97-98). Rather than arguing against such stigmatizing connotations, Halberstam reworks them into the queer art of failure, which "turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being" (88). Similar themes appear in concepts like Michael Warner's "dignity in shame," Sara Ahmed's "feminist killjoy," and José Esteban Muñoz's "cruising utopia," all of which re-evaluate negativity as a source of critical-political viability. 4 These concepts do not simply celebrate and romanticize negativity for its own sake, but put it in conversation with the queer, anti-racist, and feminist search for and creation of alternative modes of living. In the conclusion, I begin to sketch an equivalent of the queer art of failure, dignity in shame, the feminist killjoy, and cruising utopia for disability studies, which reworks the super-crip into the surviving crip.

Interlude: Opiates and Moral Panic

The only medicine that consistently provides relief for me is one of the most dreaded and stigmatized in the contemporary United States: opiates. I've run up against the moral panic over opiates many times in many guises. "Those don't work for headaches or neurological pain," doctors repeatedly tell me, even though they do work for mine. Most doctors are clearly more concerned about the possibility of addiction than my reports of my own body-mind experiences. They are the experts, after all, and I am probably just lying to get my fix.

One time I went to the ER in excruciating pain, and after waiting for hours, saw a doctor who threatened to put me through an unnecessary CT-Scan before doing anything for my pain. I explained that I'd already had CT-Scans and MRIs that showed nothing amiss (all the more suspicious, of course), and it took my mother pulling him aside to get him to act. Another time, I wasn't at the ER for the occipital neuralgia, but for a stomach bug. The staff asked if I had a headache, and I reflexively said "yes," given that I always have a headache, just not the type they meant. I answered truthfully when the ER doctor asked what I take for my headaches, and he gave me that look, one that said "I'm onto you." Shaking his head and informing me that opiates don't work for headaches, he asked who prescribed my oxycodone. I told him my neurosurgeon at a large university hospital in a city an hour and a half away, which did little to soothe his anxiety over my credibility. It didn't matter that I didn't even ask for opiates during this visit. All I really wanted was to stop puking.

The ER doctor ultimately offered me some Lyrica, the other thing I regularly take for my occipital neuralgia. This type of offer, which I've encountered frequently, makes my eyes roll. It suggests complete ignorance about Lyrica, which does not work for acute pain relief but builds up in the system over time and is arguably just as dangerous as opiates. In my experience, Lyrica withdrawal is considerably worse than opiate withdrawal. But we don't have a moral panic over Lyrica, at least not yet. After grilling me about my headaches, the ER doctor examined me and noticed the long, thin scar running down the back of my neck. I told him that my neurosurgeon had recently performed a rhizotomy to cut the offending nerves (on top of two neurostimulator surgeries in the same area). He seemed relieved to find the scar, some legible proof that I wasn't a manipulative, scheming drug addict.

The moral panic creates anxiety for me every time I go to the pharmacy to fill my oxycodone prescription. Once, my regular pharmacy did not have enough pills to fill my script, owing to federal and state crackdowns on opiates, so I went to a different pharmacy that I'd used on occasion in the past. The head pharmacist pulled me into a small consulting room and showed me a report tracking all the times I had filled prescriptions for controlled substances over the past year. During that time, I was on oxycodone, but also on Lyrica and Restoril. Strike one. My neurosurgeon prescribed the oxycodone, my GP prescribed the Lyrica and Restoril, and a new neurologist also prescribed Lyrica while we experimented with dosing. Strike two. I used three different pharmacies over the course of a year: my main one, one near my parents, and one at the hospital where my neurosurgeon works. Strike three. I almost always paid with a credit card, except for the one time I paid with cash when the total amount was in the two-dollar range. Strike four.

The up-shot: the pharmacist refused to serve me, all the while assuring me that he didn't think I was a bad person and that he had to follow the rules imposed by the FDA. Upset and shaken, I went back to my main pharmacy, and they agreed to give me what they had even though it left me short for the month. I thus suffered additional pain that month as I rationed pills even more carefully than usual. A few years ago, I could fill my opiate script a week in advance, so I never worried about running out. But now, I must wait the entire 30 days, which means I'm always out on the day I go for a refill. Each month threatens to rip away one of the only things that gives me consistent pain relief, and each month threatens to subject me to discrimination on the basis of my disability.

Given the racist and classist assumptions around addiction, my whiteness and middle-class presentation no doubt buffer me from even more intense forms of scrutiny and punishment. I still have access to painkillers, after all, even if they've become harder to get. In light of evidence that doctors take white people's pain more seriously than they do people of color's, my continued access almost certainly rests on racial privilege (Hoffman, et al. 4296). It rests on class privilege, too, especially in a society that does not guarantee universal health care. Despite these advantages, the current moral panic renders me (and anyone with chronic pain) suspect, exacerbating the skepticism we face when trying to convince folks of our conditions in the first place. It further dehumanizes, criminalizes, and pathologizes people with chronic pain and/or drug addictions.

This dynamic angers and upsets me not only for myself, but for those without the benefit of my race and class positions who are even more likely to feel its effects. It strikes me as no coincidence that the moral panic over opiates has intensified in the wake of the legalization and decriminalization of marijuana—and the increased prevalence of white middle-class people in the business of growing and selling it. Like previous wars on drugs, this moral panic provides cover for the surveillance and policing of communities of color and impoverished communities, allowing the state to continue its practices of disenfranchisement, violence, and mass incarceration (Alexander 2).

A culture that preaches "mind over matter" treats chronic pain and addiction as failures of willpower, tragic character flaws, and proof of the cardinal sin of laziness. In this formulation, claims of chronic pain only serve as a disguise for drug addiction, itself treated as an individual dysfunction rather than a social, economic, and political phenomenon. We are parasites and burdens on the body politic, a drain on the system, deliberately malingering while deserving citizens do all the hard work. We can be never trusted to articulate our own experiences or our own needs, especially when they challenge medical knowledge and expertise, especially when they come from the mouths of women, poor people, people of color, and queer or trans folks. We are, in Clare's words, "useless eaters," all consumption and no production, not easily recruited by or recuperated into neo-liberal capitalism (7). We threaten Western medicine's image of itself as omniscient, since our body-minds often do not slot nicely into clear diagnosable categories. But most of all, we fail the ultimate litmus test for sovereign selfhood: we supposedly let our bodily cravings and suffering rule our minds. Or perhaps we reveal the inevitable imbrication of body with mind, challenging the dualism so key to the organization of Western culture. Hence the anxieties and fears we engender, which justify the punishments brought to bear on us.

Queer Theory: Disability and the Embrace of the Death Drive

My critique of anti-cure politics arises from my personal experiences described in other parts of this essay. Those experiences include chronic pain, depression, and abuse and participation in feminism, anti-racism, queer theory, disability studies, and other critical-political projects. Drawing on my experiences assists me in engaging analytic concepts, and vice versa. The personal and theoretical are thus inseparable from, if not reducible to, each other. Yet academia, with its love of the View from Nowhere, typically treats personal experience with suspicion. It purportedly cannot meet academic criteria for adequate evidence because it is imagined as too particular, too embodied, and too subjective. Even critical-political fields often view personal experience with skepticism and wariness, a defensive reflex against attempts to discredit them by conflating them with the personal alone. Indeed, appeals to personal experience sometimes shut down critique, especially within a confessional and therapeutic culture that demands performances of authenticity to justify the exercise of power (Mollow and McRuer 8). Although personal experience never speaks for itself and must always be theorized, this discomfort risks cordoning the two off from one another, rather than teasing out their entanglements.

Although this suspicion of personal experience is endemic to most academic fields, I turn here to a particular preference for the abstract and the theoretical at the expense of the material and experiential: the anti-relational strand of queer theory influenced by psychoanalysis and represented by work like Lee Edelman's No Future and Leo Bersani's "Is the Rectum a Grave?" Unlike the work of Halberstam, Warner, Ahmed, and Muñoz, this strand gives up on the tension between positivity and negativity altogether in favor of the strictly negative (as one might gather from the titles of Edelman's and Bersani's pieces). I read Bersani's piece in graduate school and Edelman's book when it was originally published, but I became reacquainted with them through Anna Mollow's essay "Is Sex Disability? Queer Theory and the Disability Drive" in the anthology Sex and Disability. Reading them now, with experiences like those chronicled in this essay under my belt, their complicity with the View from Nowhere comes sharply into view. Just as the disabled normate haunts Brilliant Imperfection, a desire for the "purity of sexuality as a singular trope of difference," not contaminated by "race, gender, and other particularities," haunts anti-relational work (Muñoz 11).

Edelman's book critiques reproductive futurism, a pro-natalist ideology that conflates futurity with procreation, upholds heteronormativity, and abjects queerness in the name of the Child (2). Following Edelman, Mollow critiques rehabilitative futurism, a pro-cure ideology that conflates futurity with the eradication of disability and upholds compulsory able-bodied/mindedness in the name of the Child (288). Mollow draws on Bersani's and Edelman's articulations of the death drive to theorize what she calls the disability drive. She contends, "to foreground associations between disability and the death drive means theorizing disability in terms of identity disintegration, lack, and suffering… I critique politics of disability that emphasize identity formation and pride, exploring instead the benefits of highlighting those aspects of sex and disability that undercut and perhaps even preclude assertions of humanity" (287). In some ways, then, Mollow, Edelman, and Bersani argue for an embrace of negativity not entirely different from what I call for in the above section. However, their work relies on the ahistorical language of psychoanalysis, a closed symbol system that feigns universality and casts material and personal experience as irrelevant to abstract theorizing.

I call queer theory's anti-relational strand "a closed system" because of its explicit rejection of both politics and history. Edelman contends that queer theory represents "the 'side' outside all political sides" (7). Mollow nuances such sentiments, but ultimately agrees with Edelman that reproductive and rehabilitative futurism structure the "only politics we're permitted to know" (134). This sweeping claim ignores feminist, queer, antiracist, and crip critical-political projects, dismissing them as mere identity politics, too wrapped up in dominant notions of the human and therefore not ideologically pure enough to provide a real alternative to futurism. What is that "real" alternative that only queer theory and psychoanalysis can offer? The implosion/explosion of the self into nothingness. This type of self-annihilation also requires a detachment from history. Edelman, for instance, distinguishes the rhetorical figure of the Child from "the lived experiences of any historical children" (11). He makes a comparable move with the death drive, arguing that it does not denote literal death, but rather a metaphoric or symbolic death of the sovereign subject via the self-shattering nature of sex.

Similarly, Bersani's famous piece "Is the Rectum a Grave?" redeems penetrative (anal) sex as the space for the destruction of the sovereign subject, revels in its "anti-communal, anti-egalitarian, anti-nurturing, and anti-loving" qualities, and praises the metaphoric "suicidal ecstasy of being a woman" (22; 18). It's important to note that this recuperation only applies to penetrative sex, leaving other forms of sexual intimacy unaccounted for and bereft of any radical potential. Although I understand Bersani's piece as an intervention in homophobic discourses around gay men and the AIDS epidemic, he comes perilously close to reinforcing the vision of sex at the heart of U.S. rape culture. He argues for the appeal of "powerlessness" and "loss of control" during sex, a white masculinist fantasy given that Western culture always already positions femininity and black/brownness in these very terms (23-24).

My own experiences illustrate how a sexual breach of subjecthood can play out differently for members of marginalized groups than they might for those with more privilege. On one level, I get the appeal of the sort of surrender discussed by Bersani. In fact, I once asked my partner to tie me up on my stomach and blindfold me. In the process, she violated me via unwanted anal penetration, an "anti-loving" breach of trust and interdependence on both physical and emotional levels. On Bersani's view, this breach is the whole point of sex, the moment when the self loses autonomy, integrity, and control (as if I ever enjoyed such subjecthood in the first place). If we take this line of thinking to its logical conclusion, we come dangerously close to the familiar heteropatriarchal apology for rape, buttressed by a theoretical apparatus that claims universality: regardless of my explicitly stated wishes, I subconsciously wanted to be violated. Situating the self-annihilating queer as the site of revolution obscures these kinds of problematic echoes, dismissing them from the start as too personal, particular, and material.

The turn to the self-annihilating queer animates Mollow's essay, as well. She postulates queerness and disability as structuring positions that raise important questions about "self-disintegration" (305). Far more attentive to history and lived experiences, her piece grapples directly with challenges to the anti-relational strand, much like Clare reckons with challenges to anti-cure politics in Brilliant Imperfection. Yet, also like Clare's book, her essay is haunted by the disabled normate and the naturally impaired body-mind; instead of celebrating it, she wants to destroy it, but still remains within its terms. She notes that "disability is fantasized in terms of a loss of self, of mastery, integrity, and control, a loss that … is indissociable from sexuality" (297; emphasis in original). She wants us to lean into this fantasy, which requires that we accept the conflation of the self with mastery, integrity, and control in the first place.

Through the grammatical slippage of the dependent clause, any other visions of the self (e.g., based on interdependence, care, or empathy) vanish. If we accept the sovereign self, then, yes, the death and disability drives might be resources for exploding or imploding it and the systems of oppression it enables. But such explosions and implosions need not lead to self-annihilation, which seems to me just another instantiation of the disembodied View from Nowhere wherein death represents transformation into pure soul and thus ultimate freedom from the located-ness of the body. If we're going to explode or implode sovereign subjectivity, then let's clear space for other notions of the self, rather than glorifying nothingness.

Moreover, what happens if we take literal death (biological and/or social) seriously? What happens if we take material violence, which can and does end lives, seriously? In that case, it should become clear that reproductive futurism is the domain of only some children. This ideology values children only insofar as they themselves can further reproduce whiteness, heterosexuality, the gender binary, able-bodied/mindedness, and so forth. In Muñoz's words, in a world where queer youths of color too often do not get a chance to grow up, "racialized kids, queer kids, are not the sovereign princes of futurity" (95-96). The fact that the anti-relational strand pretends such questions can or should be set aside speaks to the normative positions it upholds.

I therefore read these anti-relational pieces with interest, but also with growing anger. I am in the process of healing from over a decade's worth of chronic pain, depression, and abuse. I am not over these things. I learn to survive with them, maybe even learn from them and integrate them into my self-perception, even as I refuse to romanticize or celebrate them as keys to enlightenment and transcendence. I haven't overcome my disabilities in some Herculean display of willpower and sovereign subjecthood. I haven't overcome them at all, but I do embrace the value of my own survival as part of my critical-political orientation toward the world.

I respect attempts to identify the excessive, the very thing that cannot be resolved, captured, or made to signify in any coherent way, and to think beyond the human. Yet the anti-relational strain reads very differently now that I have emerged from a kind of living death. It angers me given how hard I fight to believe in my right to survive and exist, not as a lone self with mastery and control, but as an interdependent self fumbling towards compassion, justice, and care. I'm not interested in being a figurehead for the revolution if that revolution depends on my erasure, absence, and self-sacrifice. I've come too close to actual suicide to see anything ecstatic about it; I've existed too long in chronic pain to see anything liberatory about that, either.

I know that psychoanalysis often takes bodily pain and pleasure as one of its starting points, typically imagined as the acute, extraordinary experience of orgasm. It is not the daily slog of chronic pain that inhibits not only mastery and control, but also care, compassion, and survival. Queer versions of psychoanalysis claim to pay attention to sexual pain and pleasure, but then do their best to escape and transcend material embodiment. They focus so narrowly on the symbolic destruction of the sovereign self that they end up treating it as if it's detached from the body, as if it's "just" metaphor. But metaphors live in actual suicidal women; they are more than abstracted playthings for academic bad boys, their closed symbolic systems, and their "white gay male crypto-identity politics" that reproduce the mind/body dualism (Muñoz 95).

This dualism contributes to the fact that the anti-relational strand of queer theory enjoys circulation and currency within the academy. Despite decades of critique of the disembodied academic voice with its white bourgeois norms, that voice still commands respect and authority. 5 It is still the lingua franca of the realm, even in (or especially in) humanities-based fields that otherwise reject universality, objectivity, and impartiality for their complicity in dominant systems of knowledge production and circulation. Our anxieties over rigor and legitimacy often bubble up in our adherence to the very academic norms of writing that disallow certain things from being sayable or legible as anything other than gibberish, noise, or confession. And, of course, our publishing and reward structures enforce these norms by treating the disembodied style as an ineffable sign of political commitment, even as they render that style itself apolitical. Or arhetorical, we might say instead, over and against the supposed rhetorical trickery of appeals to personal experience, which smuggle ideology in under the disguise of authenticity. But my graduate school advisor taught me that the most powerful rhetoric is precisely that which seems arhetorical, above the fray, outside the muck and mire that ensnare only those without access to the Truth (Theory).

Interlude: The Healthy/Sick Binary and the Desire for Cure

Sick people are considered disposable, better off dead than mooching off the system. People sometimes say to me that they would kill themselves if they were in my position, and I myself have considered suicide when the pain and depression feel like too much to endure any longer. I know disability studies rejects this line of thinking and for good reason, given that it manifests a genocidal impulse towards disabled people. It cannot comprehend living with disabilities or what we might lose if we manage to eliminate them. Yet it also stems from a genuine fear of living with debilitating pain in a culture that criminalizes, stigmatizes, and pathologizes it.

I personally see little to celebrate in my experiences with bodily and psychological suffering, and certain medical treatments do, in fact, make my life more livable and survivable. That said, I'm not talking about a desire for a cure based on Western medicine's suspect promises to restore the body-mind to a previously non-disabled state. Even if the headaches and depression vanish right this minute, I would not magically revert to my pre-disability days. I'm not sure I have pre-disability days, given that even my birth happened under duress. The umbilical cord wrapped around my neck during labor, and my heart rate flatlined for some time, prompting the doctors to perform an emergency C-section on my mom to save my life. My dad loves to tell the story of watching me in the incubator, a giant 8 lbs 10 oz compared to the tiny babies surrounding me. Every time my size occasioned comment, he proudly identified me as his daughter and explained my right to be there among the preemies.

Like Clare, medical intervention brought me into the world and kept me alive, all the while positioning me as out of place, a misfit from the start (5). And, from the start, people questioned my right to take up space, especially space designated for more legibly disabled babies. From the start, my presence—my very existence—required justification, rather than being taken for granted, not because I appeared too "sick" but because I appeared too "healthy." We see here how slippery and contextual terms like "healthy" and "sick" are. Far from naming objective truth, they call realities into existence. Disability is not an a priori fact, an authentic quality that adheres to some body-minds and not others, and it is not a stable status either.

For instance, my long-term disability insurance carrier required me to apply to Social Security (SSDI in this case). Like most SSDI claims, mine was rejected the first time it went under review because I could walk, stand, and sit for arbitrary amounts of time. It didn't matter that my conditions often interrupt these very activities. There was no acknowledgment of how chronic pain and depression affect my entire body-mind: no way of recognizing that my depression manifests itself in bodily symptoms like over-sleeping and under-eating and in a physical sensation of hollowness in my chest; no way of recognizing that head pain does not just affect the head, but the entire body-mind; no way of recognizing that my headaches often send me to the couch with an ice pack, unable to concentrate or focus. All of these experiences confound Western medicine's segmentation of the body from the mind.

SSDI requires that one be "totally disabled," a zero-sum dichotomy that makes one either disabled (i.e., unfit for paid labor) or not. This vision of disability requires a complete lack of mobility, agency, and capacity. Anything else reads as an attempt to malinger and defraud the system. The entire system is far more preoccupied with preventing fraud than with helping disabled people live more fulfilling and comfortable lives, effectively criminalizing the very population it supposedly protects. This all-or-nothing system cruelly dis-incentivizes disabled people from finding solace and purpose in activities not completely locked down by capitalist regimes. SSDI thus creates the very category of "totally disabled" people it purports to merely identify and track. Like dominant modes of medicine, it locates the problem in the body-minds of defective individuals and expends enormous resources deciding which individuals are worthy of "saving." In the eyes of the law, SSDI's verdict that I did not qualify as totally disabled magically makes me non-disabled. I have no "natural" or "biological" mobility impairment; there's nothing wrong with my body, nothing stopping it from functioning except my failure to exert enough mental control over the pain.

I often wish I could take my head off and set it somewhere outside of me. I know that my neurological and psychological conditions cannot be quarantined to one body part, even the very one imagined as the primary locus of selfhood, willpower, sentience, and autonomy. No wonder my disabilities pose such an existential threat to my sense of identity and personhood, no wonder I experience them as self-shattering, no wonder they render me so suspect to myself and others. As this piece insists, however, there are other ways of conceptualizing the self. Turning to such alternatives makes my survival possible, even necessary, an enactment of my critical-political orientation towards the world. It does not make the occipital neuralgia or depression go away, yet it does reframe my suffering in more livable ways. I no longer see my survival in the hyper-individualistic terms of dominant culture and medicine, but in the collective terms of feminist, anti-racist, queer, and crip projects.

Conclusion: Towards the Surviving-Crip

In my role as a faculty member, I once attended a diversity training during first-year orientation. The facilitators asked us to share our personal experiences around diversity, framed in the confessional terms that consternate critical-political academics. The session quickly devolved into a display of one-upmanship where students stood up and told their stories, each more tragic than the last. Neither the trainers nor anyone else intervened because the students told these stories under the rubric of the authentic, and power demanded that they professed their true victimhood as a condition of formal entrance into the institution. A different story: in the wake of the resignation of a respected faculty member facing legal charges of child pornography, my college cancelled classes in an unprecedented fashion and hosted an all-college town hall. Some students spoke about their own experiences with childhood sexual abuse, while others spoke about their everyday experiences with sexism, racism, and homophobia on campus. The logic of confession was present, but unlike with the diversity training, it was not the primary logic. Speaking truth to power and bearing witness were also present, both of which facilitated the building of collectivity rather than halting it.

Although there are similarities between the diversity training and the town hall, dismissing them both as merely confessional spaces for airing personal grievances misses the point entirely. Stories from the town hall circulated in the halls of power and informed major institutional decisions, and the diversity training prompted the college to restructure its first-year orientation entirely. None of these solutions was perfect, of course, but the desire for perfection itself troubles me. In Ahmed's analysis of diversity work within U.K. higher education, she concludes that "when we have to think strategically, we have to accept our complicity; we forgo any illusions of purity; we give up on the safety of exteriority" (94). As my own analysis suggests, such illusions haunt both the anti-cure and anti-relational strands insofar as they wish to escape into the exteriority and purity of the View from Nowhere.

But strategic alternatives do exist. Concepts like the feminist killjoy, dignity in shame, the queer art of failure, and cruising utopia hold onto the paradox between positivity and negativity, refusing to abandon either one and getting their juice from this very tension. These concepts illustrate what Judith Butler calls "working the weakness in the norm" and "repetition with a difference," creative riffs on the dominant, rather than complete breaks with it (Bodies 237; "Imitation" 317). In this spirit, I suggest reworking the reviled/celebrated figure of the super-crip into the figure of the surviving crip. This conclusion takes the first tentative but hopeful steps towards fleshing out this concept more fully.

I invoke the term "crip" to signal both a reclamation of a slur and a critical-political orientation toward compulsory able-bodied/mindedness. I invoke the term "surviving" in place of "super" to foreground the paradox between positivity and negativity discussed above. If super-crip stories emphasize overcoming disability through either Western medicine and/or religion, then surviving crip stories emphasize persistence, tenacity, and obstinance in the face of structural, interpersonal, and intrapersonal violence and trauma. Whereas the former fixates on cure as the path to overcoming disability, the latter highlights the process of pursuit rather than the product of cure. Indeed, the term "surviving" indicates ongoing, elliptical processes that loop back on (but do not simply repeat) themselves, in contrast to the linear, once-and-for-all triumph implied by the term "survivor." 6 The surviving crip does not characterize death as a failure of cure or as proof of the futility of cure, but as part of the process of surviving. This shift entails neither a rejection nor head-long embrace of death, but a reckoning with our mortality, weakness, and fragility and our strength, resilience, and adaptability.

Breakdown and Turnaround

I, too, think of myself as a surviving crip. I finally hit my lowest (highest?) point in March of 2018, undergoing an emotional and physical breakdown that lurked, waiting to happen for years, and that spurred me into a significant turnaround over the months to come. "Breakdown" certainly fits into the medical model by aligning disability with individual tragedy, lack, and incapacity. In contrast, I see my breakdown as the culmination of my relationships on intrapersonal, interpersonal, and structural levels, a moment when all these forces became too much for me to stoically bear any longer. The surviving crip fruitfully re-characterizes my breakdown as a "break up," a break with the normative demands placed on me for my entire life. My body-mind no longer functioned under these oppressive conditions, which compelled me into a grave moment of re-evaluation and self-reflection.

Make no mistake, this break up was a difficult and miserable process in which I seriously contemplated killing myself, given how unmoored I felt from the normative structures (romantic relationship, profession, family) that supposedly give life purpose and meaning. Yet I realized that, because I do not exist as an atomized individual, committing suicide would devastate those who love me. Remembering that change is possible, I contemplated how different my circumstances might be, how they could be otherwise, in the future. Knowing that change requires the exercise of agency and leaning on others, I took the one step that felt manageable: texting my therapist for help. My breakdown/break up, then, entailed both loss and gain, destruction and construction, despair and hope, all of which played vital roles in what came next: my turnaround.

At first glance, the term "turnaround" implies a simple reversal, a promise to restore my non-disabled body-mind. It fits within the super-crip notion of cure, imagined as a return to a time before and outside disability. I know this fantasy well; it gripped me during the summer and fall of 2016 right after my rhizotomy. I pinned all my hopes for a cure on this surgery. I imagined getting off all my medications, flushing all the toxins out of my system, returning to my younger body-mind, not yet ravaged by chronic pain, depression, and abuse. Of course, as I discussed previously, no such body-mind ever existed for me in the first place, but the lure of it stayed undeniable. It led me to go off medications that helped me function, especially my anti-depressant, and made me reluctant to take oxycodone again when the pain came back.

I was desperate to prove that I was not a drug addict and that I didn't need pharmaceuticals to stabilize my emotions. I wanted to qualify as a proper, responsible citizen, eliminating any traces of pain, depression, and abuse through good old willpower and pluck. I ached for a non-polluted body-mind, untainted by exterior forces like interpersonal abuse, environmental damage, medical interventions, and dominant culture. This fantasy comes from Western medicine, but it also comes from the disabled normate, seen in my paradoxical wish for a time before and after the years of treatment. If I couldn't become non-disabled, then I'd take the naturally impaired body-mind as a consolation prize.

If the super-crip invokes the above sense of "turnaround," then the surviving crip gives us different purchase on the same term. Rather than stressing recovery or rebound (i.e., a unidirectional movement) toward a non or naturally disabled state, it stresses the possibility of multiple changes of direction. A turnaround for the surviving crip signals many types and vectors of movement, not just a vertical ascent, but horizontal, sideways, and diagonal turns, swoops, and dips. Instead of the super-crip's straightforward narrative of linear progress, the surviving crip acknowledges the unpredictable and haphazard—yet still ordered and organized—nature of life. My turnaround did not involve a return to a non or naturally disabled past or future. I still have occipital neuralgia, depression, and trauma from abuse, but I no longer experience them as unadulterated misery and lack. I refuse to embrace them as natural or authentic parts of my identity (I don't like authenticity anyway), but I do accept them as central elements of my life that I must reckon with rather than avoid or deny.

What does reckoning look like for me under a surviving crip framework? I refuse to give up on medical intervention for one thing, and my class status means I don't have to. The anti-depressants clear the fog from my mind, and the RFA reduces my head pain significantly. Yet these treatments alone are insufficient, even though they clear the way for my survival. I think of the platitude that says merely surviving is not enough; one must thrive instead. The ableism of this saying jumps out at me, with its presumption that surviving is inferior to thriving and that what it means to thrive is self-evident. Does it mean marriage, children, a profession, monetary gain, and good health? If so, it is incredibly narrow and complicit with a heteropatriarchal, white supremacist, ableist, and capitalist culture.

The distinction between surviving and thriving nonetheless haunts me, making it harder for me to believe that my own survival is enough. My chief insecurity of selfishness makes it even harder. I struggle to recognize myself in dominant notions of womanhood, with their insistence on self-sacrifice, emotional labor, and selfless caretaking of men and children. According to heteropatriarchy, my lesbianism stubbornly pursues a reflection of the self (female) instead of the other (male). Identifying as genderqueer registers as a childish refusal to grow up and take on adult responsibilities, a refusal physically indexed by my androgynous and boyish appearance. Being disabled and consequently losing my paid job reduce me to a burden and parasite on the body politic. I feel selfish for all these reasons, an insecurity weaponized against me by my abusive ex, by the dominant culture, and even by myself, making self-care and self-forgiveness crucial aspects of my survival.

I had a major breakthrough when I (re)encountered a famous quotation from Audre Lorde, written in the wake of her breast cancer diagnosis: "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare" (Burst 131). Unlike neo-liberal notions of self-care that prioritize personal responsibility and substitute the welfare of private individuals for the public good, Lorde's sentiment arises from explicitly feminist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, queer and anti-capitalist projects. Speaking from her location as an ill Black lesbian, she emphasizes the importance of survival for those whom powerful forces deem disposable and unworthy of care. This requires redirecting energy and labor away from the usual suspects and towards those whose own energy and labor is expected to support those further up social hierarchies (Sister/Outsider 115).

Given her perceptive approach to the promises and pitfalls of coalition building, Lorde's conceptualization of self-care remains rooted in collectivity (Sister/Outsider 119). It rejects what Muñoz calls the "romance of community" and the "romance of singularity," both of which prop up whiteness and other markers of privilege (10). The fantasy of singularity rests on the type of individualism critiqued throughout this essay, while the fantasy of community rests on homogeneity. Scholars like Ahmed and Lorde teach us that white women's desire for "sisterhood" often leads to racial exclusions by positioning women of color as disruptive trouble-makers while obscuring white women's racism (93; Sister/Outsider 110). Collectivity, in contrast, tries to account for connections among people without losing sight of difference or power inequalities.

These insights reframe my survival from an individualistic project of maintaining the atomized self into a collective project of care, justice, and interdependence. I understand self-care not as a substitute for critical politics, but as a crucial manifestation of them, not as a retreat into the lone self, but as an embrace of sociality and solidarity. I realize my survival is an act of political warfare, given the forces that either prefer me dead or display indifference to my death. What does self-care look like for me? Refusing to commit suicide, 7 continuing to see my GP and neurosurgeon, talking with my therapist, re-engaging with reading and writing, re-establishing friendships and family relationships, reckoning with sexual, interpersonal, and systemic violence, exploring new creative outlets, considering a return to paid employment, and playing video games (my favorite hobby) with renewed enthusiasm.

I don't mean to suggest that I have somehow figured everything out, putting a nice, neat bow on it. Rather, I've developed a wider, more complex and adaptable perspective on myself, others, and the world, and I did so because I must survive. I've (re)discovered key insights that framed and guided my turnaround: whatever else I am, I am anti-racist, queer, crip, and feminist, attached to collective projects that value sociality, justice, equality, and compassion.

Writing/Speaking/Tattooing the Self

I have a fraught relationship with writing, to say the least. I rub up against academic writing conventions, never feeling entirely comfortable with them, even as I perform them when needed. I grow increasingly weary and wary of academic publishing norms: the disembodied and impersonal voice, citation as a form of credentialing and gate-keeping, the fixation on the "new" and "original," the overvaluation of publication as the sign of scholarship, the entire academic star system. During my turnaround, I learned to write from a critical-political stance all over again. Inspired and disturbed by the mainstream #metoo movement, I wrote a long-form essay about my experiences with sexual abuse and violence. Like this piece, it shifts between autobiographical and analytic voices, refusing to abandon either the personal or the political. I cite others' work when it becomes relevant, because it becomes relevant, rather than as defensive proof of intellectual mastery and expertise. Whereas I often force myself to produce journal articles, I felt compelled to work on these two essays, savoring each moment even when some moments reduced me to tears.

Sharing this work feels like an essential component of my turnaround, a way of enacting trust, intimacy, and vulnerability, and I want to share both pieces with a larger public. Yet I remain acutely aware of how they break all kinds of rules: they sport strange, unwieldly structures that nonetheless follow their own logic, they weave together the autobiographical with the analytic, and they cite sources but not obsessively and not solely academic. I am open to constructive feedback, of course, and am willing to make significant changes to my work, but neither will ever look like a conventional academic or lay piece of writing. Even if none of this work ever reaches a wider audience, it will always be available to me. It stands as a record of my collapse into pain, depression, and the aftermath of abuse, and it stands as an enactment of my survival.

I've created other concrete manifestations of my survival, including a tattoo that marks a pivotal point in my turnaround. Placed on the outside of my left calf, it features the quotation about self-care from Audre Lorde. Above the quotation sits the famous symbol of women's liberation, the sign for woman with a clenched fist in the middle, done in my favored black and teal color scheme. I went through the ritual of tattooing alone, but it did not feel lonely or hollow. I went through it with an artist I've known for years, someone who gave me my very first tattoo over a decade ago. We have history, and we know each other's histories. We both know that, for me, getting inked is a way to feel pain in a relatively controlled setting. It's a way to undergo finite, acute pain in the face of potentially infinite, chronic pain. It's a way to reclaim pain, not by denying it, but by redirecting it.

A super-crip approach might view tattooing as a conquest of bodily pain through the power of the mind. A surviving crip approach, in contrast, views it as a collaborative process of designing, drawing, writing, inking, healing, and scarring. The point is to wound the body-mind and leave a tangible trace, an example of "choosing" disability if there ever was one. But it's also importantly about healing that wound, not until it disappears, but until it becomes a visible scar.

If both writing and tattooing constitute key aspects of my survival, then so does speech. I'm an only child on the autism spectrum, who likes solitude and finds comfort and solace in myself. I never get bored for extended periods of time, and although I value other people a great deal, I consider myself my own best friend and my own constant companion. Far from feeling a wholistic sense of self as dictated by Western culture, however, I experience myself as fractured, demonstrated in my tendency to talk to myself as I would another person. Not just under-the-breath mutters, but entire long conversations where I go back and forth with myself.

People sometimes make fun of me, given that dominant culture interprets talking to oneself as a mark of madness or eccentricity, out of line with self-contained sovereign subjectivity. I wonder how others get through their lives without doing it. Its absence is a hallmark of my collapse, and its presence is a hallmark of my turnaround. For me, this fragmented sense of self is not just a source of anxiety or fear. On the contrary, it's where my creativity, sense of relation to the world and others, and meaning-making occur. I make major and minor life decisions by talking to myself, I build relationships with other people and the world by talking to myself, and I wrote this piece by talking to myself.

I describe all these experiences to flesh out the notion of the surviving crip as an alternative figure to the super-crip, the disabled normate, and the self-annihilating queer. This figure enables what Ahmed calls "feminist snap," or "how we collectively acquire tendencies that can allow us to break ties that are damaging as well as to invest in new possibilities" (162). Ahmed gives us "speaking sharply, speaking with irritation" as the paradigmatic sign of feminist snap (190). Over the past few years, I've had two major moments of feminist snap, one when I left an abusive relationship with my ex-wife and another when I broke down under the weight of my disabilities and the aftermath of that abuse. These were not singular moments of emancipation or liberation, at least not in any conventional sense. They manifested as overpowering, full-bodied, irrepressible sobbing, the very thing dominant culture equates with defeat, weakness, and surrender. Unlike the agency implied by Ahmed's sharp speech, they felt more like waking dreams, alternative worlds swirling and percolating.

During these episodes, I once again lived out my mantra that "this is impossible, but here I am anyway." Indeed, change seemed nearly impossible at these moments, even as they propelled me towards something different. By impossible, I mean unthinkable, unimaginable, beyond the limits of understanding or enduring, beyond the limits of the self. Yet the self persists at the very moment of its own dissolution; it survives. Although this mantra speaks to me personally, it also adheres to the surviving crip more generally. Both offer a heuristic for imagining alternative conceptions of the self, even if, especially if, those seem impossible. These conceptions are hopefully more open and available to those on the margins for whom the View from Nowhere is not viable, whose continued existence threatens the social order, and whom the social order continually threatens with non-existence. I'm talking in particular about gendered, sexualized, racialized, classed and disabled others who live with (against/alongside of) impossibility all the time.

We learn to live with "an optimism without a future, an optimism that makes a break of something the start of something without knowing what this something is" (Ahmed 200). Once the tears are over, their echoes persist, which sometimes leads to other bouts of sobbing and sometimes creates grounds for agency. Although this kind of optimism may not have a clear future, it does have a past, one that informs the present. My history provides access to alternative worlds because of my engagements with critical-political projects and my familial experiences with my parents' divorce and my mom's survival of/with major clinical depression. This history is constitutive of my selfhood, just as much a part of me as dominant culture. If we breathe in heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and ableism from the moment we are born (if not before), then we also ingest the seeds of those systems' undoing. The surviving crip offers a space to cultivate those seeds, which do not grow from opposition or inversion alone, but from access to critical-political world-making.

Like feminist snap, the surviving crip complicates the commonsensical separation among past, present, and future by stressing both the breaks and overlaps among these three tenses. It acknowledges the desire for an abiding, resilient self, even as it recognizes such a self as an aspirational fantasy. Necessary, yet impossible to achieve, fantasies are inescapable insofar as they animate and galvanize both survival and critical-political projects. The surviving crip is just as much a fantasy as the super-crip, the disabled normate, and the self-annihilating queer, but it does different cultural, political, and rhetorical work. It foregrounds paradox rather than resolving it into the View from Nowhere, and it insists that we all operate from a view from somewhere. We're all in this together, and there's no way out, which is not the end or telos of politics, but their beginning.

Coda

Strangers, family, and friends politely ask me, "what do you do now?" Survive, I want to say. Survive in the face of forces that will otherwise kill me, that will probably kill me anyway no matter how hard I fight, whether from despair and hopelessness, too many surgeries, or drugs that wreck my liver and kidneys. Survive thanks to forces (some of the same ones, actually) that put my pain and depression into abeyance, that sustain me, that give me joy and a prudent sense of hope. In this moment, I live, and that's enough.