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J. Logan Smilges
Bad Crip Feelings: On a Culture of Critique and the Tyranny of Hope
Opening thanks. [SLIDE 1]
Good afternoon, everyone. For those people online, this is Logan
speaking. I'm a white person with a shaved head and mustache. I’m
wearing a silver chain necklace and a black t-shirt that say “bad crip
feelings being felt cripply.” I am grateful to be here today, and I
appreciate all of you making time for me midweek in the middle of the
semester. I want to offer many thanks to Chris for inviting me to be here,
to GRSJ for sponsoring this series, and to Lauren for handling a lot of
the logistics behind the scenes. It is always such a treat to enter into
conversation with folks who are already open to disability studies and
committed—however variously—to a disability politic. It makes my job
easier and far more enjoyable when I do not have to spend everyone’s
time explaining why disabled people deserve to exist in the world. So,
thank you for being you.
Access statement.
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Before I dive into my remarks, I do want to take a moment to invite
everyone here to occupy this space in a way that is as comfortable and
accessible to you as possible. Comfort for you might mean drawing,
knitting, rocking, ticking, or stimming while we talk. Access might
include standing up, lying down, walking laps, or taking breaks. If
you’re on Zoom, you might keep your camera on or off. You might
need to leave for awhile and come back, or you might just leave. We all
have different bodies and different minds, and I want to encourage you
to honor your own bodymind and all its exquisite variations. I also want
to acknowledge that comfort and access are not available to everyone in
the same way or to the same degree. It is the case, for instance, that as
Chris said, we are gathered on Musqueam ancestral lands, meaning that
the place we are in will always carry with it legacies of violence that
render it perpetually inaccessible for many Musqueam and other
Indigenous peoples. It’s also the case that, as Palestinian people in Gaza
undergo a genocide, this particular moment is not one that can or
perhaps should become comfortable for any of us. I cite these examples
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both to enrich our understanding of access with material specificity and
to offer an entry point into today’s conversation about bad feelings.
Introduction. [SLIDE 2]
As some of you already know, last year I published my second book,
entitled Crip Negativity. The book is, broadly speaking, about the bad
feelings people accrue while living in a world structured by ableism and
about how these bad feelings might impact the work we do as scholars,
organizers, comrades, friends, lovers, and people just trying to get by.
Crip Negativity is a book about feelings, and since its release ten months
ago, it has elicited quite a range of feelings from readers. These feelings
have included gratitude, hope, and variations of appreciation. They have
also included frustration, anger, resentment, and incredulity. Many of
these feelings have been shared directly with me through email, texts,
direct messages, and tagged posts on social media. Other feelings have
been published in reviews, whether in academic journals or mainstream
outlets. And still others were shared with me second-hand, in the kind of
gossip that writers all fear.
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What I would like to do today is reflect on what people’s feelings
toward my book about feelings might tell us about the field of disability
studies’s affective attachments and political commitments. My goal is
not to dismiss criticism of the book but, instead, to situate its criticism
and praise alongside one of the book’s primary interventions, which
addresses the forms and politics of crip critique. I want to suggest today
that disability studies has reached something of a crossroads with its
own affective politics. By the affective politics of disability studies, I am
referring not only to how people feel about the field but—more
importantly—to how the field signifies feeling as a political object in
and of itself.
Context. [SLIDE 3]
To offer some context for how I am coming into this conversation, I
want to briefly sketch out what I mean by “crip negativity,” which I
explain in the book as an affective reprieve, a postponement or
cancellation of our engagement with the world as it is. As a reprieve,
crip negativity is not meant to replace any existing politic. It offers a
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mode of critique and a method of escape. By allowing us to
acknowledge how much everything sucks, how much it hurts that
everything sucks, and how much it weighs to feel like nothing is going
to stop sucking anytime soon, crip negativity arms us with the strength
to avoid concessions or to settle for less than we’re worth. It can be easy
to accept less when we feel like we’re worth less, and we feel like we’re
worth less when we’re forced into a position of gratitude for what little
we already have.
Crip negativity refuses gratitude, refuses generosity, refuses
optimism—not because these feelings aren’t good or helpful or
important but because they’re unsustainable and often inauthentic. Good
feelings, such as pride, self-love, and hope, can be weaponized against
disabled people when they’re presented as affective prerequisites for our
liberation. Sometimes, as Sara Ahmed explains, “activism is imagined as
converting unhappy queers into happy ones” (2010, 108). The same can
be said for disability activism: too often are disabled people expected to
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be pleased each time our basic access needs are met, as if
accommodation were the pinnacle of anti-ableism.
We’re expected to be happy with the bare minimum, and then our
performed happiness is used to justify the bare minimum as sufficient.
Yet, if we fail to appear happy, we’re taken to be indignant, stubborn, or
selfish for refusing to be made happy by the things that should make us
happy. Ahmed, for this reason, would call us “affect aliens” (2017, 57).
Affectively alienated and alienated because of our affect, “we are not
made happy by the right things” (57). Bad crip feelings expose the limits
of the ableist logic underpinning integrative access. If we refuse to be
made happy by the access we’re given, if we demand more than the bare
minimum, we usher ourselves onto a new horizon of crip possibility that
invites us to ask for more. Crip negativity wants us to want more, and it
gives us the tools to understand just how much more it is possible for us
to want.
The tools I’m referring to are of an affective sort. Consistent with
crip negativity’s commitment to holding space for bad crip feelings, its
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tools can also be described in terms of feeling—not only our own
feelings but also those of others, especially those others ’feelings that
reciprocally come to shape our feelings toward ourselves. [SLIDE 4]
My thinking on this methodology is indebted to Julie Avril Minich,
whose “critical disability studies methodology” responds to a question
similar to the one driving this talk: “What do we want our work to do?”
(2016). Minich proposes that the answer lies in the absences dotting the
field of disability studies, to who and what are missing. For her, the
value of a critical disability studies methodology is that it deemphasizes
the category of disability in order to interrogate “the social norms that
define particular attributes as impairments, as well as the social
conditions that concentrate stigmatized attributes in particular
populations.” Her methodology attends to the production of disability, to
how it is made and sustained across cultures and lines of difference.
[SLIDE 5] A crip negative methodology similarly decenters the
category of disability, but it also decenters disability’s analysis. Crip
negativity dwells less on the norms structuring disability than on the
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processes by which the category is secured through its deferrals, through
that broad category of debility that names disability’s excesses and
residue (Puar 2017). While disability and debility often overlap—
sometimes producing each other—their categorical distinction can be
useful in order to emphasize the ontological violence entailed by the
recuperation of disability into a legible social category. Crip negativity
dials in on who is left behind when being disabled becomes a
respectable way of being in the world.
While a critical disability studies methodology focuses on the
conditions that surround disability, a crip negative methodology zooms
out to capture the stratified formation of these conditions, alongside
those that regulate or withhold the recognition of some people’s
illnesses, traumas, and impairments as disabilities. That is, crip
negativity adopts a scalar perspective to show both the norms
underpinning the category of disability and the norms preventing the
category’s democratization. [SLIDE 6] I find it helpful to think about
this methodological distinction through the language of affect: What
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feelings produce the conditions that shape disability? And how are these
feelings tethered to forms of harm, debilitation, and violence that,
through their obfuscating power, work to consolidate the category of
disability in the moment of its emergence? By shifting toward affect, we
can more easily back away from the subject of disability to chart its
ontological distribution and distributed effects.
As a methodology, crip negativity encourages us to name the
feelings that have historically been projected onto disability—pity,
disgust, grief, anger, and resentment, to name a few—alongside those
feelings that predict its liberal rehabilitation—pride, love, desire, and
contentment, among others. Then, importantly, crip negativity urges us
to further consider how these feelings regulate the boundaries of
disability, as well as how they coincide or conflict with the feelings that
mark its exclusions, such as indifference, apathy, hostility, and fear.
These latter feelings are those that subtend others ’fungibility and
illegibility—feelings felt toward people living on the bad side of town,
people fleeing from bad parts of the world, people rotting in
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confinement for doing bad things, people hurting as collateral damage in
wars against bad regimes, people dying en masse for being dealt a bad
hand.
Crip negativity can be about the bad feelings we bear toward a
culture of detachment, toward a lack of feelings that precipitates our
own bad feelings. Ableism is sometimes just a fancy word for a society
that doesn’t give a fuck. Crip negativity is sometimes just a fancy phrase
for how it feels to never have been given a fuck about or to know the
damage caused to others when no fucks are given. In this sense, a crip
negative methodology can sometimes be a mode of critique, a tool for
calling out the affective norms that sustain a culture of detachment and
for calling in disabled and nondisabled people alike who wield the
category of disability to silence others ’bad crip feelings. This is crip
negativity as a mode of accountability. Critique toward correction. Using
our own bad crip feelings to reveal the conditions that cause them.
[END SLIDES] Here’s an example. Last fall, I attended a panel at
a conference that was broadly about professionalization in the field of
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disability studies. The panel opened with remarks by an Arab scholar
mourning the destruction of Palestine and the slaughter of Palestinians.
The scholar, through tears, asked—point blank—what can disability
studies do here? It was an invitational question, intended to provoke
conversation. Following that remark, the remaining panelists, who were
almost all disabled scholars of color, spoke forcefully about the ways
disability studies—as an intellectual enterprise—remains elusive to them
because of its persistent failure to fully grapple with the complexity of
the relationships between race, nation, and the body. It was a powerful
and devastating collection of papers. But then, during the Q&A, a series
of visibly white attendees asked the panelists pragmatic questions about
how to establish a healthy work/life balance and how to secure disability
accommodations from their university. A number of them referenced my
book Crip Negativity as a way to infuse their bad feelings toward their
institutions with political weight.
Being the person that I am, I took to the mic and—as kindly and
gently as I could—mapped the trajectory of the conversation as I just
explained it to you. A trajectory beginning with a plea to bear witness to
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genocide on other side of the world and ending with liberal calls for
institutional inclusion. My point, of course, was not to dismiss the value
of access nor to downplay the reality that inaccessibility is an expression
of ableism; rather, I was attempting to situate the bad feelings articulated
under the banner of disability alongside those bad feelings from the
beginning of the session that had been effectively dismissed. I was
attempting to engage a crip negative critique that took to task the limits
of disability as a singular organizing rubric for the field of disability
studies. The panelists, all wonderful, responded generously to my
comment, but when the session was over, a senior figure in disability
studies—and I’ll do them the favor of not naming them—pulled me
aside to say, and I quote, “Not everyone has to talk about Gaza in order
to care about it.” [RESUME SLIDES: SLIDE 7]
Not everyone has to talk about Gaza in order to care about it.
You don’t have to talk in order to care, which I took to mean,
“Stop asking me to listen because I don’t care.”
Not caring is a form of feeling. It’s one that a crip negative
methodology makes visible as a structuring feature of disability studies:
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what are we allowed not to care about? How do we allow ourselves not
to care? In the place of care, what are we feeling?
Despite that crip negativity is a practice of refusal, including
sometimes a refusal of the labor that care requires, it is also a practice
meant to be taken up in the context of that labor. Meaning: crip
negativity is not a permanent bowing out, not a totalizing disavowal, not
an isolating position. There is an ethics to crip negativity, to how and for
what purpose we indulge our bad crip feelings. Our feelings are our
own, and in an ideal world, we’d be able to feel them whenever,
wherever, however, and for however long we want. But given the
stratification of humanity under liberalism, feelings cannot be
disarticulated from power. As such, the expression of bad crip feelings
must sometimes be negotiated among crips who all have bad feelings in
need of expression. At the end of the day, what matters is our shared
commitment to the right of expression and our mutual acknowledgement
that one person’s expression can impact the conditions of another’s.
Minich reminds us that “the ethical value (or lack thereof) in a disability
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studies methodology will lie in the form that methodology takes” (2017).
The same holds true for a crip negative methodology, which gleans its
ethicality from the purposes for which we use it.
[SLIDE 8] Crip negativity is meant for those who have historically
been denied the freedom to indulge their bad crip feelings, for those
whose forms of crip expression are policed and disciplined, and for
those whose bad crip feelings are sidelined by the persistent focus on the
feelings of those who more closely approximate normativity. To feel bad
crip feelings cripply includes being aware of crip’s contingencies, that is,
to feel crip cripply by attending to the power dynamics that determine
whose feelings deserve our attention and when. Sorting through the mess
of bad crip feelings in community with other crips is where the ethical
value of crip negativity lies. It’s the sitting with that makes crip
negativity worthwhile. Crip negativity does not orient us toward the
future or toward justice or toward measurable, material change, but it
does allocate us a spacetime to collectively mourn how much change is
needed. We can’t change the world for the better until we allow
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ourselves to feel the depth of our grief. It is only from those depths—
dug further still from the multiplicative effect of crip negative
communion—that we can even begin to know what change is needed.
Crip negativity jars us loose from the world as we know it, so that later
on we can more conscientiously articulate the world as we want it.
This is where I will leave you today: with the reminder that your
bad crip feelings are never yours alone. This means you will always
have affective community if you want it but also that we must live up to
the responsibilities that being in community entails. Disability studies is
one such community, and it’s a community that has a history and
ongoing tendency to sublimate the feelings of too many people. This
history and tendency, too, are worthy of bad crip feelings. We all have
so much to gain if we allow ourselves to feel more expansively about
what we have lost and are continuing to lose.
Thank you. [SLIDE 9]
https://cripnegativity.com/