Queer Cripping, Art, and Resistance
Organization: Canadian Journal of Disability Studies
We are seeking submissions for a special issue (titled: Queer Cripping, Art, and Resistance) for the peer-reviewed journal, Canadian Journal of Disability Studies.
As disability scholar Tobin Siebers states, “Disability is properly speaking an aesthetic value, which is to say, it participates in a system of knowledge that provides materials for and increases critical consciousness about the way that some bodies make other bodies feel.” (1)
Queerness and disability have long intersected, from the medicalization of queerness, institutionalization, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic to contemporary subjects, such as the ongoing suppression of Trans* healthcare rights. Queer disability researcher Robert McRuer’s introduction of the neologism ‘crip theory’ signaled the development of an approach that links queer and disability studies. Both crip and queer not only emerge as concepts that critique and resist cultural norms and binaries, but as political practices that emphasize “the high significance of the body and embodiments as a means to subvert prevailing socio-cultural perceptions, ideas of, and opinions on disability, sexuality, and gender.” (2) Cripping further reflects core qualities found in methodologies such as auto/biography, which foregrounds a reflexive ontology that acknowledges the interdependence between lived experience and social research. (3) By recognizing there is no such thing as a “nonembodied” memoir, a critical embodiment lens in queer/crip and auto/biography research can resist the consumption and commodification of marginalized identity or experience by “the center.” (4)
Queer/crip refusals of closure offer radical alternatives to assimilationist or reformist politics, reflected in alternative modes of making and exhibition. Deviance, chosen or intrinsic, reflects a form of resistance that affirms multiplicity – of experiences, of bodies. The restrictions on deviance, particularly disabled/queer sexuality, deny “the rights... to intimate citizenship,” reflect a core quality of cripping as praxis – a resistance to the invisibilizing, pathologizing, and denying of human intimacy and connection for queer and disabled people. (5) The history of queer and disability justices reflects the same ontological qualities that question: Who deserves the right to exist [especially in the public sphere]? Who was this made for? Further, drawing from Johanna Hedva’s Sick Woman Theory, how are both our bodies and minds affected by oppressive regimes, and what community infrastructure can we build to weather its impacts? (6)
With an interest in asking questions rather than in finding answers, we invite essays, creative works, or opinion editorial pieces from contemporary and historical perspectives, exploring art objects, practices, and/or institutions that produce, perform, and/or promote radical queer/crip art and methodologies. For questions or to submit, email Dr. Ira Kazi (ikazi3@uwo.ca) and Ana Moyer (amoyer9@uwo.ca). Submission deadline: April 25, 2025.
Possible key topics may include:
Queer(ing)/Crip(ping) spaces + times/futurities
Art + curatorial transgressions, activism, barriers
Institutional critique
Abstraction
Orientations or affects
Transnational, and/or postcolonial feminism
Visual dramatizations, media representations, and embodied practices
De/colonizing the body
Historical + contemporary queer/crip aesthetics
Capitalism/Neoliberalism
Austerity/Precarity
Hybridity
Wreckage, refuse, debris, parts
Eco-Criticism and Queer/Crip Ecologies
COVID-19
Toxicity
Necropolitics
Submission Types:
Peer-reviewed Essay: Peer-reviewed article (5,000–8,000 words) with notes in the Chicago Manual of Style 17th Edition (notes and bibliography).
Creative Works: Accounts of practice with 7–10 images. (1,000–1,500 words, including notes). We are also open to proposals for other forms of creative work.
Opinion Editorial: A non-peer-reviewed article (800–1,500 words) with notes in the Chicago Manual of Style 17th Edition (notes and bibliography).
Notes:
(1) Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2010), 20.
(2) Heike Raab, “Cripping the Visual: Visual Politics in Crip Queer Activism,” in Queer Futures: Reconsidering Ethics, Activism, and the Political, eds. Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Eveline Kilian, and Beatrice Michaelis (Farnham: Taylor & Francis Group, 2013), 40.
(3) Pamela Cotterill and Gayle Letherby, “Weaving Stories: Personal Auto/Biographies in Feminist Research,” Sociology 27, no. 1 (February 1993): 67–79.
(4) Sasha Kruger and Sayantani DasGupta, “Embodiment in [Critical] Auto|Biography Studies,” A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 33, no. 2 (May 4, 2018): 486.
(5) Alan Santinele Martino, “Also Here, Also Queer: The Work of LGBT+ Disabled Activists/Scholars in ‘Cripping’ Sexualities,” in Young, Disabled and LGBT+: Voices, Identities and Intersections, eds. Alex Toft and Anita Franklin (London: Routledge, 2020), 14.
(6) Johanna Hedva, "Sick Woman Theory". Mask Magazine. January 2016.
Ira Kazi
