Welcome to this little TOUR D'HORIZON, honey!
Pilot, practice, possibility. A framing.
Gotta say, choosing a title for this weekly roundup of links about disability arts, culture, and politics was not easy.
First there was the what-actually-is-it dilemma. A weekly roundup of links, I said to myself. Then I was like, “Roundup?” It brought to mind nonconsensual techniques of animal capture. Googling brought up images of the consumer product. Nope, nope.
To the synonyms! Digest, briefing. Tour d’horizon. I liked the look of it. I imagined myself at sunset on the beach saying to friends, “Let’s tour this magnificent horizon, darlings.”
From the OED: “An extensive tour. Usually figurative, a broad, general survey.”
Seems like a scale crisis. Isn’t a horizon too extensive to tour extensively? Isn’t the best thing about experiencing a horizon that even a quick moment with it is extensive?
Some years ago, I started using the word “horizon” to conceptualize disability arts organizing as the politics of the impossible (resisting and reversing the quip that politics is the art of the possible). That you can never touch the horizon is precisely what makes orienting to it so immediate. Which means when you imagine the most wildly impractical possibilities for disability arts, you are activating the conditions for those possibilities to come into existence.
As adrienne maree brown has taught me, “Small is all.” Small (me, now) is all (horizon, us).
So it’s a little tour d’horizon.
Now: Which horizon are we touring? “Disability arts and political action,” I said to myself. “Crip news.” “Disability culture and politics.”
This is where I have to admit I’m stuck. I’m stuck with what “disability” is supposed to designate. I wrote about this recently in conversation about nightlife organizing I do:
“this is going to sound really wild as i reflect on my 10 years in disability activism, but: i’m really losing interest in disability as an identity category, especially how it is designed in a monolithic rights-based model of political minoritarianism. just about every week i talk to someone who would not claim disability identity and yet describes to me some fascinating experience of disability: someone i meet for the first time tells me about an undiagnosed food allergy that caused mysterious seizures, i hear post-covid anosmia described in terms of eating popcorn that tastes like little shards of glass, i look at the data about late-stage ph.d. students going through serious forms of anguish and despair.”
I get into the complexities of disability culture so much more reliably when I actually don’t use the phrase “disability culture.” “Disability culture” is what I talk about with my friends from grad school, from the Society from Disability Studies conferences of yore, with other white disabled people who have transformed our political subjectivities in study of disability identity, history, and politics. And I love talking about “disability culture.” “Disability culture” is essential and fabulous.
But that’s not even some of it. The conundrum of what to call disability has been a fixation of white disability rights debates - and it takes us away from where disability appears in our lives and in the interlocking systems of domination and dispossession that define disability for us. I’m reminded of one of the many excellent ways Disability Justice activist Cyrée Jarelle Johnson has put it:
So here I am cycling through all these names for the kind of newsletter this is and touching this fundamental problem in identity politics.
This newsletter is not going to try to address this problem, but the problem is definitely part of the horizon we’re at.
I use “crip” because 1) it names the gradations of experience of disability in and outside identity political constraints, 2) it already recognizes that culture, art, and politics are never separate, and 3) some people kinda gasp at it, which marks a space of something emergent. It’s the incompleteness of disability, the conversation that will happen when someone cringes at “crip,” the ways we just need to get into it together.
Fine, but still: How will I know what “counts” as “crip culture” to include in this newsletter?
I don’t know. And the not knowing doesn’t stress me out.
I know I want to disrespect the legibility of (and therefore distinction between) artistry and political action. I don’t want to dwell in contemplation of whether Ana Rodney’s work to help Black mothers navigate racist health systems “counts” as crip. I don’t want to determine whether Chicago-based CoFED’s work to build food and land co-ops for young people of color is or isn’t crip. I want to say, “Who cares if it’s crip! It’s interesting and important to know about.”
It’s crip because it’s kindred. '“Crip News” for now. Anything to come.
I want to assemble a weekly collection of links to ideas, techniques, dramas, and excitement that is relevant to anyone working to advance whatever might or might not already be called disability arts and politics.
We’re touring the horizon, honey! We’re not project managing it. We’re not selling it. We’re here for its permanent call to keep going.
Let’s get to it!
Mm! Love it. Thank you for your generosity to gather and share.
Kevin, this is fantastic. What a great service! Sue