In the second part of our series – Reclaiming The Word Crip – we share some of the many incredible and insightful works of disability literature that are taking back power on the terms “crip” and “cripple” in its titles and context.
Below are 10 books, consisting of biographies, academic journals, fiction and much more, with unaffiliated e-book links to each title.
Cripple – A 21st Century Parable by Nick Maynard
Jonathan is a twenty-two-year-old quadriplegic, and Carol is his mother and carer. From their windows, they both see a young man at a bus stop. From their windows, they both embark on a fantasy…
Cripple is a parable for the 21st Century, which explores the concept of virtual relationships and asks questions about their validity. Are these relationships any less real or meaningful than the ones we choose to conduct in the physical world? What if we can’t conduct ‘traditional’ relationships? Does that mean we shouldn’t look for alternative ways to fall in love?
Crippled: Austerity and the Demonization of Disabled People by Frances Ryan
In austerity Britain, disabled people have been recast as worthless scroungers. From social care to the benefits system, politicians and the media alike have made the case that Britain’s 12 million disabled people are nothing but a drain on the public purse.
In Crippled: Austerity and the Demonization of Disabled People, journalist and campaigner Frances Ryan exposes the disturbing reality, telling the stories of those most affected by this devastating regime. It is at once both a damning indictment of a safety net so compromised it strangles many of those it catches and a passionate demand for an end to austerity, which hits hardest those most in need.
Feminist, Queer, Crip by Alison Kafer
In Feminist, Queer, Crip, Alison Kafer imagines a different future for disability and disabled bodies. Challenging how ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Alison rejects the idea of disability as a pre-determined limit. She juxtaposes theories, movements, and identities such as environmental justice, reproductive justice, cyborg theory, transgender politics, and disability that are typically discussed in isolation and envisions new possibilities for crip futures and feminist/queer/crip alliances.
This bold book goes against the grain of normalization and promotes a political framework for a more just world.
The Cripple by Hans Christian Anderson
In this classical fictional story The Cripple, Ole and Kristen worked for a lord who was both rich and good. Every year, for Christmas, together with his wife, he welcomed all the poor children of the area to the castle and treated them to a great celebration with gifts and feasting. As Ole and Kristen worked very hard, their children received more gifts than the others, even Hans, who was called the Cripple because his legs were too weak to carry him.
But this year, while his brothers and sisters received warm clothes, Hans received only a storybook. Ole and Kristen would have preferred warm clothing for him too, but Hans was happy to have something to read during the long hours he spent in his bed.
Ole and Kristen worked hard to maintain the castle gardens and envied their master who was rich without needing to work. One evening, Hans heard his parents complaining about this once again and offered to read them one of the stories from the book he had received for Christmas. Ole and Kristen would never have believed it, but the reading of a simple story would change the life of this poor family.
Crip Up the Kitchen: Tools, Tips and Recipes for the Disabled Cook by Jjules Sherred
Crip Up the Kitchen is a comprehensive guide and recipe collection that brings the economy and satisfaction of home cooking to disabled and neurodivergent cooks.
Cripping / Crip Up: A term used by disabled disability rights advocates and academia to signal taking back power, to lessen stigma, and to disrupt ableism to ensure disabled voices are included in all aspects of life.
When Jules Sherred discovered the Instant Pot multicooker, he was thrilled. And incensed. How had no one told him what a game-changer this could be, for any home cook but in particular for those with disabilities and chronic illness? And so the experimenting—and the evangelizing—began.
The kitchen is the most ableist room in the house. With 50 recipes that make use of three key tools – the electric pressure cooker, air fryer, and bread machine—Jules has set out to make the kitchen accessible and enjoyable. The book includes pantry prep, meal planning, shopping guides, kitchen organization plans, and tips for cooking safely when disabled, all taking into account varying physical abilities and energy levels.
Organised from least to greatest effort (or from 1 to “all your spoons,” for spoonies), beginning with spice blends and bases, Jules presents thorough, tested, inclusive recipes for making favourites like butter chicken, Jules’s Effin’ Good Chili, Thai winter squash soup, roast dinners, matzo balls, pho, samosas, borshch, shortbread, lemon pound cake, and many more.
Jules also provides a step-by-step guide to safe canning and a template for prepping your freezer and pantry for post-surgery. With rich accompanying photography and food histories, complete nutritional information and methods developed specifically for the disabled and neurodivergent cook, Crip Up the Kitchen is at once inviting, comprehensive, and accessible. If you’ve craved the economy and satisfaction of cooking at home but been turned off by the ableist approach of most cookbooks—this one’s for you!
Teachings of a Grumpy Cripple by Thane Pullan
Teachings of a Grumpy Cripple is an honest commentary about disability and society from a guy with cerebral palsy. Offering commentary and solutions on patronizing, relationships, abuse, media, politics, accessibility and sports. My goal is to help empower people with disabilities. Volume three copies various topics including employment, advocacy, technology, media, religion and boredom.
Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability by Robert McRuer
Crip Theory attends to the contemporary cultures of disability and queerness that are coming out all over. Both disability studies and queer theory are centrally concerned with how bodies, pleasures, and identities are represented as “normal” or as abject, but Crip Theory is the first book to analyze thoroughly how these interdisciplinary fields inform each other.
Drawing on feminist theory, African American and Latino/ cultural theories, composition studies, film and television studies, and theories of globalization and counter-globalization, Robert McRuer articulates the central concerns of crip theory and considers how such a critical perspective might impact cultural and historical inquiry in the humanities. Crip Theory puts forward readings of the Sharon Kowalski story, the performance art of Bob Flanagan, and the journals of Gary Fisher, as well as critiques of the domesticated queerness and disability marketed by the Millennium March, or Bravo TV’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. McRuer examines how dominant and marginal bodily and sexual identities are composed and considers the vibrant ways that disability and queerness unsettle and re-write those identities to insist that another world is possible.
Crip Authorship: Disability as Method by Mara Mills
Crip Authorship: Disability as Method is an expansive volume presenting the multidisciplinary methods brought into being by disability studies and activism. Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez have convened leading scholars, artists, and activists to explore the ways disability shapes authorship, transforming cultural production, aesthetics, and media.
Starting from the premise that disability is plural and authorship spans composition, affect, and publishing, this collection of thirty-five compact essays asks how knowledge about disability is produced and shared in disability studies. Disability alters, generates, and dismantles methods. Crip authorship takes place within and beyond the commodity version of authorship, in books, on social media, and in creative works that will never be published.
The chapters draw on the expertise of international researchers and activists in the humanities, social sciences, education, arts, and design. Across five sections – writing, research, genre/form, publishing, media – contributors consider disability as a method for creative work: practices of writing and other forms of composition; research methods and collaboration; crip aesthetics; media formats and hacks; and the capital, access, legal standing, and care networks required to publish. Designed to be accessible and engaging for students, Crip Authorship also provides theoretically sophisticated arguments in a condensed form that will make the text a key resource for disability studies scholars.
Essays include Mel Y Chen on the temporality of writing with chronic illness; Remi Yergeau on perseveration; La Marr Jurelle Bruce on mad Black writing; Alison Kafer on the reliance of the manifesto genre on disability; Jaipreet Virdi on public scholarship for disability justice; Ellen Samuels on the importance of disability and illness to auto theory; Xuan Thuy Nguyen on decolonial research methods for disability studies; Emily Lim Rogers on virtual ethnography; Cameron Awkward-Rich on depression and trans reading methods; Robert McRuer on crip theory in translation; Kelsie Acton on plain language writing; and Georgina Kleege on description as access and aesthetic technique.
Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice and Art Activism of Sins Invalid by Shayda Kafai
In recent years, disability activism has come into its own as a vital means to acknowledge the power and resilience of the disabled community and to call out ableist culture wherever it appears.
Crip Kinship explores the art-activism of Sins Invalid, a San Francisco Bay Area-based performance project, and its radical imaginings of what disabled, queer, trans, and gender nonconforming body-minds of colour can do: how they can rewrite oppression, and how they can gift us with transformational lessons for our collective survival.
Grounded in their Disability Justice framework, Crip Kinship investigates the revolutionary survival teachings that the disabled, queer of colour community offers to all our body-minds. From their focus on crip beauty and sexuality to manifesting digital kinship networks and crip-centric liberated zones, Sins Invalid empowers and moves us toward generating our collective liberation from our bodyminds outward.
Crip Negativity by J. Logan Smilges
Imagining anti-ableist liberation beyond the rubrics of access and inclusion
In the thirty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, the lives of disabled people have not improved nearly as much as activists and politicians had hoped. In Crip Negativity, J. Logan Smilges shows us what’s gone wrong and what we can do to fix it.
Levelling a strong critique of the category of disability and liberal disability politics, Smilges asks and imagines what horizons might exist for the liberation of those oppressed by ableism—beyond access and inclusion. Inspired by models of negativity in queer studies, Black studies, and crip theory, Smilges proposes that bad crip feelings might help all of us to care gently for one another, even as we demand more from the world than we currently believe to be possible.
Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
Can you suggest any other books that have proudly included “crip” or “cripple”, diminishing the stigma and trying to stop ableism? Let us know in the comments box or on social media.
Did you miss part one? Read: Disability Organisations Using Crip With Pride