Last Updated on 01/05/2024 by Emma Purcell
On 1st May 2024, Crip Life™ is celebrating one year of dismantling disabling barriers one article at a time. Over the past 12 months, we’ve published 100 articles, interviewed some incredible disabled people from the world of entertainment, sport and business and collaborated with more than a dozen disability organisations and entrepreneurs.
To celebrate our first milestone, we’re doing a series of articles acknowledging and praising the reclaiming of the word “crip” by artists, producers, writers, podcasters, communities and businesses.
Reclaiming the word “crip”
Since launching Crip Life™ in May 2023, we’ve had mixed reactions to our choice of name. When we mentioned the name to friends and family, we were either met by a stunned silence or from those a little braver, “I don’t like it.”
The reason is that crip is regarded as a derogatory term for people with disabilities. The neurotypical and able-bodied amongst us regard this term as insulting and demeaning.
Well, if for us, crip is these things, we certainly wouldn’t have decided to name our magazine using it.
For people who may have less knowledge of the origins behind the word crip and are unaware of the crip social movement, we started our online disability magazine with an article titled Why (on earth) call it Crip Life?, which detailed all this, in the hope people would gain a better understanding and learn to embrace the use of the word crip.
However, we’ve still received negative feedback about our name, with the most recent just a couple of months ago when somebody recommended us to a disability community group and a moderator took it down.
Despite this, we’ve managed to grow a good amount of support, which has included 1000 followers on Instagram, just under 300 subscribers to our free newsletter and have had several businesses come on board with our advertising services, including Nimbus Disability, LanzAbility, Southbank Centre and Transport for London.
But of course, we want to grow more and one day become the most popular, trusting, engaging and newsworthy disability online magazine in the world.
Disability organisations using crip with pride
To those of you who still feel uncomfortable or offended by the word crip, we want to bring to your attention the fact we’re not the only organisation that has proudly used crip or cripple to brand their disability business and by reading this, it should hopefully change your perspective of the word.
Here are some of the many disability organisations that are using the word crip with pride and showing crip has positive sass and attitude:
Crip Rave™
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Crip Rave™ is a Toronto-based collective, event platform, and consulting hub showcasing and prioritising Crip, Disabled, Deaf, Mad and Sick body-minds within safer and more accessible rave spaces.
Structural barriers, ableism, industry standards, and cultural norms have largely resulted in inaccessible rave spaces and the exclusion of Crip bodyminds. Setting up an electronic music event so that all people can enter a venue is crucial, but accessibility requires us to go further— to centre disability in every aspect of planning so that all people can feel safe, comfortable, have their access needs met and their talents reflected in rave culture.
Crip Rave™ Collective was created by Renee Dumaresque and Stefana Fratila, two Mad and Crip organisers who are passionate about electronic music and envision a world where rave sites are accessible to everyone.
Together, they have hosted both in-person and virtual raves and workshops, participated in panels at Nowadays (New York) and MUTEK (Montréal), and consulted with festivals and event promoters to enhance the accessibility of their offerings.
The ‘collective’ in its name refers to the artists, collaborators, teachers, ASL interpreters, graphic designers, access support workers, and lineages of Disability Justice and Crip community wisdom that make its events possible.
CRIPtic Arts
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CRIPtic Arts exists to ignite disabled excellence across the arts. It provides active disabled leadership, which advances world-class arts work with disabled creatives. From high-quality community activities to showcasing breakthrough performers, it is blazing a revolution in accessibility.
It is a creatively courageous, accessibility-driven organisation, forging diverse disabled excellence, with community, ethics, and solidarity at the heart of its work. When talking about disabled people, it means “people who face disableist (including audist) barriers”, or “people who identify themselves as deaf or disabled – or are identified by others as deaf or disabled in society”.
CRIPtic Arts is also committed to supporting artists facing the highest barriers to opportunities and/or whose access requirements are less likely to be met by other organisations.
In 2022, CRIPtic Arts was named one of the 25 most influential disabled-led community organisations in the Disability Power 100.
Crip Video Productions
Crip Video Productions‘ mission is to make short independent films that increase understanding of disability through engaging characters and storytelling. The films are created by people with disabilities for everyone to enjoy. All films are written, directed, and produced by Margot Cole.
Crip Video Productions collaborates with able-bodied people and people with a variety of disabilities for the sake of simply telling a good story. The company mostly works with people who have physical disabilities. It does its best to make the films accessible by adding open captions to the films for the deaf and hard of hearing and audio description for the blind.
Crip Video Productions is an online project done for fun. It’s not an official organisation and does not receive any kind of funding or grants from the government or elsewhere. It doesn’t seek to profit from the films in any way.
It tries to produce the highest quality films it can on a low budget. Most people working on the films donate their time out of the kindness of their hearts.
Crip Video Productions follows the necessary precautions of filmmaking and has full permission to use all the locations seen in the films.
Cripple Media
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Cripple Media is the first-ever media company where young disabled creatives can shift the lens on how disabled people are viewed — into something more honest, accurate, impactful, and youthful.
Cripple Media does this by telling and reporting stories that are about disabled people, covering issues that impact disabled people, creating content that is representative of disabled people, and nurturing a community that has long been ignored.
At its heart, Cripple Media is striving to train and centre young disabled media professionals to lead conversations in mainstream media. With that being said, Cripple is entirely self-funded, and it intends to continue and expand for seasons to come. And most importantly, it believes that young disabled creatives deserve to get paid.
Crippen Cartoons
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Dave Lupton has been creating disability-related cartoons based on the Social Model of Disability for almost 40 years.
As a white, male wheelchair user he is conscious of the need to represent those disabled people with differing impairments, ethnicity and cultural backgrounds in his cartoons. He is in regular contact with a diverse representation of disabled people across the world, which is reflected in his work as a cartoonist and writer.
Crippen Cartoons appear across the world, being used by groups and organisations of disabled people in Australia, New Zealand, Germany, USA, Canada, Ukraine, Hong Kong and many more.
The name Crippen arose following a road traffic accident which left Dave using a wheelchair. The ‘Crip’ part is obviously based upon the term ‘cripple’ whilst the ‘pen’ is self-explanatory. There is also a sting in the tail as Crippen is synonymous with the infamous Dr Crippen who allegedly disposed of his wife’s body in a bath of acid … the acid being Crippen’s acerbic wit!
It was recently pointed out that Crippen Cartoons are unique in as much that they offer an insight into the UK disabled people’s movement from the late 1970s up to the present time.
Here are links to a few more crip companies:
Can you suggest any other disability organisations that use crip with pride? Let us know in the comments box or on social media.
Additional crip reading
To gain an even better understanding of the word crip, its history, the social movement, crip theory and much more, we recommend you have a read of these articles:
- Crip: A Story of Reclamation
- Crip Time
- Crip Negativity
- Performing Normal But Becoming Crip: Living with Chronic Pain
We hope this has taught you more about the origins of the word crip and the reclaiming of the word by the disabled community. Stay tuned over the coming weeks when we will also be delving into other areas where crip is positively used, including in disability literature, titles of TV shows and films and podcasts.
