Is There a Crip in this Class?

Christina Lee (she/her), Independent Researcher

Christina Lee recently completed her PhD in English and Medical Humanities at King’s College London. Her thesis was titled ‘The Care of the Dis-ease Self: A Foucauldian Reading of Buddhist Meditation Memoirs as Narratives of Healing’. Her research looks at experiences of illness and disability, embodiment, and intersectionality.

For the video recording of this presentation, please see the online symposia page.

Medical humanities is an emergent interdisciplinary field that combines arts, humanities, social sciences, and scientific approaches to explore issues of health and illness. Medical humanities was developed by physicians and medical educators in the 1970s in response to the commercialisation and technologisation of biomedical education. Drawing on diverse practices such as narratives and creative arts, medical humanities aims to rehumanise medical practice and improve patient-doctor relationships (Cole et al., 2015, p. 2). In the last decade, the field took a “critical” turn. Drawing on diverse disciplines including queer theory and disability studies, critical medical humanities expanded its focus away from medical education to explore illness and wellbeing beyond the clinical context. Nevertheless, disability remains an “absent presence” in medical humanities – a problem, subject of inquiry, or metaphor, but rarely a “scholarly authority” (Goodley, 2023). In this article, I reflect on how disability studies’ place in medical humanities has changed since the critical turn and consider what its presence in the field means for the future.

I begin with the question: Is there a crip in this class?

In his classic essay “Is There a Text in this class?”, literary theorist Stanley Fish (1980) presents an anecdote about a colleague’s exchange with a student who asked if there is a text in his class. The colleague responded with the title of the set text, the Norton Anthology of Literature. However, the student had previously taken a class from Fish, who had taught that meaning is not fixed in the words of a literary text itself but emerges through the reader’s act of reading. She was in fact asking after the instructor’s interpretative approach to the text as opposed to information about the course itself. Like the student’s question, “Is there a crip in this class?” may be understood in two ways.

On first reading, “Is there a crip in this class?” is a question about disability inclusion and representation in medical humanities. Crip is derived from the derogatory term “cripple” and was used as a slang for “easy” (Lewis, 2015, p. 46). Just like the word “queer”, crip is reclaimed by disabled people as a means of empowerment. During the 1970s disability rights movement, crip was used by disabled people and disability scholars to reframe disability as a subversive social and political identity. Disability studies emerged as a field that interrogates how disability emerges not from an individual’s impairment but from social and cultural barriers that oppress the person. Contemporary critical disability studies scholars further theorise disability beyond the social model and position disability as necessarily entangled with systems of race, gender, and class.

While early work in medical humanities tended to use disability studies and patient narratives in medical education to teach medical students about disability, critical medical humanities uses disability studies to challenge representations of disability in medicine and medical humanities itself. Medical humanities has traditionally privileged individual narratives by white middle-class cisgendered writers in the Global North. This has led to the underrepresentation of black, ethnic minority, queer, trans disabled people in health research. Following work by critical disability studies scholars like Alison Kafer and Eunjung Kim (2017) on how notions of health are always underpinned by racist and ableist structures, interdisciplinary critical medical humanities projects like the Black Health and the Humanities project (2020) have collaborated with black activists and artists to amplify marginalised voices and spotlight how racist healthcare environments shape black people’s physical and mental health.

“Is there a crip in this class?” is also a question about critical approaches to disability in medical humanities. Critical disability studies scholars argue that disability studies is not simply the study of disabled people but a methodology for scrutinising “the social norms and conditions that define and stigmatise particular attributes as impairments” (Minich, 2016, para. 5). Crip theory, which combines disability studies with queer theory, examines how queerness and disability unsettle gender and bodily norms. As a verb, to "crip" is to expose the ways in which social practices and systems exclude and marginalise disabled people. In medical humanities, crip theory has been invaluable in analyses of how people with conditions like organ transplantation and diabetes reclaim control of their bodies by refusing linear narratives of cure and fatphobia (Wasson, 2021; Sabada, 2022).

For some, using ideas like crip that originated from disability activism in medical humanities is problematic because it effectively transforms tools for resistance into instruments that justify and expand medicine’s control over disabled people. Cripping her own illness narratives syllabus, Sayantani DasGupta (2016) expressed her discomforts as a nondisabled medical educator teaching disability studies within the confines of the ableist structures of academic and medical institutions. Critical disability studies can also at times limit medical humanities’ engagement with patients, physicians, and health organisations. The language of crip theory may alienate disabled and chronically ill people who do not identify as crip. Critical theory can do little to alleviate patients’ physical pain or improve the material conditions that lead physicians to experience care burnout.

As well as a methodology, critical disability studies is also a framework for critical disability praxis (Nishida, 2019). Critical disability studies is about practising disability with disability communities and transforming the ways we teach and produce knowledge. The growing presence of disability studies scholars, disabled activists, and scholars who crip in the medical humanities is an encouraging sign that we are moving in the right direction. However, we have some way to go to make medical humanities a safe and accessible space for disabled people. As noted in the recent report on the challenges and barriers to progress in medical humanities, neurodivergent, chronically ill and disabled students and researchers remain excluded from traditional academic networking practices (McLusky 2023). It is therefore vital that we move beyond theorising and actively practise disability in the clinic, classroom, and the community.

So, would the crips in the class please stay seated.

References

Black Health and the Humanities Project (2020) Available at: https://www.blackhealthandhumanities.org/ (Accessed: 12 November 2023).

Cole, Thomas R., Nathan S. Carlin, and Ronald A. Carson (2015), Medical Humanities: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

DasGupta, Sayantani (2016) ‘The Politics of the Pedagogy: Cripping, Queering and Unhoming Health Humanities’, in Rita Charon (ed.) The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 137-154.

Fish, Stanley (1980) ‘Is There a Text in This Class?’, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Harvard: Harvard University Press, pp. 303-321.

Goodley, Dan (2023) ‘Disability and depathologisation are not metaphors’, The Polyphony, 5^th May. Available at: https://thepolyphony.org/2023/05/05/disability-and-depathologisation/ (Accessed: 12 November 2023).

Kafer, Alison, and Eunjung Kim (2017) ‘Disability and the Edges of Intersectionality’, in Clare Barker and Stuart Murray (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability, edited by (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 123-138.

Lewis, Victoria Ann (2015) ‘Crip’, in Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, David Serlin (eds.) Keywords for Disability Studies. New York: New York University Press, pp. 46-48.

McLusky, Sarah (2022) ‘Overcoming Barriers to Progress in Medical Humanities Research’, Institute for Medical Humanities Durham. Available at: https://www.durham.ac.uk/media/durham-university/research-/research-institutes/institute-for-medical-humanities/Overcoming-Barriers-to-Progress-in-Medical-Humanities-McLusky-2022.pdf (Accessed: 12 November 2023).

Minich, Julie Avril (2016) ‘Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now’, Lateral 5(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.25158/L5.1.9

Nishida, Akemi (2019) ‘Critical Disability Praxis, in Katie Ellis, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Mike Kent and Rachel Robertson (eds.) Manifestos for the Future of Critical Disability Studies Volume 1. New York: Routledge, pp. 239-247.

Sabada, SK (2022) ‘Troubling Cure and Cripping Futurity: Queering Narratives of Diabetes’, in Bianca Frazer and Heather Walker (eds.) (Un)doing Diabetes: Representation, Disability, Culture. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 319-336.

Wasson, Sara (2021) ‘Waiting, Strange: Transplant Recipient Experience, Medical Time and Queer/crip Temporalities’, Medical Humanities, 47, pp. 447-455. doi: http://doi:10.1136/medhum-2021-012141