“Cripping” Resilience: Contributions from Disability Studies to Resilience Theory

Introduction Resilience is a well-explored topic in the fields of psychology and psychopathology (Young, Green, and Rogers), with roots in physics and materials science such as engineering (Tarter and Vanyukov). Resilience refers primarily to the ability of the individual to cope with risk, trauma, or adversity (Young, Green, and Rogers). More specifically, resilience describes the personal qualities, competencies, processes, or contexts that predict developmentally appropriate or “satisfactory” outcomes in individuals under threat (Masten; Kaplan; Tarter and Vanyukov; Shaikh and Kauppi). These definitions comprise the ecological approach to resilience, which outlines risk factors including: poor health, low socioeconomic status, or exposure to violence, maltreatment, or community-level trauma (Leshner; Masten; Rolf) and protective factors including: self-efficacy, self-esteem, academic competence, problem-solving skills (Kaplan), family cohesion, and social supports (Garmezy). The ecological approach attempts to provide a predictive model of such risk and protective factors, and their intersection (Sapienza and Masten; Riley and Masten; Corcoran and Nichols-Casebolt), in efforts to provide holistic support interventions to those deemed ‘at risk’ (Masten; Leshner; Luthar, Cicchetti and Becker). Although this is the most widely invoked approach to resilience, it has not been employed without critique (Ungar Constructionist; Masten; Luthar, Cicchetti and Becker; Young, Green, and Rogers; Kaplan; Hutcheon and Wolbring). In light of these critiques, we propose a ‘cripping’ of resilience — a re-envisioning of its conceptual boundaries, meanings, and utility. What Is “Cripping”? The word “cripple” has been used pejoratively to describe disability-identified people or those deemed by others to be impaired, as Barton describes in her analysis of disability discourses in Readers Digest. The term has also been used to describe an action/event/object/person which has been rendered inoperable, not useful according to its intended purpose, or weakened (for example, “he felt crippled by the thought”). ‘Cripple’ had been largely dropped from folk and expert lexicon until its upcycling and reclamation by activists and academics in recent years (Sandahl). According to organisers of the “Cripping” of Comic Con, the term “cripping” may be understood as a way for disability-identified people and their allies to assert control and social power: By using the terms “cripping” and “crip,” instead of “cripple” or “crippling,” one may claim, strategically, that a host of well-meaning diagnoses, labels, treatments, options for intervention, and medical cures have the potential to be unwelcomed by — if not harmful to — the individuals they are designed to ‘help.’ The reclamation of the term “crip” has occurred, and is still occurring, alongside and in intersection with endeavours by other groups (Barounis; Clare; McRuer; Sandahl). For example, the term “queer” is being used fruitfully including for political purposes within (and beyond) LGBTQ communities (Butler; McRuer). As McRruer demonstrates in his theorising of compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory heterosexuality, these bodies of knowledge and political movements have potential to inform and disrupt each other (“Crip Theory”). And, much like the term “queer” has taken on new meaning in those communities, “cripple” is no longer just used by disability-identified people to re-shape injurious words and to describe themselves using language of their choice; indeed, it has accumulated additional political and analytical power. Work by Judith Butler and Michael Warner on the word “queer” may illuminate these new uses as they relate to “cripple.” Warner notes that “queer” is used not only to describe a particular identity or trait of a person but as a verb to describe a resisting of “the regimes of the normal” (Warner xxvi). “Queering” is an always-changing and an often re-deployed “site of collective contestation and the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings” (Butler 228). In other words, “queer” depicts a critical orientation to the world, a positionality, and a process by which power structures and oppressive assumptions are revealed and disrupted. “Cripping” has taken on a similar flavour in disability studies. For example, Sandahl defines queering as “[spinning] mainstream representations to reveal latent queer subtexts [or] deconstructing a representation’s heterosexism” (37) and cripping similarly as “spin[ning] mainstream representations or practices to reveal able-bodied assumptions and exclusionary effects” (37). To “crip” is not just a conceptual or academic exercise of critique and disruption — it unfolds in the lived realities, daily practices, and performed identities of individuals and groups as they preserve Self and community. Carrie Sandahl alludes to these different dimensions of “cripping” in her examination of solo autobiographical performances by queer/crip artists: “[Cripping involves] the act of coming out as a crip queer, the public display of sexualized bodily difference, and the process of bearing witness to past and present injustice” (28). Margaret Price expands on this in her essay Cripping Revolution, where she contextualises “cripping” in a discussion of activism, privilege, and enacting alliance. She likens “cripping” to authentically attending to others of different standpoints and experiences, and to deliberation, exchange, and reparation across partnership (Price). Finally, in her online essay, Eliza Chandler describes “cripping” as entailing an “open[ning] up [of] desire for what disability disrupts.” The author uses the example of communities, which are are cripped when they are enacted in ways that recognise, interrogate, and unsettle entrenched understandings of disability and community. This cripping occurs “through mutual motivation or desire to dwell with disability, a desire which is antagonistic to the normative desire to cure or kill disability”. These “cripped” communities re-think whom and what we can know — who our community members are, and who they are not. The author characterises these “cripped” communities as de-bounded, creative, and generative. In sum, “crip” may refer to a person or a group of people (“I am crip, and belong to a community of crips”). It may also be used as a verb to describe a process of critique, disruption, and re-imagining, and includes an orientation and a way of living. “Cripping” is deployed and redeployed for political purposes as a way to re-imagine conceptual boundaries, relationships, communities, cultural representations, and power structures. In cripping resilience, we do the following: (1) Resist the “regimes of the normal” prevalent in existing definitions of resilience; (2) Problematise who or what we can know as resilient; (3) Generate a “desire for what disability disrupts,” that is, suggest an understanding of resilience which embraces polyvocality, circumvents ability-centrism, re-understands “disability,” and which re-locates resilience to the level of relationship and community. “Cripping” Resilience A Critique Scholars across disciplines have critiqued the concept of resilience as ill-defined and overly-tautological (Ungar Constructionist; Ungar, Brown, Liebenberg, Cheung and Levine; Luthar, Cicchetti, & Becker; Masten), as well as lacking in the predictive validity it claims to offer (Tarter and Vanyukov). Definitions of resilience are constrained by positivism, which Tarter and Vanyukov link to these definitions inappropriate grounding in the physical sciences. Due to these constraints, these definitions do not account for context or for localised notions of resilience, and do not provide opportunities for individuals to self-define as resilient or not resilient. Authors contend that definitions of resilience are plagued by hegemonic notions of healthy, normal, or valued functioning consistent with western, middle-class, ableist norms (Hutcheon and Wolbring; Hutcheon and Lashewicz; Tarter and Vanyukov; Ungar Constructionist; Young, Green, and Rogers). Indeed, according to Tarter and Vanyukov, the notion of resilience reveals an “enduring [American] belief that personal fortitude surmounts adversity” (86), perhaps best encompassed by the cultural identity of “survivor.” A disability studies orientation is useful in elaborating existing critiques of the resilience concept and in proposing new ones. Firstly, we have noted along with others that popular definitions of resilience are largely individualised (Hutcheon and Wolbring; Ungar Constructionist; Prilleltensky and Prilleltensky; Young, Green, and Rogers). In this sense, thriving is seen as a concern for the individual, and resources for thriving must be recognised and acquired by individuals. These definitions ignore important aspects of lived experience, including: co-construction, community- or group-level thriving, and experiences of marginalisation/oppression in contexts of scarce power resources (Ungar Constructionist; Prilleltensky, and Prilleltensky). As Young, Green, and Rogers note in their discussion of d/Deaf children, “The individualization of resilience distorts significantly the life context of disabled children in which they may be seeking to be resilient” (47). Next, these definitions are uncritically founded in rather fuzzy notions of ‘risk’ and ‘vulnerability’ (Patterson). We have suggested in other work that this is inherently problematic for those deemed ‘impaired’ (Hutcheon and Wolbring), largely because “disability” is understood as an inherent risk factor (Theron; Tarter and Vanyukov; Leshner; Rolf), and individuals are compelled to overcome this “disability” to divest themselves of such risk. As a result, the notion of resilience is seen to parallel that of the supercrip icon (Hutcheon and Lashewicz), which paints an individual as heroic or insp

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