This path was created by Anonymous. The last update was by Sam Weiss.
"Cripping the Apocalypse"
Alison Kafer’s critique of the ways that disability is used to litmus test the “success” of an imagined future (no disability = utopia, lots of disability = dystopia) raises the question: how does and should disability fit into our imagined futures? Speculative fiction, particularly science fiction, often imagines futures in which all disability, illness, and injury have been “solved” in some way or another through advanced medical technology. Many of the works in this project challenge that idea, imagining utopian or ambiguous visions of disability. The works in this section challenge the stereotypical dystopian representations of disability. Rather than using disability to explain how dystopian or apocalyptic a future is, these texts center disabled people in dystopias. The disabled characters are well-rounded badasses who are essential to their communities' ability to survive and thrive in a dystopian or apocalyptic environment.
This section title is named after Leak Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarinsinha's essay, "Cripping the Apocalypse: Some of My Wildest Disability Justice Dreams.” In that essay, Piepzna-Samarasinha remembers the wildfires that devastated the West Coast in 2017. She recalls that when people began feeling symptoms of the smoke in the air, it was disabled people who had the answers for what to do next:
Over and over, it was sick and disabled folks—particularly folks with chemical injuries, environmental illness, asthma, and other autoimmune conditions who had already taught us. We had comprehensive information about where to get masks and respirators and about the right herbs to take to detox after exposure to air pollutants. We knew to go to libraries and other air-conditioned places to get an air break. We knew about HEPA filters and how you can make one with a furnace filter and a box fan. We knew it was normal to feel fatigue, confusion, and panic, and we knew to hit inhalers and take anti anxiety herbs. (Piepzna-Samarasinha)
Piepzna-Samarasinha brings attention to the ways that disabled communities’ knowledge is not only helpful but essential to surviving such an apocalypse. When the world goes to hell, it is disabled people who have a plan, as we have been navigating hell already. We are accustomed to making accommodations for our bodies that able-bodied people are not. Piepzna-Samaransinha finds hope in the apocalyptic, advocating for the necessity of disabled communities in such a future:
The texts featured in this section explore and advocate for this revolutionary apocalypse. Mia Mingus’s short story, “Hollow,” imagines a world in which disabled people have all been shipped off to another planet, but, little do the able-bodied people know, they organized and rebelled and now hold control of the planet. Rory Power’s Wilder Girls explores a mysterious plague that has ravaged a girls school on an island off the coast of Maine. All of the women and girls that are still alive have mysterious and supernatural ailments, and each time they become ill, their ailments worsen. Our protagonist is a queer, partially-blind, chronically ill girl who is also the best shooter in the whole school. George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road gives us Furiosa, a queer-coded butch amputee who outruns and outwits everyone to get herself & Immortan Joe’s “wives” to safety. RoAnna Sylver’s novel, Chameleon Moon, features a cast of disabled queers fighting to stay alive and thrive in a government-quarantined, constantly-on-fire city. Toby MacNutt’s story, “Morphic Resonance,” features a queer disabled protagonist with government-controlled tech implants. He is recruited by an underground, off-the-grid resistance group who reprograms said implant to alter appearance, mobility, gender presentation, etc. The story does not use this technology to explore the ways that disability could be cured, but rather, how adaptive tech can encourage and allow alternate ways of embodying queer crip existence. All of these pieces, like Piepza-Samaransinha, “[dream] the biggest disabled dream,” (Piepza-Samaransinha) forging an apocalyptic future in which “we lead the way."For years awaiting this apocalypse, I have worried that as sick and disabled people, we will be the ones abandoned when our cities flood. But I am dreaming the biggest disabled dream of my life—dreaming not just of a revolutionary movement in which we are not abandoned but of a movement in which we lead the way. With all of our crazy, adaptive-deviced, loving kinship and commitment to each other, we will leave no one behind as we roll, limp, stim, sig, and move in a million ways towards cocreating the decolonial living future. I am dreaming like my life depends on it. Because it does. (Piepzna-Samaransinha)