Monstering, dissenting and revolting: dialogues from and between cryp/ crip-sur epistemologies and de/pos-colonial disability studies

Abstract

This essay presents some critical interrogations of the construct of disability, interweaving and tracing dialogues from and between the crip/crip sur and de/poscolonial epistemologies of critical disability studies. In recent years, discas and crip activisms have reclaimed the body as a central field of political contestation, challenging its invisibilisation in the social model of disability. These movements confront contemporary thanatopolitical practices that marginalise and render certain bodies unlivable, and assert alternative narratives of disability. Through a critique of the normative regime of the body - white, able-bodied, healthy, productive - they challenge the pathologisation and normalisation historically imposed by the colonial and capitalist system, while subverting these impositions by celebrating disability and somatic interdependence as forms of resistance to ableism.