#cripkult

[coldalbion]

Disabled people know some folks regard us as acceptable collateral damage in the fight to keep your lives as you like them. We see the way we get killed in wars because we can't leave our homes. We see the way war makes more of us every day. We see how climate change drowns us and dehydrates us. We see how pandemics reiterate the truth you don't want us to hear out loud - better dead than disabled, have an automatic DNR

We see how your jetfuel and petrochemical emissions and smog poisons lungs already struggling to breathe. We see you, and part of us laughs because soon, you will know too. It will come upon you and many of you may beg to avoid such humiliation, such loss.

And we will strive to be kind. Kind because you will not, cannot embrace a disabled life as just as good as a nondisabled life. Cannot face what that would mean, if that were true.

But amongst ourselves we'll call you cowards. Be sure of that.

#disability #crip #cripple punk #cripkult

[coldalbion]

Is it possible, perhaps, that such cultural use of plants and animals to treat injuries and illness was inherited from a common ape-like ancestor millions of years ago?

As in humans, self-medication in wild animals is not uncommon –individuals from a diverse range of species, including chimpanzees, select particular plant foods that contain chemicals known to treat infection by parasites.

For example, caterpillars ingest plant toxins when infected by parasitic flies and gorillas consume a wide variety of plants that contain known compounds important in human traditional medicines.

Some species, such as wood ants, even anticipate infection, adding antimicrobial resin from nearby trees into their nests, which reduces the colony’s exposure to microbes.

To date however, this widespread behaviour almost always centres on self-medication with plant material. Never before has the use of insects on wounds been observed.

Over a 15-month period, beginning in November 2019, the team observed 76 open wounds on 22 different chimpanzees. There were 22 events of insect application by ten different chimpanzees. On 19 occasions, various individuals were seen applying an insect to one of their own wounds.

They caught an insect from the air, which they immobilised by squeezing between their lips. Then they placed it on an exposed surface of the wound and moved it around using their fingertips or lips. Finally, they extracted the insect from the wound.

But the use of insects didn’t stop there. In a remarkable act of “allocare” (caring for another individual) a mother was seen applying insects to her offspring’s wound, and a further two adult chimpanzees treated the wounds of another community member.

Wake up babe, new/old "Law of the Jungle" lore just dropped!

#cripkult #disability #we have always been here

[coldalbion]

“The terrain enforced its own rhythms.” ― Frank Herbert, Dune

#cripkult #dune #the old man

[coldalbion]

Give me More Crip SF/F

Give me More crip SF.

Deep narratives of cyborgs that go beyond tryborgs, the cybernetic-punkery of a care collective taking down medical medicorps, their epileptic neurologies monitored by lines of symbiotic more-than-human hybridities that go beyond 'service animals. Give me Baradian-Ballardianisms.

Give me crip-wizards who crawl and gimp and limp as they send forth their souls to shatter extractive Empires and return stolen lands to their custodians - human and otherwise. Let them be feral and leaking, never-to-be fixed. Let them be not "strong, independent characters" alone, but "deep, inter-and-intra-dependent, living characters" together with their kin.

Let the carrier-bag of such fictions be woven by the queer entanglements of anormate bodyminds - let the madfolks bring forth better worlds, the "obsolescent" bodies long abandoned by hypercapatalists be seen as the smiths and the artisans they are, the true deliverers of that phrase "the street finds uses for things".

Let uneven, discarded, forgotten, uneven dis/personed presences laugh and show that "the futures" (plural) are not only here, but that it is their very unevenness that dis/eases fixity and solutionism, making that same bag *bulge and warp* with the gravity and joy of its creativity. Let it dis/rupt our obsessions with uprightness, rectilinearity.

Let all this, and More, be so. Because it is. And has been. And will be.

(And before anyone posts existing examples, understand this is an unending call for More, that will never be satiated.)

But if you want some of what already exists, try this: Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction

#cripkult #criplit #disability fiction #science fiction and fantasy

[coldalbion]

My crip stance on disability

In case people are wondering: I am all in on the idea that being disabled is*NOT AN INHERENTLY BAD THING*. I can point folks to plenty of groups and academic texts that point out that an ableist society *requires* disability to be a bad thing in order to buttress itself and make demands upon bodies and minds which pushes them beyond limits while insisting that "disability" is the worst thing ever.

AND I am also all in on the idea that being disabled is absolutely terrible under capitalism and in an atomised society which constantly reinforces individualism and inculcates us with the idea that we must be unencumbered and autonomous at all costs.

AND I am also all in on the idea that suffering should be ameliorated or eliminated as much as possible, because frankly it sucks to suffer every single day.

AND that the construction of disability is culturaly determined, and most of the coinages and context, like everything else, were culturally determined -largely by the so-called Global North, though that is changing.

AND that disability *exceeds* matters of identity politics.

What may be a surprise to some is that these positions can and do co-exist as a coherent whole, and that I actively encourage people to try out the 'disabled' label if they feel it fits, because it reduces stigma and actually says "hey, ableism, you're the new kid on the block, you're not the only game in town, and maybe, just maybe you should listen to the folks who have one of the oldest kinds of reccuring situated knowledges on the bloody planet.

#disability #crip #cripkult #chronic illness

[coldalbion]

"Everything that involves Óðinn is marked in this way...he has often been seen as a a sort of shaman-god to who whom sacrifices are made by hanging - and nothing, absolutely nothing in his affairs has the clarity of rational phenomena." - Boyer, "Elements of the Sacred among the Germanic and Norse peoples" p. 287 (emphasis mine)

#the old man #happy wednesday #*odin #the book I found this quote in also refers to him as an' incurable necromancer' #which I'm going to be honest has so many crip and cripkult valences it's not funny #cripkult

[coldalbion]

They will not love you

The dominant power-structures will not love you when you twist yourselves into the shapes they demand. They will use you as fuel to perpetuate themselves. But they will not love you I understand it is easier, safer, to hide, to steal that rest from them. But they will not love you. I understand it is easier to not feel attacked constantly for existing. To crave camouflage and quiet. But they will not love you. And you should understand: Some of us have no choice. No camouflage. No closet. We exist and they regard that as unacceptable. As a disease to be eradicated, smoothed out, consigned to their histories. We exist. We have always existed. Always will. Because of love. Because of care. Because, secretly we exist in the heart of them, and everything they do, is to avoid being us. And We Have Always Been Here. Before identity, before even the idea of human and non-human leaked from nightmares. They will not love you. But we may.

#cripkult #among other things

[coldalbion]

Lying here awake at stupid o'clock in the morning it occurs to me that I am fundamentally unsurprised that so many people who become sick or disabled don't know what to do after the rage ebbs. And ebb it does, and will, and it may crest again. And any and all of that is OK.

But for many the rage is a contact with their previous reality, and when it goes, they don't know who or what they are. Because nobody teaches how to be sick or crippled, and have a rich rewarding life *within their new reality*. Few ever approach the beauty and potency of uselessness because they don't know it exists - the secret joys that can emerge if you know where to look, in spite of suffering.

All that matters is use. This we are taught. This, we may unlearn, too

What might a Nietszchean dynamite of uselessness look like? What seeming foundational assumptions might it explode? How might trees appear in our dreams to teach us the hard work of becoming useless? How might we learn the wu wei that gives us the neurochemicals we crave from bathing in forests or the rhythms of metal?

I realise that in some senses, my life has been, is this, unlearning.

I'm not a teacher. At most I'm a journeyman wordslinger. But another kind of life is possible. It's not easy, but it exists and I'm always open to sharing my experience, when you get here. Because disabled folks know things. We crip, and we know things

#cripkult #disability

[coldalbion]

I'd not seen this before. Really nice.

#disability #sunaura taylor #judith butler #cripkult

[coldalbion]

Cripping things

Cripping things is all about dealing with what the fashy techno-utopians want to avoid. It's about dealing with the idea that "peak performance" is unsustainable, that you can't just accelerate through breaks, and so called "sustainability" needs interrogating or it just becomes another recipe for exhaustion and sunk-cost fallacy of resource use. It's about working-with and using friction, encumbrance, living with dis/ability as inescapable difficult potentially JOYOUS fact.

#crip #cripkult #disability #dis/ability

[coldalbion]

People are complicated sure

Sometimes it feels like being an arsehole to point out that folks like Magnus Hirschfield or Emmeline Pankhurst and other luminaries were eugenicists. People act like you're trying to negate the good changes they influenced and so react badly. The thing of it is, uncritical lionisation of figures is easier with internet virality and that elides complexities and airbrushes charcters and demonises others. But when we point out, say, the eugenics, it's a principle of "Yes, And" because, you know what? "Good Important People" can do or believe horrific things. And this is not some moral calculus, some utilitarian Good Place-ian points system, nor search for Original Sin. No, it's a reminder that you, me, ordinary people exist within environments and systems that are messy, joyous and awful. There's no place of safety, no sterile sanctum of purity, and the ideal that makes you strive towards it is constructed by those with an interest in selling you the idea that the labour of worlding ever ends - that there will be a point when you don't have to touch and be touched in your turn. That they have the keys to heaven, and can sell you it for the tiny price of of obedience to them and their vision. And that sanctum you crave, it isn't real, because the daimonic powers which might make it are messy bastards. They're filthy and they overflow with strange vitality. If there's one thing I've learnt over the years, the hero and the monster are inextricably imbricated in a queer, awe-ful. joyous kinship. Idols are covered in smoke, detritus, blood, and other fluidities. Condemn horror, condemn attrocity, yes. Swear an oath to not let it happen on your watch. But be watchful, look again, and,make sure your scales of morality aren't pre-weighted by assumptions of what you've been soaked in in terms of your notions of moral superiority. Looking-again is second sight and in doing so, what we encounter thickens, becomes richer, like good dark loam enlivened by luxurious shit and filled with rhizomatic mycorhizal wonders. Eugenics happened. Eugenics happens. People still think that way, because whether you realise it or not, we are all inculcated with an image of an ideal human. So fuck the human. Fuck the ideal. Fuck the idea of ranking as method of orientation, spatialisation, and location - as forming "identity" Break the surface, the veneer of the human as the centre of everything and you begin to intuit something which is incredibly old, something that shows humankind as earth, or trees, or something else entirely. Realise that there's something beneath the monster-mask, and the heroes' helm. Something the human doesn't want to admit, because it would undermine everything - make oh so many homo sapiens become catastrophically lost, its instinctive grasp for the status quo revealed as a marketing ploy. No to purity. No to assimilation. No to the human subject. Yes to to the humus, the dark night soil, the ambiguity of the chthonic, the vasty gulfs, the roaring noise of silence between the stars. Yes to the crip, the crooked, to everything more - to moving beyond and through carceral, cancellative, and punitive dialectics. Turning a prison into a rewilded garden full of animate life and death, where so-called degeneration, so called decay is seen as what it is - where, with apologies to Auntie Ursula? The Word For World Is Forest.

#cripkult #blood and honey #black bird magic

[coldalbion]

Wordsmithing again

Possible new word coinage: Cripacity.

The faculty disabled folks (and the wider dis-field) possess, and are possessed-by which is a portmanteau of Crip + the double meanings of capacity + opacity.

That is: Cripacity, Cripacities.

1. The faculty to blur, obcure, occult, and undermine assumptions - especially, but not limited to, abled and ableist assumptions.

2. The skill and praxis of operating in a crooked, bent, or otherwise difficult to 'read', 'grasp', 'hold' or 'make legible' fashion which enhances Life, often operating 'beneath' standard 'notice' metric, norms. etc.

3. The unique embodied rhythms, capacities, knowledges, experiences, and perceptions of crips, (disabled) cyborgs, 'neurodiverse' folks on their own terms

#cripkult

[coldalbion]

"More and more passengers arrive at the gate, some of them consuming snacks or packaged breakfasts. Mr. Brown refrains from eating; he can’t risk needing to use a bathroom on the flight. He hasn’t eaten anything since 1 p.m. yesterday.

Forgoing food and water for hours before a flight is a common practice among travelers who use wheelchairs and cannot access the bathroom.

[...]

Brown has a two-hour layover in Charlotte and is supposed to board his 2:45 p.m. flight to San Antonio, which is scheduled to land at 4:42 p.m. As he waits, his stomach is starting to get “shaky,” he says.

Just before the flight is supposed to board, the gate agent announces that there is a delay. The flight will now depart at 4:30 p.m. and land at 6:30 p.m. But, with the time it takes to deplane and get to his hotel, Mr. Brown doesn’t think he can make it until after 8 p.m. to eat again.

At 2:16 p.m., he finally bites into a Snickers bar. It has been 25 hours since his last meal. Just before he boards his next flight, Mr. Brown also eats a cup of pretzel bites from Auntie Anne’s."

The food and drink restriction thing again. I've done it on eight hour train journeys too. But this whole article is required reading as to why I don't fly (ETA: I haven't since I was 17), even though I have more bodily control than this gent.

#disability #cripkult #air travel #flying is a fucking nightmare and i still want to do it but it aint worth the risk at all

[coldalbion]

Crip Theory beginnings

@astranemus here are a few: Becoming dishuman: thinking about the human through dis/ability by Daniel Goodley & Katherine Runswick-Cole

Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time, by Ellen Samuels Crip Theory, by Robert McRuer, coiner of the term (book) Contours of Ableism (technically Studies in Ableism) by Fiona Kumari Campbell (book) On Being A Cripple, Nancy Mairs

#cripkult

[coldalbion]

Below the thresholds of 'activity'

Thinking about the way outrage can be farmed - and other ways bodies can be adrenalised and stressed. Wondering for the nth time how our ideas of 'power' 'ability' and 'activism' are based on extrapolating internal felt-senses and affect onto the world.

Where the thresholds of 'doing' and 'movement' are, for such things to be recognised as that. And what the consequences of ignoring stuff happening below those thresholds are.

#disability #chronic illness #cripkult #neisvoid

[coldalbion]

I'm very disabled and, it's been a challenging process feeling out what the weight of what that label entails, while my disabilities interact and clash with explorations of belief and identity, stigma, as well as situations of social neglect and trauma. I haven't seen disability, cripkult, or even neurodivergency included very often in the development of a spiritual practice in particular - neither in perceptions of spiritwork, beyond mentionings of anxiety and depression afflicting deities. How did you feel all of this out? I have many lingering questions besides that but - curious

Honestly? Experience and a lot of non-occult theory. Specifically disability/crip theory and systems theory plus spirit contacts and what I was taught. I've been at this over 20 years now and it was only about 8-9 that I really began leaning into the crip angle and how it dovetails with certain ontological shifts. Like everything e;se in an ableist society, spirituality has a whole bunch of stumbling blocks which rather than trying to avoid, I found exploring them caused them to shapeshift into interesting pathways and their status as blocks was something that came from modern ableist assumptions and ontologies which forced particular ways of relating in the world. Embracing the full implications of those 'blocks' actually shifted my entire ontology and worldview.

#cripkult