The Right Words: CripQueer Articulation
This post is a collection of excerpts from the working draft of an essay I’ve been building for my senior Capstone as an undergraduate student double majoring in Professional Writing & Rhetoric and Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. As this spring semester wraps up, I wanted to share the excerpts here — even though the entire piece is still very much in progress and will likely remain so for some time. Thanks for checking it out!
Everyone seems to have an opinion on my rhetorical capacity when I tell them I’m Autistic. I have been ensnared in a web of impossible proximity to my own disability. Supposedly, I am at once considered “not Autistic enough” to be awarded merit to my own words when I talk about Crip (radical disabled) Politics — although I have concluded that if I do not “seem” Autistic “enough’ to someone, it is because that person does not know very much about Autism — but I am also considered to be just a little too much of an oddball to ever be a reliable source when I talk about an average experience of personhood…
I refer throughout this essay to “articulation” as a stand-in for varying forms of expression, both interpersonally communicative and non. In my own life, I articulate verbally through spoken and written language as well as through neurodivergent emotive embodiment: Stimming motions like flapping my hands and rocking my torso in circles when I sit at my computer, in addition to many forms of bodily posturing (or as some call it, “nonverbal communication”) that congeal into messages that people around me might or might not interpret accurately.
In 2007, the late Autistic activist Mel Baggs uploaded a YouTube video titled In My Language which later went viral. The video has had a profound effect on me and many others in my community; I’ve watched it dozens of times since I first discovered it as a young teenager. If you haven’t seen In My Language, I’d recommend watching it, and then watching it again. The video is structured into two parts: In the first couple of minutes, Mel appears on the screen engaging in various types of stimming with different inanimate objects in hir home. Mel wordlessly wiggles hir fingers under the stream of water running from a sink faucet, rubs hir face against the smooth pages of an open book, rocks hir body back and forth — all while humming and singing.
The second part of the video is when the neurotypicals start to pay fresh attention. Spoken by a text-to-speech computer program, Mel’s words offer what sie referred to as a “translation” of the earlier video footage. Mel wrote:
“The previous part of this video was in my native language. Many people have assumed that when I talk about this being my language, that means that each part of the video must have a particular symbolic message within it designed for the human mind to interpret. But my language is not about designing words or even visual symbols for people to interpret. It is about being in a constant conversation with every aspect of my environment. Reacting physically to all parts of my surroundings.”
For a lot of hir life, Mel used alternative and augmentative communication (AAC) to communicate with other people, and in the video essay In My Language, sie used it to directly call the viewer’s attention to who is tasked with bridging any gap in understanding between people who articulate in different styles:
“The thinking of people like me is only taken seriously if we learn your language,” Mel continues. “It is only when I type something in your language that you refer to me as having communication.”
It is also impossible for me to think thoroughly about the idea of expression or articulation without remembering a quote by feminist writer and activist Audre Lorde, who once wrote the following sentence found in her book Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches: “I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.”
With Lorde’s words and Baggs’ video essay in mind, I am reaching out for the working answers to many questions: Knowing that flawless communication between two or more persons is a kind of ideal form of expression that we all instinctively (and perhaps desperately) aspire to in order to be truly known by others…what does it mean to stumble, stutter, say the “wrong” thing, and endlessly try to get it “right” so that we can live lives of rich connection to other people? What is it like to grasp ahold of queer, Disabled feelings (especially as an amorphously gendered, nonbinary, Autistic person who does not primarily think via speech, such as myself) for which few words feel adequate to begin with? And how do I reckon with what Lorde has damningly gestured to: This unfortunate plucking of a particular Thing and the eclipsing of All the Rest?
In response, I am turning over and over in my mind an idea I’m calling CripQueer Articulation. This term borrows from Crip Theory and from Queer Theory, which have their own overlapping ideas and intertwining histories. In these fields, the words “Crip” and “Queer” can function as nouns, adjectives, and — most interestingly to me — as verbs. To queer something is to challenge the tradition of cisgender heteronormativity. We can queer countless things: from the nuclear family, masculinity and femininity, to abstract concepts like adolescence, (etc.) by introducing the critical analysis and personal experiences of queerness in response to and criticism of cis-hetero norms. Relatedly, to “Crip” something is to apply to it a radical Disabled or disability justice perspective. We can crip what it means to be in community with others, or time, or education, or beauty. Cripping, like queering, is as much a survival strategy as it is a creative art form.
I propose that to CripQueer something, then, would be to apply not only a perspective layered in “both” disability and queerness, but something that is exponentially greater than the sum of them combined. After all, I cannot cut away my transness from my Autism, and I also cannot divorce my Autism from my queerness. Their combination cannot be simplified to a “1 +1 = 2” equation, but rather a kind of mixture that crafts something new from its own complexity.
CripQueer Articulation permits a fluidity in understanding one another, especially as people who might express ourselves or communicate atypically. CripQueer Articulation values embodied authenticity over the performance of a perfect personhood. In this world, CripQueer Articulation is a response to frustrations born out of searching endlessly for the right words. It is at once both an answer to my list of questions and an invitation to create new ones.
