crip time – meaning and definition. What is crip time
- A flexible standard for punctuality, as an accomodation for a person with a disability.
- The extra time needed to arrive or accomplish something, needed to maneuver your wheelchair, empty your leg-bag, etc.
Crip time emerges here as a wry reference to the disability-related events that always seem to start late or to the disabled people who never seem to arrive anywhere on time. As one slang dictionary puts it, “crip time” means both “a flexible standard for punctuality” and “the extra time needed to arrive or accomplish something.” This need for “extra” time might result from a slower gait, a dependency on attendants (who might themselves be running late), malfunctioning equipment (from wheelchairs to hearing aids), a bus driver who refuses to stop for a disabled passenger, or an ableist encounter with a stranger that throws one off schedule. Operating on crip time, then, might be not only about a slower speed of movement but also about ableist barriers over which one has little to no control; in either case, crip time involves an awareness that disabled people might need more time to accomplish something or to arrive somewhere.
Feminist, Queer, Crip
Exploring disability in time also includes speculation on temporalities of disability: how might disability affect one’s orientation to time? Irv Zola and Carol Gill were perhaps the first disability studies scholars to mention the temporal orientation of “crip time,” describing it as an essential component of disability culture and community. Tellingly, neither one of them defined the term but rather focused on its frequent appearance in disability communities; they wrote as if the concept would be already familiar to their readers. For Zola, discussing “the intricacies of crip time” was an important act of political reclamation for disabled people; Gill reports feeling pleasure and surprise at discovering “the common usage and understanding” of crip time among the diverse groups of disabled people she encountered. By locating crip time in disabled people’s in-group conversations, Gill and Zola center community-based temporalities, ones which they equate with disability culture and resistance.
Feminist, Queer, Crip
Recognizing some people’s need for “more” time is probably the manifestation of crip time most familiar to those of us in the academy. Disabled students (or at least those with approved paperwork) are permitted more time on exams, for example, or granted extended reading periods. But “crip time” means more than this kind of blanket extension; it is, rather, a reorientation to time. As Margaret Price explains, “[A]dhering to crip time…might mean recognizing that people will arrive at various intervals, and designing [events] accordingly; and it might also mean recognizing that [people] are processing language at various rates and adjusting the pace of a conversation. It is this notion of flexibility (not just ‘extra’ time)” that matters.9 Crip time is flex time not just expanded but exploded; it requires reimagining our notions of what can and should happen in time, or recognizing how expectations of “how long things take” are based on very particular minds and bodies. We can then understand the flexibility of crip time as being not only an accommodation to those who need “more” time but also, and perhaps especially, a challenge to normative and normalizing expectations of pace and scheduling. Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.
Feminist, Queer, Crip
When disabled folks talk about crip time, sometimes we just mean that we’re late all the time—maybe because we need more sleep than nondisabled people, maybe because the accessible gate in the train station was locked. But other times, when we talk about crip time, we mean something more beautiful and forgiving. We mean, as my friend Margaret Price explains, we live our lives with a “flexible approach to normative time frames” like work schedules, deadlines, or even just waking and sleeping. My friend Alison Kafer says that “rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.” I have embraced this beautiful notion for many years, living within the embrace of a crip time that lets me define my own “normal.”
Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time | Disability Studies Quarterly
Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings. Some of us contend with the impairments of old age while still young; some of us are treated like children no matter how old we get. The medical language of illness tries to reimpose the linear, speaking in terms of the chronic, the progressive, and the terminal, of relapses and stages. But we who occupy the bodies of crip time know that we are never linear, and we rage silently—or not so silently—at the calm straightforwardness of those who live in the sheltered space of normative time.
Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time | Disability Studies Quarterly
Crip time is grief time. It is a time of loss, and of the crushing undertow that accompanies loss. I lost my mother when I was twenty and she was fifty-two, to a cancer that she had lived with for fifteen years. But those numbers don’t say anything about the way the days slowed and swelled unbearably around her death, or how the years piled up afterward, always too much, never enough. When I fell ill just two years later, both doctors and relatives wanted to believe it was the result of my stored-up grief, my refusal to stop mourning my mother and move on with my life. Freud wrote in “Mourning and Melancholia” that “normal mourning” resolves on its own and needs no intervention. Only melancholia is a true illness, mourning without end, without resolution. The bodymind refuses to let go of the lost object, and deforms itself in the process.
Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time | Disability Studies Quarterly
In Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America, Dana Luciano traces how grief time emerged with modernity as a temporal and affective state juxtaposed to progressive, mechanical time. She writes that “grief was aligned with a sensibility that sought to provide time with a ‘human’ dimension, one that would be collective rather than productive, repetitive rather than linear, reflective rather than forward-moving.” This sounds very much like the notion of crip time that Alison and Margaret were talking about. But disability scholars like Alison, Margaret, and I tend to celebrate this idea of crip time, to relish its non-linear flexibility, to explore its power and its possibility. What would it mean for us also to do what queer scholar Heather Love calls “feeling backward”? For us to hold on to that celebration, that new way of being, and yet also allow ourselves to feel the pain of crip time, its melancholy, its brokenness?
For crip time is broken time. It requires us to break in our bodies and minds to new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and feeling and moving through the world. It forces us to take breaks, even when we don’t want to, even when we want to keep going, to move ahead. It insists that we listen to our bodyminds so closely, soattentively, in a culture that tells us to divide the two and push the body away from us while also pushing it beyond its limits. Crip time means listening to the broken languages of our bodies, translating them, honoring their words.
Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time | Disability Studies Quarterly
Crip time is sick time. If you work a 9-5, 40-hour-a-week job, what is defined as full-time work in the United States, then (if you’re lucky) you accumulate a certain number of sick days. There is always a strange arithmetic to this process: maybe for every eight hours you work, you accrue one sick hour. Or maybe one for every twenty work hours, or every forty. It’s never a one-to-one ratio: you have to work hard to earn the time to be sick. The assumption, of course, is that we will not be too sick too often.
Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time | Disability Studies Quarterly
Ellen Samuels explores this possibility of crip time as resistant orientation: “Crip time refuses to define itself in terms of either the ideal or the average: Schedules for work, parenting, and the social are thus shaped by individual needs, desires, and abilities, rather than by regimented economic and cultural imperatives.”
Feminist, Queer, Crip
‘Crip time for me is reflected in the ways that many normative milestones in my life were delayed or missed out altogether. The opportunity to ‘bend’ time meant that I was able to go to university later in life and graduate with a PhD. Crip time aligns with the flexibility associated with being self-employed and allows me to cultivate my work around my interests.’ (Team member, Cripping Breath)
Rethinking Crip time and Embodiment in Research – the polyphony
In Cripping Breath, rest, recuperation and recovery time considers how we are thinking about ethical pacing and ways of working together.
Rethinking Crip time and Embodiment in Research – the polyphony
Respiratory failure, and other forms of progressive respiratory impairment, bring about a strange relationship to time. They are quite often clocks that cannot be stopped and which clash with neoliberal-able timelines (see Goodley and Lawthom 2019).
Rethinking Crip time and Embodiment in Research – the polyphony
