CHAPTER TWO
Part Two
I bring community into my bed
I cannot remember who I was listening to when I came to hear the two orientationally changing words crip time. Maybe it was Alice Wong? Maybe Alice Wong and Shayda Kafai talking to each other online? Was it Johanna Hedva? Their work did carry me for a whole month. I do remember that at the time I was very unwell and so I only have a blurred memory-feeling of the glow and the warmth and the support and the feeling of acknowledgement these two words gave me. Like a community-based diagnosis; a crip kinship given permission (Kafai, 2021). It was a luxurious bedbound received gift to be away from the socially pervasive "good" time, "good" life (Kafer, p.2, 2013).
Like many of the ideas that I was hearing about for the first time from the illness and disability community, hearing because I was too unwell to read, I put these two words as a note in my phone with a digital thumbtack. A virtually filed place that I could come back to when I was ready and could hold on to information again.
Crip, short for the pejorative term cripple, time relates to crip theory, an intersection of critical disability studies and queer studies and experiences of systemic social oppressions of race, class and gender (McRuer, 2006; Kafer, 2013). Crip theory and crip time are critical political reclamations of the bad body, the unruly body, as perceived through bodynormative, mindnormative, colonially imposed systems.
Crip theory can be explored through a doing of crip theory; critical exploration and practicing of illness and disability experiences. This is called cripping. When a person is cripping time, they are critically centering time relative to one's own bodymind and critically decentering, resisting medical model diagnostic and social deficiency narratives of ourselves and time, dissecting globally held notions of illness and disability bodies as monolith or fixed. We are advocating for the many everyday diverse and relational individual experiences of body, bodymind and mind illnesses and disabilities.
Alison Kafer in Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013) writes: "Crip time is flex time, not just expanded but exploded. It requires reimagining our notions of what can and should happen in time or recognising 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" (2013, p.27). Crip time is liberation... contributing diverse voices of truth-telling and showing about the heterogeneity of time experience. Retelling time becomes recognition, representation, celebration of difference, equity of engagement and access, accessibility.
I've been in solitude with... in bed with... laying with... thinking with... two people, Johanna Hedva and Alison Kafer, and one space with many people, Crip communities of Tumblr. Three access points that alter ideas of my own experiences of time and pace and voice and space and academia and research and bed. They are full of "[...] stories that not only admit limitation, frustration, even failure, but that recognise such failure as ground for theory itself" (Kafer, 2013, p.141).
I have thought a lot about including so many of them in this project because of how meaningful as a support library of lived experiences and information and catalyst this community was to opening me up to disability justice, disability theory and crip theory. But I want to keep their voices in the online space. They have not shared their experiences to be excavated as evidence in an academic environment. I do want to say that these voices are in the DNA of this work, in my thinking and in every move I have made that connects to agency. This community is how I find some of the voices and work that thread through my work. I meet them through links to essays and lectures and interview videos in my bed from others' beds and bedrooms.
And so I decentre.
I centre. Bed is in my middle. In my centre.
I bring community into my bed. I bring care into my bed. I bring crip time into my bed.
I am not forcing. I am staying in this paceless place. I am my own pace.
I am being slow. Slower. Slowest. Slowness. I am slow with my bodymind because I am scared. I am scared by the thick sick of the past few years. I am scared of my bodymind as a sick bodymind and how little I really actually know about it as a sick bodymind. How little I really actually know about it as a place of complex relationality.
In rehabilitation I am learning this... but before this makes me feel empowered I feel fear. Fear of the responsibility of being both the sick and the carer. Fear for how little energy I have for both of those roles. Fear because of the knowledge that being a carer for myself will often make me more sick.
My fear responds with slowness. Slowness helps me to cope with the mechanics of being a biological paradox. Slowness helps me feel safe. I wield it as a shield. Slow is a bed pace. When I am out of bed... I bring bed with me by being slow. I commit to a slow-moving, fluid, non-solving, responsive, respectful, caring pace.
Slow is my first anchoring of an everyday unseen. Slow... a need for slow... until now has been hidden. It was secret.
Private.
Silenced.
Repressed.
I have kept slow in my background underneath my life.
Acknowledging and embracing and staying with slow gives me a tilling of a safe ground. I feel like I am on the ground. On soil. On the earth. Like... my bed has lovely cool damp soil in it. And on it.
My bed is my favourite country.