Crip and Cripple are different words
Crip and Cripple are different words
So this might be opening up a CAN OF WORMS but as a physically disabled person I just wanna throw out a clarification that I personally think is useful to have explicitly articulated. These two words are DIFFERENT:
- Crip: a reference to crip theory and its friends. Refers to ALL disabilities (not just mobility/physical). Similar to queer, it’s a way of seeing the world: disability is socially constructed, fuck eugenics, fuck capitalism, fuck colonialism, being disabled means you HAVE to be creative to navigate a world not built for you, disabled people are the OG makers/hackers, and so on. “Crip” is used as a verb to apply to this way of seeing the world to analyse different facets of society (e.g. cripping the arts, crip technoscience). Seen in academic terms like cripistemology and eco-crip theory but also nonacademic contexts like krip-hop and crip time.
- Cripple: refers to physically disabled people ONLY. Seen in terms like cripplepunk, which is exclusive to physical disabilities. (Punks with other disabilities are encouraged to use other terms like dyspunktional.)
Yes, “crip” was coined as a shortening of “cripple”. Yes, they are both reclamations of the same slur. But I think it is productive for us to understand these two words as distinct, and to be mindful of the difference.
Crip at this point has a very well established usage that is pan-disability, while at the same time we physically disabled we need space to talk about cripple-specific stuff.
I hope this clarification is helpful! I know the two words sound similar and share a root but I think it’s a nuance that matters. <3
This is asked in total good faith, not trying to start discourse, but why is that? Why does crip get to be pan-disabled and not cripple? There’s also the use-case of “mental cripple” which (as far as i can tell) was a synonym for intellectual disability
Oh let’s be clear: if anybody here has started discourse it’s *me* LOL
I honestly don’t have a very satisfying answer for you. To me, the distinction is a pragmatic compromise: there are physically disabled people out there with very strongly held views that this is an exclusive term.
I’ve encountered multiple people on this site who have been hassled for using the term “crip” in the pan-disability sense and THAT upsets me. I’m a Disability Studies nerd, so to me it’s like seeing people go aggro on some trans people for calling themselves “queer”.
As a someone with a mobility disability I do understand that there should be space for us to talk about mobility-specific things. I personally don’t have a strong attachment to cripple as a mobility-specific term, but I have spent more than enough time on the cripplepunk tag to know I very much am not speaking for all mobility-disabled people on that front.
I suspect - but don’t actually know for sure - that cripplepunk emerged as a term more-or-less independently of the (largely) academic movement. Both build on the same effort to reclaim the slur, but the two groups took it in different directions. My impression is this is part of why cripplepunk stirs up such defenses: the cripplepunk community didn’t consent to, nor were party to, what the academicians were doing. I can see how that would be jarring and unwelcome.
Wrong sequence of events.
Cripplepunk was coined in 2014 here on Tumblr by user @crpl-pnk, with a definition of “physically disabled for the physically disabled”.
Crip theory is much older. The book that really popularized crip theory, Robert McRuer’s Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, came out in 2006.
But McRuer didn’t coin the term. He points to Carrie Sandahl, citing Sandahl’s 2003 article “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer?: Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance”
While Sandahl might have been the first to use crip as a verb in its current academic meaning, her article is also pretty clear that “crip” is already in use as an identity that includes sensory & mental disabilities.
But the term goes even further back in disability studies. Like this 1999 article by Lennard Davis entitled “Crips Strike Back: The Rise of Disability Studies”. He points to David Mitchell & Sharon Snyder reclaiming the term in their 1995 film Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back. Which also isn’t even the origin!
The oldest document I can find using “crip” as a reclaimed, subversion of ableism is a 1975 law article talking about “’‘Crips’ united”. 😯 So activists were probably using it way before then! 😯
What happened here was a term was reclaimed and built up by activists and scholars *decades* before a teenager on tumblr decided to coin a term. 🙃
So no. You have it backwards. Crip theorists were not intruding on cripplepunk’s space. Cripplepunk intruded on crip theory’s space.
I personally think it’s unfair to restrict “cripple” to just physically disabled people. I say this as a physically disabled person. Maybe cripple punk can remain an exception.
But the term cripple has a longhistory of being used to described all sorts of disabilities, and its reclamation as a pan-disability movement is probably older than the people who are now insisting “cripple” is physical-only.
For those who’re curious about the etymology in general, here’s the entry on “cripple” from Etymology Online:
cripple | Etymology of cripple by etymonline
Old English crypel, “one who creeps, halts, or limps, one partly or wholly deprived of the use of one or more limbs,” related to cryppan “to crook, bend,” from Proto-Germanic *krupilaz (source also of Old Frisian kreppel, Middle Dutch cropel, German krüppel, Old Norse kryppill)
I’m particularly fascinated by that relation “to crook, bend,” because a) as someone with spastic cerebral palsy, that’s a simple descriptor of what my body is like (showing that there have been people with bodies like mine in Society since before English was English, and b) it shares a parallel meaning with “Queer” as: “Not Straight.”
And also, if we’re going to be cripping our history, then (metaphorically) we’re going to have to crouch down and scramble through the thickets of human experience – we’re notgonna be just walking down the straight, and carpeted aisles of the palace of knowledge.
Okay, here’s another online article (2013, by Keith Armstrong) that gets into the weeds of the etymology of “Cripple,” specifically its Anglo-Saxon roots:
The Old English Origin of the Word 'Cripple’ (Revised)- Keith Armstrong
Two paragraphs, in particular, have stayed with me since I first read them, ~11 years ago:
Naturally, I first turned to the current Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and then to the Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Supplement (ASD) edited by T. Northcote Toller and published in 1921. Both dictionaries give their earliest recorded reference as: crypel […] The Gospel of St. Luke. Chapter V. v. 24. Both dictionaries are correct as far as it goes. Their source or authority comes from the Lindisfarne Gospels of the eighth-century.
(That’s in the 700s a.d. – 1,300 years ago – and that’s just the earliest surviving example of the word in print; people were speaking the word a lot longer than that)
And this paragraph:
In the English language of the eighteenth-century the term 'cripple’ was first recorded as a term of abuse in 1785. A sixpenny coin was referred to as a “cripple” because it was ‘commonly much bent and distorted’ .
So for well over a thousand years, the word “cripple” was simply used as an adjective for people, like “Short,” “Tall,” “Brown-eyed,” “Stout,” “Skinny,” etc.. And then, during the “Age of Enlightenment” (When the medical model of disability was starting to gain prominence), “Cripple” became a general, derogatory, term to say that people (or things!) were broken and useless.
I don’t think this is a coincidence.
Some of the first modern “Cripple” activism was specifically undertaken by mentally ill people protesting the conditions they were living in and the warehousing of the mentally ill. Specifically, the 1981 “cripple tribunal” in Dortmund, Germany, was a protest against, among other things, poor living conditions in long-term care facilities and psychiatric hospitals. The people who participated in these tribunals are not lost to time. Here’s a 2014 article written by one of them:
Watch: We All Face Barriers. Inequality Shouldn’t Be One of Them.
Saying “cripple” is “only physical disabilities” is - bluntly - a Tumblr fiction. It was made up by gatekeepers who have spent years trying to turn a solidarity movement into a club. This falsely restrictive definition of cripple has no basis in external reality & in order to claim that, one must directly ignore disability activism history, including foundational disability activists who are still living, still working. To claim “this word has a different meaning now” is to ignore that they’re still right here and to talk over their decades of work.
Cripple and crip are for all disabled people.