91Ö±²¥

To cite this work: Lee, C. (2025). Crip Writing; Cripping Writing. Disability Dialogues. 91Ö±²¥: iHuman, University of 91Ö±²¥. 

Christina Lee (she/her) is a Research Associate for Knowledge Exchange for the Disability Matters project at the University of 91Ö±²¥. She is also an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London. She completed her PhD in English and Medical Humanities at King’s College London in 2023. Her research interests include narratives of illness and healing, care, disability studies, and the medical humanities. This piece of writing emerged as a part of an ongoing conversation between three Research Associates based at iHuman who meet regularly to discuss issues of access and ableism in academia.

The troubled time of writing in conditions of chronic illness and under conditions of institutionalized publication intensifies the need for a poetics, a generative worlding that also makes its own way into that worlding, a poetics that can be lived as much as it can be written. 

Studies on the gender publication gap suggest that women consistently publish less than men . This gender productivity gap became ever more apparent during lockdown in 2020 when women took up more domestic labour and child-caring (as well as home education) responsibilities at the expense of their own writing time. While this is largely true for many women academics in the global North, there is an implicit assumption of a heterosexual nuclear household with two working adults that easily falls back onto the simplistic binary opposition of the low-achieving interrupted women (mother) and high-achieving unconstrained man . Such an assumption not only erases the experiences of single men and women, homosexual and single-parent households, it also ignores the struggles of disabled academics and those with SEN children or dependent relatives. Indeed, the data for the disability publication gap in academia (as a category independent of the disability employment or attainment gap) is practically non-existent.

In their chapter in Crip Authorship, Mel Chen writes that chronic illness writing (writing about chronic illness? Writing while chronically ill?) is often experienced as disjointed ways of being because it doesn’t adhere to the normative fantasy of fluency that is expected from writing (polished academic writing). Writing in normative culture is imagined as a practice that demands stillness and intense concentration. Crip writing on the other hand, meaning both writing by disabled people who identify as crips (noun) and as writing that crips (verb), often involves fidgeting, frequent breaks, distractions, and moving around. Crip writing takes place on sofas, in beds, during time that is not occupied by demands of the disabled body. It happens in between bladder and bowel routines, medical appointments, medications, as long as the pain permits or until the carer leaves. Concentration comes at the cost of eye strain, exhaustion, headaches and immobilising pain that render the rest of day unusable. Disjointed bodies and disjointed ways of being produce disjointed writing, though in the process of editing, the enormous labour of maintaining a body capable of thinking and writing is over-written and edited out. Writing is a laborious process that seeks to conceal its own labour.

If, as Mel Chen and Alison Kafer suggest, ‘cripping authorship might mean cripping single authorship’, then perhaps we also need to crip the singularity of writing as a distinct practice apart from everyday life and the body . Ellen Samuels, in the same volume, proposes that autotheorical writing, writing that takes one’s embodied experiences as the material basis for theorising, is always already crip. Or rather, crip writing is already autotheoretical because it both draws on personal experiences of disability to theorise and uses theory to make sense of disability.

But does autotheory weave together theory and personal experience, or does it make theory out of personal experience, thus redefining what we mean by theory . . . or experience . . . or person? 

The blurring of life and writing in crip writing opens up an expanse for reimagining writing as a collaborative extra- and intertextual venture that includes those who participate in our lives as we write and those crip writers with whom we write in dialogue. This kind of collaborative writing resists authorship attribution and output metrics and invites us to rethink co-writing as more than joined up paragraphs in a shared document. Writing (crip writing) together is as much about learning and adjusting to the habits, needs, and limitations of other bodyminds, as it is the distillation and contestation of ideas and thoughts. 

Crip writing is a labour of love that revels in rests and revisions.

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