After Crip, Crip Afters

What does it mean to be attached to crip? What might such attachments make possible, and what might they foreclose? In this hybrid essay—part scholarly article, part creative nonfiction—the author reflects on the concepts of crip and crip time. In an attempt to mark crip time through form, the essay proceeds across two sets of numbers: the list that comprises the body of the text and the list of endnotes that accompany it. Readers may choose to read the two sets concurrently, following each endnote as it appears, or read the two parts consecutively, so that the endnotes function as a kind of afterword. The essay critiques the reduction of crip time to slowness or extended time, noting how both are often sites of debilitation and violence. Centered on the question of what might come after crip and on the possibilities of crip afters, the essay challenges approaches to disability that presume it has a discrete before and after. How do logics of innocence and punishment undergird such models of disability? And how do such notions then determine who is seen as deserving of care?