Introduction to Imagined Futures PDF

# Introduction Imagined Futures I dream of more inclusive spaces. -Kavitha Koshy, “Feels Like Carving Bone” I HAVE NEVER CONSULTED a seer or psychic; I have never asked a fortune-teller for her crystal ball. No one has searched my tea leaves for answers or my stars for omens, and my palms remain...

# Introduction Imagined Futures I dream of more inclusive spaces. -Kavitha Koshy, “Feels Like Carving Bone” I HAVE NEVER CONSULTED a seer or psychic; I have never asked a fortune-teller for her crystal ball. No one has searched my tea leaves for answers or my stars for omens, and my palms remain unread. But people have been telling my future for years. Of fortune cookies and tarot cards they have no need: my wheelchair, burn scars, and gnarled hands apparently tell them all they need to know. My future is written on my body. In 1995, six months after the fire, my doctor suggested that my thoughts of graduate school were premature, if not misguided. He felt that I would need to spend the next three or four years living at home, under my parents’ care, and only then would it be appropriate to think about starting school. His tone made it clear, however, that he thought graduate school would remain out of reach; it was simply not in my future. What my future did hold, according to my rehabilitation psychologist and my recreation therapist, was long-term psychological therapy. My friends were likely to abandon me, alcoholism and drug addiction loomed on my horizon, and I needed to prepare myself for the futures of pain and isolation brought on by disability. Fellow rehab patients, most of whom were elderly people recovering from strokes or broken hips, saw equally bleak horizons before me. One stopped me in the hallway to recommend suicide, explaining that life in a wheelchair was not a life worth living (his son, he noted offhandedly, knew to “let him go” if he was eventually unable to walk). My future prospects did not improve much after leaving the rehabilitation facility, at least not according to strangers I encountered, and continue to encounter, out in the world. A common response is for people to assume they know my needs better than I do, going so far as to question my judgment when I refuse their offers of help. They can apparently see into my immediate future, forecasting an inability to perform specific tasks and predicting the accidents and additional injuries that will result. Or, taking a longer view, they imagine a future that is both banal and pathetic: rather than involving dramatic falls from my wheelchair, their visions assume a future of relentless pain, isolation, and bitterness, a representation that leads them to bless me, pity me, or refuse to see me altogether. Although I may believe I am leading an engaging and satisfying life, they can see clearly the grim future that awaits me: with no hope of a cure in sight, my future cannot be anything but bleak. Not even the ivory tower of academia protected me from these dismal projections of my future: once I made it to graduate school, I had a professor reject a paper proposal about cultural approaches to disability; she cast the topic as inappropriate because insufficiently academic. As I prepared to leave her office, she patted me on the arm and urged me to "heal", suggesting that my desire to study disability resulted not from intellectual curiosity but from a displaced need for therapy and recovery. My future, she felt, should be spent not researching disability but overcoming it. These grim imagined futures, these suggestions that a better life would of necessity require the absence of impairment, have not gone unchallenged. My friends, family, and colleagues have consistently conjured other futures for me, refusing to accept ableist suggestions that disability is a fate worse than death or that disability prohibits a full life. Those who have been most vocal in imagining my future as ripe with opportunities have been other disabled people, who are themselves resisting negative interpretations of their futures. They tell stories of lives lived fully, and my future, according to them, involves not isolation and pathos but community and possibility: I could write books, teach, travel, love and be loved; I might raise children or become a community organizer or make art; I could engage in activist struggles for the rights of disabled people or get involved in other movements for social justice. At first glance, these contradictory imagined futures have nothing in common: the first casts disability as pitiable misfortune, a tragedy that effectively prevents one from leading a good life, while the second refuses such inevitability, positioning able-ism-not disability-as the obstacle to a good life. What these two representations of the future share, however, is a strong link to the present. How one understands disability in the present determines how one imagines disability in the future; one's assumptions about the experience of disability create one's conception of a better future. If disability is conceptualized as a terrible unending tragedy, then any future that includes disability can only be a future to avoid. A better future, in other words, is one that excludes disability and disabled bodies; indeed, it is the very absence of disability that signals this better future. The presence of disability, then, signals something else: a future that bears too many traces of the ills of the present to be desirable. In this framework, a future with disability is a future no one wants, and the figure of the disabled person, especially the disabled fetus or child, becomes the symbol of this undesired future. As James Watson-a geneticist involved in the discovery of DNA and the development of the Human Genome Project-puts it, "We already accept that most couples don't want a Down child. You would have to be crazy to say you wanted one, because that child has no future. Although Watson is infamous for making claims about who should and shouldn't inhabit the world, he's not alone in expressing this kind of sentiment.2 Watson's version simply makes clear some of the assumptions underlying this discourse, and they are assumptions that cut to the heart of this project. The first is that disability is seen as the sign of no future, or at least of no good future. The second, and related, assumption is that we all agree; not only do we accept that couples don't want a child with Down syndrome, we know that anyone who feels otherwise is "crazy." To want a disabled child, to desire or even to accept disability in this way, is to be disordered, unbalanced, sick. "We" all know this, and there is no room for "you" to think differently. It is this presumption of agreement, this belief that we all desire the same futures, that I take up in this book. I am particularly interested in uncovering the ways the disabled body is put to use in these future visions, attending to both metaphorical and “corporeal” presence and absence. I argue that disability is disavowed in these futures in two ways: first, the value of a future that includes disabled people goes unrecognized, while the value of a disability-free future is seen as self-evident; and second, the political nature of disability, namely its position as a category to be contested and debated, goes unacknowledged. The second failure of recognition makes possible the first; casting disability as monolithic fact of the body, as beyond the realm of the political and therefore beyond the realm of debate or dissent, makes it impossible to imagine disability and disability futures differently. Challenging the rhetoric of naturalness and inevitability that underlies these discussions, I argue that decisions about the future of disability and disabled people are political decisions and should be recognized and treated as such. Rather than assume that a "good" future naturally and obviously depends upon the eradication of disability, we must recognize this perspective as colored by histories of ableism and disability oppression. Thus, in tracing these two failures of recognition-the disavowal of disability from "our" futures-I imagine futures otherwise, arguing for a cripped politics of access and engagement based on the work of disability activists and theorists. What Feminist, Queer, Crip offers is a politics of crip futurity, an insistence on thinking these imagined futures-and hence, these lived presents-differently. Throughout the course of the book, I hold on to an idea of politics as a framework for thinking through how to get "elsewhere", to other ways of being that might be more just and sustainable. In imagining more accessible futures, I am yearning for an elsewhere-and, perhaps, an "elsewhen"-in which disability is understood otherwise: as political, as valuable, as integral. Before going any further, I admit to treading tricky ground here. “A future with disability is a future no one wants”: while I find it absolutely essential to dismantle the purported self-evidence of that claim, I can't deny that there is truth to it. Not only is there abstract truth to it, there’s personal, embodied truth: it is a sentiment I myself hold. As much joy as I find in communities of disabled people, and as much as I value my experiences as a disabled person, I am not interested in becoming more disabled than I already am. I realize that position is itself marked by an ableist failure of imagination, but I can't deny holding it. Nor am I opposed to prenatal care and public health initiatives aimed at preventing illness and impairment, and futures in which the majority of people continue to lack access to such basic needs are not futures I want.⁵ But there is a difference between denying necessary health care, condoning dangerous working conditions, or ignoring public health concerns (thereby causing illness and impairment) and recognizing illness and disability as part of what makes us human. While definitively mapping that difference is beyond the scope of this book-and, I would argue, neither fully possible nor desirable-sketching out some of the potential differences is exactly the work we need to be doing. ## Defining Disability: A Political/Relational Model The meaning of disability, like the meaning of illness, is presumed to be self-evident; we all know it when we see it. But the meanings of illness and disability are not nearly so fixed or monolithic; multiple understandings of disability exist. Like other disability studies scholars, I am critical of the medical model of disability, but I am equally wary of a complete rejection of medical intervention. In the pages that follow, I offer a hybrid political/relational model of disability, one that builds on social and minority model frameworks but reads them through feminist and queer critiques of identity. My concern with imagining disability futures differently frames my overview of each model; thinking about the kinds of futures imagined or implicit in each definition provides a useful lens for examining the assumptions and implications of these frameworks. Despite the rise of disability studies in the United States, and decades of disability rights activism, disability continues to be seen primarily as a personal problem afflicting individual people, a problem best solved through strength of character and resolve. This individual model of disability is embodied in the disability simulation exercises that are a favored activity during “disability awareness” and diversity events on college campuses (including, in years past, my own). For these kinds of events, students are asked to spend a few hours using a wheelchair or wearing a blindfold so that they can “understand” what it means to be blind or mobility-impaired. Not only do these kinds of exercises focus on the alleged failures and hardships of disabled bodies (an inability to see, an inability to walk), they also present disability as a knowable fact of the body. There is no accounting for how a disabled person's response to impairment shifts over time or by context, or how the nature of one's impairment changes, or, especially, how one’s experience of disability is affected by one’s culture and environment. Wearing a blindfold to “experience blindness” is going to do little to teach someone about ableism, for example, and suggests that the only thing there is to learn about blindness is what it feels like to move around in the dark. The meaning of blindness, in other words, is completely encapsulated in the experience of wearing a blindfold; there is simply nothing else to discuss. Although these kinds of exercises are intended to reduce fears and misperceptions about disabled people, the voices and experiences of disabled people are absent. Absent also are discussions about disability rights and social justice; disability is depoliticized, presented more as nature than culture. As Tobin Siebers notes, these are exercises in “personal imagination” rather than “cultural imagination”, and a limited imagination at that. This individual model of disability is very closely aligned with what is commonly termed the medical model of disability; both form the framework for dominant understandings of disability and disabled people. The medical model of disability frames atypical bodies and minds as deviant, pathological, and defective, best understood and addressed in medical terms. In this framework, the proper approach to disability is to "treat" the condition and the person with the condition rather than “treating” the social processes and policies that constrict disabled people’s lives. Although this framing of disability is called the “medical” model, it's important to note that its use isn't limited to doctors and other service providers; what characterizes the medical model isn't the position of the person (or institution) using it, but the positioning of disability as exclusively medical problem and, especially, the conceptualization of such positioning as both objective fact and common sense.10 Indeed, some of the most passionate defenses of the medical model of disability occur outside the hospital or clinic. Literary critic Denis Dutton exemplifies this pattern of thought, condemning a writing manual for its attempt to describe disability in social rather than medical terms. Dutton refutes the need for such attention to disability language, countering that “it is the medical condition that is the problem, not the words that describe it." Because disability is a purely medical problem, Dutton finds no need to engage with disability as a category of analysis; concepts such as able-bodiedness, healthiness, and the normal body, or conditions such as "blindness, wheelchairs, polio, and cretinism” do not require or merit critical attention for they are merely facts of life.12 For Dutton, disability is a self-evident, unchanging, and purely medical phenomenon, and the meanings, histories, and implications of "cretinism,” for example, are not available for debate or dissent. Thus, in both the individual and medical models, disability is cast as a problematic characteristic inherent in particular bodies and minds. Solving the problem of disability, then, means correcting, normalizing, or eliminating the pathological individual, rendering a medical approach to disability the only appropriate approach. The future of disability is understood more in terms of medical research, individual treatments, and familial assistance than increased social supports or widespread social change. Disability studies scholars and disability activists, however, refute the premises of the medical/individual framework. Rather than casting disability as a natural, self-evident sign of pathology, we recast disability in social terms. The category of “disabled” can only be understood in relation to "able-bodied" or "able-minded", a binary in which each term forms the borders of the other. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson explains, this hierarchical division of bodies and minds is then used to “legitimat[e] an unequal distribution of resources, status, and power within a biased social and architectural environment.”13 In this construction, disability is seen less as an objective fact of the body or mind and more as a product of social relations. Thus, the definitional shift away from the medical/individual model makes room for new understandings of how best to solve the "problem" of disability. In the alternative perspective, which I call the political/relational model, the problem of disability no longer resides in the minds or bodies of individuals but in built environments and social patterns that exclude or stigmatize particular kinds of bodies, minds, and ways of being. For example, under the medical/individual model, wheelchair users suffer from impairments that restrict their mobility. These impairments are best addressed through medical interventions and cures; failing that, individuals must make the best of a bad situation, relying on friends and family members to negotiate inaccessible spaces for them. Under a political/relational model of disability, however, the problem of disability is located in inaccessible buildings, discriminatory attitudes, and ideological systems that attribute normalcy and deviance to particular minds and bodies. The problem of disability is solved not through medical intervention or surgical normalization but through social change and political transformation. This is not to say that medical intervention has no place in my political/relational model. By my reckoning, the political/relational model neither opposes nor valorizes medical intervention; rather than simply take such intervention for granted, it recognizes instead that medical representations, diagnoses, and treatments of bodily variation are imbued with ideological biases about what constitutes normalcy and deviance. In so doing, it recognizes the possibility of simultaneously desiring to be cured of chronic pain and to be identified and allied with disabled people.14 I want to make room for people to acknowledge-even mourn-a change in form or function while also acknowledging that such changes cannot be understood apart from the context in which they occur. In juxtaposing a medical model with a political one, I am not suggesting that the medical model is not itself political. On the contrary, I am arguing for increased recognition of the political nature of a medical framing of disability. As Jim Swan argues, recognizing that a medical model is political allows for important questions about health care and social justice: “How good is the care? Who has access to it? For how long? Do they have choices? Who pays for it?”15 Swan's questions remind us that medical framings of disability are embedded in economic realities and relations, and the current furor over health care reform underscores the political nature of these questions. Moreover, as scholars of feminist science studies, reproductive justice, and public health continue to make clear, medical beliefs and practices are not immune to or separate from cultural practices and ideologies. Thus, in offering a political/relational model of disability, I am arguing not so much for a rejection of medical approaches to disability as for a renewed interrogation of them. Insisting upon the political dimension of disability includes thinking through the assumptions of medical/individual models, seeing the whole terrain of “disability” as up for debate.16 My framing of disability as political/relational is intended as a friendly departure from the more common social model of disability. Like Margrit Shildrick and Janet Price, my intent is to "demand an unsettling of its certainties, of the fixed identities of which it is bound up” and to pluralize the ways we understand bodily instability.17 Although both the social and political/relational models share a critique of the medical model, the social model often relies on a distinction between impairment and disability that I don't find useful. In that framework, impairment refers to any physical or mental limitation, while disability signals the social exclusions based on, and social meanings attributed to, that impairment.18 People with impairments are disabled by their environments; or, to put it differently, impairments aren't disabling, social and architectural barriers are. Although I agree that we need to attend to the social, asserting a sharp divide between impairment and disability fails to recognize that both impairment and disability are social; simply trying to determine what constitutes impairment makes clear that impairment doesn't exist apart from social meanings and understandings. Susan Wendell illustrates this problem when she queries how far one must be able to walk to be considered able-bodied; the answer to that question, she explains, has much to do with the economic and geographic context in which it is addressed. What we understand as impairing conditions-socially, physically, mentally, or otherwise-shifts across time and place, and presenting impairment as purely physical obscures the effects of such shifts. As feminist theorists have long noted, there is no mention of "the" body that is not a further articulation of a very particular body.20 At the same time, the social model with its impairment/disability distinction erases the lived realities of impairment; in its well-intentioned focus on the disabling effects of society, it overlooks the often-disabling effects of our bodies. People with chronic illness, pain, and fatigue have been among the most critical of this aspect of the social model, rightly noting that social and structural changes will do little to make one’s joints stop aching or to alleviate back pain. Nor will changes in architecture and attitude heal diabetes or cancer or fatigue. Focusing exclusively on disabling barriers, as a strict social model seems to do, renders pain and fatigue irrelevant to the project of disability politics.21 As a result, the social model can marginalize those disabled people who are interested in medical interventions or cures. In a complete reversal of the individual/medical model, which imagines individual cure as the desired future for disability, a strict social model completely casts cure out of our imagined futures; cure becomes the future no self-respecting disability activist or scholar wants. In other words, because we are so often confronted with the medical framing of disability as unending burden, or as a permanent drag on one’s quality of life, disability rights activists and scholars tend to deny our own feelings of pain or depression; admitting to struggling with our impairments or to wanting a cure for them is seen as accepting the very framings we are fighting against, giving fodder to the enemy, so to speak. But by positioning ourselves only in opposition to the futures imagined through the medical model, and shutting down communication and critique around vital issues, we limit the discourses at our disposal. As Liz Crow warns, in refusing to acknowledge pain, fatigue, or depression, "our collective ability to conceive of, and achieve, a world which does not disable is diminished.”22 Finally, drawing a hard line between impairment and disability, and having this distinction serve as the foundation for theorizing disability, makes it difficult to explore the ways in which notions of disability and able-bodiedness affect everyone, not just people with impairments.23 Anxiety about aging, for example, can be seen as a symptom of compulsory able-bodiedness/able-mindedness, as can attempts to “treat” children who are slightly shorter than average with growth hormones; in neither case are the people involved necessarily disabled, but they are certainly affected by cultural ideals of normalcy and ideal form and function. Or, to take this idea in a different direction, friends and family members of disabled people are often affected by ableist attitudes and barriers, even if they are not themselves disabled. Their social lives may shrink, for example, because others are uncomfortable or embarrassed by their stories of illness and adaptation, or friends may feel guilty inviting them to inaccessible houses; difficulty accessing reliable and affordable attendant care or finding appropriate housing certainly affects entire families, not only the disabled person herself or himself. Moreover, not only does disability exist in relation to able-bodiedness/able-mindedness, such that disabled and abled form a constitutive binary, but also, to move to a different register of analysis, disability is experienced in and through relationships; it does not occur in isolation. My choice of a relational model of disability is intended to speak to this reality. Similarly, my articulation of a political framing of disability is a direct refusal of the widespread depoliticization of disability. Dutton's medicalized description of disability assumes that "cretinism” is a natural category, derived purely from objective medical study and irrelevant to discussions of politics or prejudice; proclaiming the naturalness of disability, he goes on to ridicule attempts to discuss disability in terms of language or identification.24 By asserting that we cannot (or should not) resignify disability identities and categories, refusing to recognize the impact disability rhetoric and terminology might have on understandings of disability (and thus on the lives of disabled people), and insisting that medical approaches to disability are completely objective and devoid of prejudice or cultural bias, Dutton completely removes disability from the realm of the political. In doing so, he forecloses on the possibility of understanding disability differently; divorcing disability and disabled people from understandings of the political prohibits incorporating disability into programs of social change and transformation or, in other words, into visions of a better future. Once disability has been placed solely in the medical framework, and both disability and the medical world are portrayed as apolitical, then disability has no place in radical politics or social movements-except as a problem to be eradicated. A political/relational model of disability, on the other hand, makes room for more activist responses, seeing "disability" as a potential site for collective reimagining. Under this kind of framework, "disability awareness" simulations can be reframed to focus less on the individual experience of disability-or imagined experience of disability-and more on the political experience of disablement. For example, rather than placing nondisabled students in wheelchairs, the Santa Barbara-based organization People in Search of Safe and Accessible Restrooms (PISSAR) places them in bathrooms, armed with measuring tapes and clipboards, to track the failures and omissions of the built environment. As my fellow restroom revolutionaries explain in our manifesto, "This switch in focus from the inability of the body to the inaccessibility of the space makes room for activism and change in ways that 'awareness exercises' may not.25 In creating and disseminating a "restroom checklist," PISSAR imagines a future of disability activism, one with disability rights activists demanding accessible spaces; contrast that approach with the simulation exercises, in which “awareness” is the future goal, rather than structural or systemic change. In reading disability futures and imagined disability through a political/relational model, I situate disability squarely within the realm of the political. My goal is to contextualize, historically and politically, the meanings typically attributed to disability, thereby positioning “disability” as a set of practices and associations that can be critiqued, contested, and transformed. Integral to this project is an awareness that ableist discourses circulate widely, and not only in sites marked explicitly as about disability; thus, thinking about disability as political necessitates exploring everything from reproductive practices to environmental philosophy, from bathroom activism to cyberculture. I am influenced here by Chantal Mouffe, who argues that "the political cannot be restricted to a certain type of institution, or envisaged as constituting a specific sphere or level of society. It must be conceived as a dimension that is inherent to every human society and that determines our very ontological condition."26 To say that something is “political” in this sense means that it is implicated in relations of power and that those relations, their assumptions, and their effects are contested and contestable, open to dissent and debate. In other words, I’m concerned here with what Jodi Dean calls "the how of politics, the ways concepts and issues come to be political common sense and the processes through which locations and populations are rendered as in need of intervention, regulation, or quarantine.”27 This focus on the how of politics parallels the first set of questions that motivate my project: Is disability political? How is it political? How is the category of disability used to justify the classification, supervision, segregation, and oppression of certain people, bodies, and practices? Addressing these questions requires a recognition of the central role that ideas about disability and ability play in contemporary culture, particularly in imagined and projected futures. After stressing the importance of the "how" of politics, Dean insists on the need "to take depoliticization seriously, to address the means through which spaces, issues, identities, and events are taken out of political circulation or are blocked from the agenda-or are presumed to have already been solved."28 Attending to the ways in which disability is political leads to my second set of motivating questions: How has disability been depoliticized, removed from the realm of the political? Which definitions of and assumptions about disability facilitate this removal? What are the effects of such depoliticization? I’m not so much arguing for or positing a chronology here- “disability used to be political and now it’s not"-as highlighting the need for disability studies to attend to the specific ways in which ableist understandings of disability are taken as common sense.29 Such attention is vital in a context in which, as Susan Schweik notes, disability-based discrimination and prejudice are often condemned not as markers of structural inequality but of cruelty or insensitivity; this kind of rhetoric "sidesteps the reality of social injustice, reducing it to a question of compassion and charitable feelings."30 These questions of politicization and of depoliticization-lie at the root of my interest in political frameworks of the future: Do the futures I examine in these chapters assume and perpetuate the depoliticization of disability, and if so, how? What is it about disability that makes it a defining element of our imagined futures, such that a “good” future is one without disability, while a “bad” future is overrun by it? Why is disability in the present constantly deferred, such that disability often enters critical discourse only as the marker of what must be eliminated in our futures or what was unquestioningly eliminated in our pasts? And, most importantly, why are these characterizations taken for granted, recognized as neither partial nor political? ## Identifying Disability: Bodies, Identities, Politics Seeing disability as political, and therefore contested and contestable, entails departing from the social model’s assumption that “disabled” and “nondisabled” are discrete, self-evident categories, choosing instead to explore the creation of such categories and the moments in which they fail to hold. Recognizing such moments of excess or failure is key to imagining disability, and disability futures, differently. Thus I understand the very meanings of "disability”, “impairment”, and “disabled” as contested terrain.³¹ Disability can then be understood, in Jasbir Puar’s framework, as an assemblage, where “[c]ategories-race, gender, sexuality [and, I would add, disability]-are considered as events, actions, and encounters between bodies, rather than as simply entities and attributes of subjects."32 Thus, a political/relational framework recognizes the difficulty in determining who is included in the term “disabled”, refusing any assumption that it refers to a discrete group of particular people with certain similar essential qualities. On the contrary, the political/relational model of disability sees disability as a site of questions rather than firm definitions: Can it encompass all kinds of impairments-cognitive, psychiatric, sensory, and physical? Do people with chronic illnesses fit under the rubric of disability? Is someone who had cancer years ago but is now in remission disabled? What about people with some forms of multiple sclerosis (MS) who experience different temporary impairments-from vision loss to mobility difficulties-during each recurrence of the disease, but are without functional limitations once the MS moves back into remission? What about people with large birthmarks or other visible differences that have no bearing on their physical capabilities, but that often prompt discriminatory treatment? Government and nongovernmental organizations alike frequently issue guidelines for determining who is disabled and thus eligible for certain programs and protections. Such groups, ranging from the World Health Organization to the US Social Security Administration, would not have to be so precise in defining “disability” if such definitions were without controversy; the very fact that so much energy is funneled into defining “disability” and impairment suggests the fundamental instability of the terms. Moreover, the desire for fixed definitions cannot be divorced from the economic effects of such fixing. The Social Security Administration uses its definitions of disability to determine who qualifies for benefits and at what level; the US Supreme Court has continued to revisit the Americans with Disabilities Act in order to determine who merits protection under its provisions and who does not. Both entities rule as if there were bright lines between disabled and non-, even though the need for such rulings suggests otherwise. But there is clearly a notion that there are people whose claims do not rise to the level of disability, and who therefore are undeserving of such protections. In contrast, the disability theory and politics that I develop in these pages do not rely on a fixed definition of "disability" and "disabled person" but recognize the parameters of both terms as always open to debate. I am concerned here with disability not as a category inherent in certain minds and bodies but as what historian Joan W. Scott calls a “collective affinity.” Drawing on the cyborg theory of Donna Haraway, Scott describes collective affinities as “play[ing] on identifications that have been attributed to individuals by their societies, and that have served to exclude them or subordinate them."33 Collective affinities in terms of disability could encompass everyone from people with learning disabilities to those with chronic illness, from people with mobility impairments to those with HIV/AIDS, from people with sensory impairments to those with mental illness. People within each of these categories can all be discussed in terms of disability politics, not because of any essential similarities among them, but because all have been labeled as disabled or sick and have faced discrimination as a result. Simi Linton illustrates this fundamental diversity of the disability community when she writes: We are everywhere these days, wheeling and loping down the street, tapping our canes, sucking on our breathing tubes, following our guide dogs, puffing and sipping on the mouth sticks that propel our motorized chairs. We may drool, hear voices, speak in staccato syllables, wear catheters to collect our urine, or live with a compromised immune system. We are all bound together, not by this list of our collective symptoms but by the social and political circumstances that have forged us as a group.34 Linton’s formulation strikes me as a fitting place to begin this exploration of accessible futures, primarily because it reads more as promise than fact. Both disability studies and disability movements have been slow to recognize potential linkages among people who hear voices, people with compromised immune systems, and people using wheelchairs. Although there have been notable exceptions, disability studies, especially in the humanities, has focused little attention on cognitive disabilities, focusing more often on visible physical impairments and sensory impairments.35 Chronic illness has become more common in these discussions, but only in particular forms; discussion of chronic fatigue syndrome and mental disability has increased thanks to the work of scholars such as Susan Wendell, Ellen Samuels, and Margaret Price, but diabetes, asthma, and lupus remain largely unexplored by disability studies scholars.36 (This oversight is all the more troubling given the fact that diabetes occurs disproportionately among "members of racial and ethnic minority groups in the United States," and asthma is a common side-effect of living in heavily polluted neighborhoods, which, unsurprisingly, are more likely to be populated by poor people.)37 I repeat Linton’s formulation then in an effort to call it into being, to invoke it as a possibility for thinking disability differently. I want to hold on to the possibility of a disability studies and a disability movement that does take all of these locations seriously, that feels accountable to these bodies and identities and locations. One of the arguments I will make in this book, however, is that part of the work of imagining this kind of expansive disability movement is to simultaneously engage in a critical reading of these very identities, locations, and bodies. We must trace the ways in which we have been forged as a group, to use Linton’s terminology, but also trace the ways in which those forgings have been incomplete, or contested, or refused. We need to recognize that these forgings have always already been inflected by histories of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation; failing to attend to such relations will ensure that disability studies remains, as Chris Bell puts it, “white disability studies.”38 We must, in other words, think through the assumptions and erasures of "disabled" and "disability," reckoning with the ways in which such words have been used and to what effect. Doing so might mean imagining a “we” that includes folks who identify as or with disabled people but don’t themselves "have" a disability. Scholars of chronic illness have started this work, arguing for the necessity of including within disability communities those who lack a “proper” (read: medically acceptable, doctor-provided, and insurer-approved) diagnosis for their symptoms. Doing so not only provides such people with the social supports they need (everything from access to social services to recognition from friends and family), it also presents disability less as diagnostic category and more as collective affinity; moving away from a medical/individual model of disability means that disability identification can’t be solely linked to diagnosis. Less familiar, and potentially more complicated, would be people identifying with disability and lacking not only a diagnosis but any “symptoms” of impairment. How might we understand the forging of a group that includes, in Carrie Sandahl’s and Robert McRuer's framings, a “nondisabled claim to be crip?”39 Hearing Children of Deaf Adults, or CODAs, would be a clear example of this kind of identification, as CODAs consider themselves part of Deaf communities, and some even claim Deaf identity, but are not themselves deaf or hard-of-hearing.40 But does claiming crip require this kind of blood or kinship tie? What might it mean for lovers or friends to claim crip, or to understand themselves as “culturally disabled”? Or for theorists and activists committed to rethinking disability and able-bodiedness/able-mindedness to make such claims? Can claiming crip be a method of imagining multiple futures, positioning "crip" as a desired and desirable location regardless of one’s own embodiment or mental/psychological processes? As McRuer notes, these practices run the risk of appropriation, but they also offer a vital refusal of simplistic binaries like disabled/nondisabled and sick/healthy.41 Claiming crip, then, can be a way of acknowledging that we all have bodies and minds with shifting abilities, and wrestling with the political meanings and histories of such shifts. Thus, to circle back to the notion of “we” as more promise than fact: thinking through what nondisabled claims to crip might entail will require exploring whether such claims might be more available, or more imaginable, to some people than others (and on what basis). Attention to these kinds of questions-the histories and effects of disability claims, the different availability and viability of disability identification-distinguishes this kind of "nondisabled claim to crip" from the well-intentioned but deeply ableist declaration that "we are all disabled." The latter obscures the specificities I call for here, conflating all experiences of physical, mental, or sensory limitation without regard to structural inequality or patterns of exclusion and discrimination. It is for this reason that Linton cautions against "erasing the line between disabled and nondisabled people," explaining that "naming the category" of disabled remains necessary because it effectively "call[s] attention to" disability-based discrimination. But I suggest that exploring the possibilities of nondisabled claims, as well as attending to the promises and dangers of the category’s flexibility, can facilitate exactly this kind of critical attentiveness.42 To claim crip critically is to recognize the ethical, epistemic, and political responsibilities behind such claims; deconstructing the binary between disabled and able-bodied/able-minded requires more attention to how different bodies/minds are treated differently, not less