Роберт Макрюер в книге «Disability, Revolution» предлагает новые подходы к движению за права инвалидов и сексуальную свободу

The following is an excerpt from Disability, Revolution by Robert McRuer, out now from the University of California Press. In recent political times, disability identity has been mobilized in ways that paradoxically compound bodily injury and disability. This single-issue approach obscures the oppression of disabled people and prevents solidarity across difference. How about we take this to the next level? Subscribe to our newsletter for a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy. In Disability, Revolution, Robert McRuer introduces alternatives to “one-dimensional disability,” providing an accessible overview of disability justice movements and their relevance to larger emancipatory coalitions. Exploring the most prominent examples from the past several decades, the book focuses on the convergence of queer and crip movements, mad pride, intersectional disability justice work, neurodiversity, and the globalization of disability alliances. Essential for anyone interested in disability politics, this book shows how these multivalent movements help us imagine alternative disabled worlds. Queer disabled people were naming such minoritarian standpoints and interventions as crip by the final years of the twentieth century. Filmmakers David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder produced one of the first celebrations of crip defiance in their 1995 documentary, Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back. Vital Signs puts into circulation a crip practice of repetition and reversal: if “vital signs” conjure up the diagnostic gaze and an objectified, one-dimensional patient, a patient who is perhaps even on life support, Vital Signs, the documentary, instead displays a thriving community of disabled artists and activists, including Clare reading poetry. Many in Vital Signs identify as queer and understand the work of crip to be similar to the bold reclamation of the word queer. Indeed, the activist and artist Carrie Sandahl, who appears in a performance in Vital Signs, would later go on to coin the phrase “crip theory” through a study that focused on crip/queer performers connecting disability culture to the flamboyance, excess, and defiance of queer culture. Sandahl performs in museum space with a cane and a white laboratory suit, on which are written various surgeries and other interventions that had been made on her body over the course of her life. The performance takes that medical objectification and makes it subjective, with Sandahl writing on her own body and then displaying that self-authoring in public space. As queercrip culture expanded, a range of other documentaries and collections in the twenty-first century similarly put into circulation repetition and reversal of not only crip but other words intended to contain or wound disabled people, such as freak. In 2020, Simone Chasnoff directed Code of the Freaks, a witty look back on more than a century of problematic, flat, one-dimensional representation of disability in Hollywood. The title of the documentary itself claims Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks for disability/crip culture, with the code of the freaks referring to the adage “offend one and you’ve offended them all.” Code of the Freaks is a thickly intersectional documentary, attending to the ways in which problematic representations of race, gender, and sexuality converge with ableist representations in mainstream representation. Antonio Centeno and Raúl de la Moreno, in 2015, released Yes, We F*ck!, a documentary filmed in Barcelona and Madrid that worked to spotlight more generative possibilities than mainstream representations of sex and disability generally afford. Yes, We F*ck! is composed of six vignettes spotlighting both physical and cognitive disabilities, focused entirely on sexual freedom for disabled people. One of the vignettes particularly explores what sexual pleasure and freedom mean for intellectually disabled people, as a range of young adults are interviewed about their sexual fantasies and pleasures. The documentary circulated not only in Spain but across Latin America, and put forward multiple examples of what Andrea García-Santesmases, in her study of the same name, calls “el cuerpo deseado” (the body desired or desirable). In his endorsement of El cuerpo deseado, Bob Pop writes that “El cuerpo deseado habla de mí, de mi cuerpo discapacitado, de cómo lo vivo y de cómo lo percibís. Habla de mi deseo y el deseo que os podría generar” (El cuerpo deseado speaks of me, of my disabled body, of how I experience it and how you perceive it. It speaks of my desire and the desire it could generate in you). [Throughout Disability, Revolution, all translations from Spanish are mine, unless I am using a quotation from an already-published/translated source.] The symbol for the documentary adapts the universal access symbol for disability in queercrip ways. Accompanying the generic and nongendered universal access figure is a second stick figure seated in her/his/their lap; the erotic, intimate connection implied between the two not only represents crip sexual pleasures but also rescripts the bland utilitarianism of the widely known symbol. In the process, the symbol for Yes, We F*ck! essentially asserts that a right to what Tobin Siebers has termed “a sexual culture for disabled people” is as important (or perhaps more, given the role of sexuality in self-actualization) as accessible doors, elevators, or parking places. Queer crips had in fact long been generating alternative ways of apprehending disabled sexuality, from Lorenzo Wilson Millam’s The Cripple Liberation Front Marching Band Blues (1984) to Connie Panzarino’s The Me in the Mirror (1984) to, in the twenty-first century, Terry Galloway’s Mean Little Deaf Queer (2009). Panzarino’s sex-positive queercrip presence included, famously, a sign that she would wear to Pride marches and elsewhere: “Trached dykes eat p*ssy without coming up for air.” The sexually explicit assertion not only foregrounded the pleasures of crip sexuality but also emphasized that the accoutrements or technologies of disability need not necessarily be a limitation, and could even be a sexualized asset. Through queercrip pride and defiance, writers such as Millam, Panzarino, and Galloway take what Sandahl calls “a radical stance towards concepts of normalcy.”Moving beyond calls for mere inclusion into dominant institutions, this worldmaking queercrip cultural production instead imagines and works to materialize other modes of existence. Reprinted from Disability, Revolution by Robert McRuer, courtesy of the University of California Press. Copyright 2026. Sign up for the Queerty newsletter to stay on top of the hottest stories in LGBTQ+ entertainment, politics, and culture.