Jump to content

Accessibility: Default text size Large text size High contrast layout

• Email this page
• Share this page
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Bebo
  • Share on MySpace

Passing It On

I know crip culture to be exciting, inspiring and the ignition to intellectual stimulation! Not to sex it up too much, but it does make me feel like a strong, bold woman. I’m a proud member of crip culture. For me, culture is a common experience, a shared history, a shared community; crip culture is the shared experiences of those of us who are disabled and the creative expression that is rooted in that daily, bodily, psychic experience.  With the greater participation by disabled people in mainstream education I wonder where, when and how disabled people meet. I wonder where younger disabled people find each other when the ‘special schools’ are nearly mainstreamed out of existence.  If these spaces don’t exist, then where do we find each other and how do we develop art that comes from a self-conscious position: a  space where we can find other people who by virtue of their skin colour, sexuality, gender, ethnicity are afforded a bird’s eye view on the desperate work involved in passing as “normal”. The Centre for Independent Living was supposed to be a panacea for disability culture and arts, unfortunately we now find whenever we’re together we’re arguing about service provision for our daily existence and very few of us have energy left over to make our work in the arts.

Our cultural expression rings deep with emotion and piercing insight with the potential to remake the world as a wider place for us all. Disabled people are stigmatised – marked as the other and offered the route of redemption by encouragement/enforcement to behave normally; we are expected to know our subordinated place by showing that we crave mainstream acceptance. Often it is in meeting other disabled people that we have the support to embrace our stigma as an act of resistance – our first audience who can recognise our voice, find our truths to be beautiful and rejoice in our journey which takes an alternative route.   

I long for more consciousness of the political dimensions of art and identity; such a wider spread consciousness would have made it safer to give a stronger response to a situation such as Tommy Tiernan’s offensive mimicry of the speech of people with a head injury on the Late, Late Show in October 2008, or his ongoing gags about people with Down’s Syndrome. We need to combat disablism, even if it is dressed up as radical comedy. We need to use the word disablism to articulate the specific form of institutional, individual and attitudinal discrimination disabled people experience.

Again, I’m not in favour of special schools, the environment is clinical, isolating and discriminatory. Not for a minute would I suggest we go back to that model, but it did give us a consciousness of our rights and the rights of others. We had each other. We fought with each other, we made up with each other, we saved each other, we supported each other and mostly, we celebrated each other.

The move to mainstream education, while it is a good thing for which disability activists worked, has encouraged those partaking in it to see all the battles as already won. By being in a mainstream class, disabled students as individuals may not know of the collective historical effort behind them and don’t value thinking about the political implications of being a minority-group person in a majority-group environment, and will face unspoken encouragement in that environment not to think about such issues. It is, by analogy, like young women who think that feminism is something for the older generations, that there is already gender equality in Irish society; or like young gay people who in today’s more open society, assume that mainstream straight culture is more open than it actually is, and that any remaining homophobia will be easily swept away. Such young women and young gay people are often rudely awoken when they at last come up against gender discrimination or institutional homophobia.

Young disabled people, similarly, either still in education or starting their careers, may simply not yet have hit the glass ceiling   - or in this case, the glass non-accessible staircase. I wonder how many disabled people manage in some way to reach the top of that glass staircase – and how very many more must stay at the bottom. Often, the positioning of power relations goes unnoticed and people arrive at consciousness when they discover others like themselves experience discrimination.

In order to engage or to be part of Crip culture, one needs to be exposed to it. In this instance I’m choosing disabled arts as an example. When I first heard of Graeae, a theatre company in London, I was excited. Their production of Peeling, performed in the Project Arts Centre in June 2002, really blew me away. I fell in love both with the aesthetic of disability in the play, and with the Project Arts centre, one of the few older theatres that makes a commitment to accessibility. I won’t mention the Peacock! (I’ll restrain myself from naming out all the wonderful productions I haven’t been able to attend).

The spirit of art as a political statement is alive. There are younger and emerging disabled artists who are interested in disability history, who have a sense of pride in their identity as disabled people, who are, above all, conscious of themselves and their art as an expression of pride.

How can we pass on Crip culture, in all its complexity – its fun as well as its liberation? Dialogue needs to happen between artists, allowing a community to be nurtured and to evolve. This means making deliberate choices to support emergent disabled artists, by buying their books, watching their plays, attending their recitals and exhibitions. This should not be a chore for people who love the arts! By helping to build up emergent disabled artists’ professional identities, a space can be created for their disabled identities to also grow and flourish.