Quote/Unquote: Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time

“In this creative nonfiction essay, the author reflects on how ‘crip time’ has operated in their life, not only as a form of liberation, but also as a site of loss and alienation.”

The “six ways” are:

1. Crip time is time travel: “Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings
2. Crip time is grief time: “It is a time of loss, and of the crushing undertow that accompanies loss.”
3. Crip time is broken time: “It requires us to break in our bodies and minds to new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and feeling and moving through the world.”
4. Crip time is sick time: “If you work a 9-5, 40-hour-a-week job, what is defined as full-time work in the United States, then (if you’re lucky) you accumulate a certain number of sick days.”
5. Crip time is writing time: “I have been writing an essay about crip time, in crip time, for so many years now, I wonder if I will ever get it done.” [I can very much relate!!]
6. Crip time is vampire time: “It’s the time of late nights and unconscious days, of life schedules lived out of sync with the waking, quotidian world.”

To read the full essay: Samuels, E. (2017). Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time. Disability Studies Quarterly, 37(3). https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v37i3.5824.