Reimagining Disablist and Ableist Violence as Abjection

Cripping criminology

“…It could be suggested that proposing a crip criminology is pre-emptive, in that it has not formerly emerged in any coherent way to warrant an exposition of its key themes, let alone argue for its legitimacy as a particular subfield of criminology. However, we posit that this interpretation is incorrect, given the body of research that has already been done in this area (see Baldry, 2014; Dowse, 2017; Dowse et al, 2009; Harpur and Douglas, 2014; Minkowitz, 2014; Spivakovsky, 2014; Spivakovsky and Seear, 2017; Steele, 2014, 2017; Steele and Thomas, 2014; Thorneycroft, forthcoming; Thorneycroft and Asquith, 2017; Wadiwel, 2017; Weller, 2014, 2017). 5 Additionally, it is a timely intervention because criminology has been crip/pled all along.…”

“…To be sure, identity categories cannot be abandoned completely in research; despite their constructedness, identity categories can be useful for ‘strategic essentialist’ 2 political purposes (Butler, 1993; Spivak, 1990). Suffice to say, crip theorists maintain an approach to (disabled) subjectivity as contingent, permeable, leaky, and revisable (Shildrick, 1997; Thorneycroft, forthcoming).…”

“…Nevertheless, our submission to Theoretical Criminology is part of a performative politics that seeks to orient crip criminology towards a mainstream approach, yet simultaneously crips criminology in the process. The exclusion of crip from mainstream discussion says something about the social state of disability—it is an abject state that is only made intelligible on the margins (Thorneycroft, forthcoming). It may be difficult to situate crip within a mainstream criminology that it is not part of, yet crip’s utility as an expansive position and subversive function is promissory.…”

“…However, since its advent in the 1970s the social model has been attacked in many quarters. Previously seen as a socialized account that examined the ways in which people were dis-abled by social and structural forces, recent post-structuralist work has problematized this approach and unearthed its essentialist character (see Campbell, 2009a; Thorneycroft, forthcoming; Tremain, 2002). Following Butler (1990, 1993), many now consider the disability/impairment distinction to be as similarly problematic as the sex/gender divide.…”

When does research end? The emotional labour of researching abjection

“…The distributed, compounding, and iterative nature of the practices of abjection require mechanisms to eschew its power. (Thorneycroft, forthcoming)…”