Criply, Madly, Deeply: Salty Cultures of the Left Behind


Danielle Peers, University of Alberta; Nathan Viktor Fawaz, University of Alberta

Crip and Mad community (and our scholarship) converge and diverge in spite of (and because of) the ways in which our lives are socially imagined as expendable and permit our deaths and their frequency to be rendered both meaningless and inevitable. Collateral. Sure, death is the only certainty for us all, but in a world where people generally hope to live a little before they die, it is perhaps a defining characteristic of Crip and Mad community to also die (over and over) before we are killed. In the both/and/and of it all, there is something magnificent and vital about the ways in which we live in care – the ways in which we live and care. A coordinating species of interbeing (Hanh, 2020), care haunts, hurts, heals (Eales, et al., 2021), and also: it holds. Care, “alters light, pH, and other conditions that dictate what can grow and how well” (Katz, 2012, p. 41). Our arts and our technologies springing up over and again from the if-only. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. In The art of fermentation: An in-depth exploration of essential concepts and processes from around the world , Sandor Katz wrote, Every traditional fermentation practice involves communities of microorganisms. Over the past 150 years, microbiologists have isolated and bred many individual fermentation organisms, but it is only as communities of organisms that they have existed otherwise, and as evolved communities they exhibit the greatest stability and resilience over time (p. 41). In this paper – one part critique, seven parts love-letter, two parts performance piece, we present fermentation as a kinship enactment of Crip and Mad theoretical and methodological alternatives to the rigid (and often violent) docilizing impositions of compulsory ablebodiedness (McRuer, 2010) and sanitization (Eales, et al., forthcoming) that in some ways of telling (and experiencing) govern and delimit our lives. Dear you, Thank you for being here, now, as you are[.] Content notes, for Clare (2017), “are in essence tools for self-care and collective space care” (p. xx). [You should know,] we swear sometimes. We engage with wide-ranging pandemic experiences, with eugenics, racism, settler colonialism, sanism, ableism, fatmisia, and queer-and-transmisia. “We tell these hard, complicated, beautiful stories because they matter. Care matters. Like bones, and skin, and lungs, and blood, and spirit, and meaning, [and breath, and salt,] and dreams, it matters.” (Eales and Peers, 2021, p. 164-165) (Eales, et al., forthcoming). The ways in which we have come to learn from and live in (Crip, Mad, Queer, Trans) kinship not only resists (Able-, Sane/Typical, Hetero, Cis) framings of our lives, but through Mad citational generativity and (Crip, Mad, Queer, Trans) joy and pain, outright refuses the power(s) of their coordinating and governing intentions. We draw from our Re-creation Collective collaborators in voicing this work: we speak from the collective ‘we’ for ideas around which there is consensus and collective resonance [...] Like singing together, the collective sound that emerges shifts, swells, and quells; different voices take more of a lead, or take a break, a breath. But we do not always write in collective voice [...] there is no meaningful consent or consensus without invitations and affirmations of dissent, discordance, and divergence (Eales and Goodwin, 2015) (Peers et al., 2023, p. 29) Always, and especially now, in year five of the pandemic.  What pandemic? We’re endemic now. Yeah. That one. Live a little. Die. Stay home. Love a little. Live. Live. Live. Be killed. Carry on.

This paper will be presented at the following session: