You are cordially invited to celebrate the launch of J. Logan Smilges’s Crip Negativity. At a funeral. For good crip feelings.
Crip negativity refers to the bad feelings felt by disabled, debilitated, and otherwise non-normatively embodyminded folks while we’re living in a world structured by ableism. The phrase comes from the eponymous book (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) written by J. Logan Smilges, who is a queer, trans, and disabled scholar at the University of British Columbia.
Crip Negativity was written for a wide variety of audiences–from academic to activist to casual readers–with the intention of bringing attention to bad crip feelings and asking how they can serve an anti-ableist political project.
This event will feature poetry readings by Erin Soros, Valois Vera, and Maneo Mohale.
American Sign Language and Communication Access Realtime Translation services will be provided.
Learn more about the event here.
About the Book
Cover of the book Crip Negativity by J. Logan Smilges.
Crip Negativity
In the thirty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, the lives of disabled people have not improved nearly as much as activists and politicians had hoped. In Crip Negativity, J. Logan Smilges shows us what’s gone wrong and what we can do to fix it. Leveling a strong critique of the category of disability and liberal disability politics, Smilges asks and imagines what horizons might exist for the liberation of those oppressed by ableism—beyond access and inclusion. Inspired by models of negativity in queer studies, Black studies, and crip theory, Smilges proposes that bad crip feelings might help all of us to care gently for one another, even as we demand more from the world than we currently believe to be possible.
About the Author
J. Logan Smilges (they/them) is an assistant professor of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia, where they write and teach in queer/trans disability studies, rhetorical studies, and the history of medicine. They are the author of Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) and Crip Negativity (University of Minnesota Press, 2023).
