Crip Utopian Workwear

Hey sickos,

As promised, here is the essay I read in this episode!

Before I jump into it though, I wanted to highlight a fundraiser for Walla and his family so that they can flee Gaza. Any amount truly makes a difference! Remember, we keep us safe.

Walla's Fundraiser

Onto the essay: I wrote this piece in summer 2020, just as I was realizing that the diagnosis of Chronic Lyme disease I’d received from a naturopath 3 years earlier was inaccurate, based on shoddy science, and that, after 3 years of treatment with herbs and supplements I was actually getting worse and worse. I began to accept—even embrace—the possibility I would not, in fact, get “better” and that, contrary to wellness cultural edicts, my body was not a problem or a barrier to a good life. This piece is me fully embracing my surplus-crip-freak self and marks a major turning point in my personal and political education. Enjoy, sickos :)

“From each according to their abilities and passions, to each according to their needs and desires” - Cindy Milstein, Anarchism and It’s Aspirations

The Crip Utopia is beautiful and lush. There is no wage slavery, no austerity. No gender, kyriarchy, or normativity. Empire is over. Coercion is a barely remembered bad dream. 

In Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, the anarchist Odonian society we enter into uses the same word for Work and Play. This is not because people have been conditioned into thinking their jobs Are Fun (see The Soul at Work by Franco “Bifo” Berardi) but because it is unthinkable to Odonians that one would dedicate their life to something they didn’t genuinely enjoy. All their needs are met regardless of what they “do”. Noone is coerced into drudgery for fear of not having food/shelter/healthcare/etc. Noone is coerced, period. If you don’t want to work/play, you don’t have to. 

When people ask me what I “do” I often launch into an uncomfortable explanation that goes something like, “well I’m chronically ill so I can’t really work much. I spend a lot of time resting.” But that doesn’t really get at it. “Resting” is my work--both in the sense of drudgery but also, sometimes, in the Odonian sense of play. Being sick and stuck at home means I often have time to think, read, draw, dream. If it weren’t for the literally crippling fear of not having my basic needs met because I cannot participate in the Capitalist economy and the constant violence of ableist culture, my life would actually be pretty close to the utopian vision, chronic pain and all.

The anarchist ethos of Prefigurative Politics encourages us to build our utopias in the midst of the imperfect present. Not as escapist bubbles a la the hippy commune, but as dynamic, ever-shifting play spaces for us to practice the Beautiful Ideal.

What do I wear in the Crip Utopian future/present? What does “workwear” look like when there is no work/work is play and the work/play is taking care of my sick body? When ableism (and racism and capitalism and gender and borders) is gone, how much freer are we all to adorn/caretake our bodies in exactly the ways we need/desire?

Johanna Hedva has a clear lucite cane. I think that's so hot. 

My crip friends say they love wearing hospital socks at home. “They’re the best”. When I google “cute hospital socks” I find image after image of socks with the words “ keep calm and push” printed on the soles in grippy paint. But what if I'm not having a baby? What if I can't have a baby? What if I don't want one? 

I want grippy socks that have my friends' drawings on them. I want grippy socks with SPK quotes on them. I want grippy socks that say “damn the man!” on one foot and “let's have fun :)))” on the other. 

Frida Kahlo, the Mexican painter, revolutionary Communist, queer, crip dreamboat said, “ I must fight with all my strength so that the little positive things that my health allows me to do might be pointed toward helping the revolution.” 

Frida painted her body casts. Adorned them with the Hammer and Sickle. Painted butterflies, cut and pasted illustrations of birds of prey and turtles--I wonder what they meant to her? Ferocity and protection?

In 1953, 27 years after the trolly accident that ripped through her pelvis, gangrene set into her right foot and Frida’s leg had to be amputated to the knee. Her custom prosthetic leg ended in a knee-high lace-up red silk platform boot, complete with embroidered dragon. She wove a little brass bell into the laces. 

Rather than hide this appendage under her many layered skirts, every time Frida took a step she jingled, by choice. Her prosthetic leg was not a cold, impersonal medical imposition on her body to be rendered invisible. It was an extremely sexy, unapologetically noisey extension of herself. Beauty and pleasure and humor are part of the revolution.

 When I finally stopped waiting for my doctors to tell me my pain was real “enough”, I decided to buy a cane. Me and Brendan drove to the CVS on Federal street at 10:30 pm and I chose a $25.95 leopard-print number. When I got home I put the SPK sticker Beatrice sent me on it: “turn illness into a weapon.” 

Prefigurative Politics, applied to my sick body, means I do not wait for some unknown future when I am “Well” again to live my life beautifully. The Utopia will include us sickos or will not exist at all!  Rejecting austerity, martyrdom, and shame: how can I give my body what it needs and desires now? And how do we work/play collectively towards a Crip Utopia where we can all live according to our many different abilities and passions, needs and desires?