Crip Taxonomies

I remember as a child going to a museum which showed the taxonomy of butterflies, these tiny flying things pinned to a board, with lines and charts showing the structured groups into which they had been classified. Nobody had asked them what they wanted, and if they had, I feel like the answer would have been freedom, not classification.

I am so often classified. I’ve been called inspirational for the simplest things, like driving my wheelchair onto a bus. Like having a job (regardless of the job). It’s like being called brave for existing in the world. These things are ordinary, and I realised that, like that butterfly, I hadn’t been seen for what I was; I had merely been classified.

It feels like there’s a short set of roles, and we’re assigned one of these the moment that we encounter a non-disabled person - and it’s very rare (in my experience) that the role we’re assigned is “person”. Laying out this list of roles is the first step to challenging it - but it’s also the first step to acknowledging an uncomfortable truth - that I sometimes put myself in those boxes to benefit, as well.

Admiration

Inspirational is probably the box I’m most often shoved into. Ordinary acts are treated as extraordinary, and when I achieve something truly extraordinary, then it becomes “what’s your excuse” as abled - and other disabled people - are treated like they’ve failed for not having achieved that. Inspiration porn, as the late, great Stella Young called it, names the way our achievements are put there to be witnessed and absorbed by non-disabled people, for the motivational lift they get from them.

Supercrip is a variant on inspirational, I think. It’s the disabled person who achieves feats (usually of athleticism) which are twisted to make non-disabled people feel bad for not having achieved them. A double amputee running on prosthetic running blades and competing at the Paralympics AND the Olympics. Wheelchair racers who can outpace running racers at marathon distances. The We Are The Superhumans campaign, which tried to show disabled people as being better than - rather than simply being humans - (and for those of us that aren’t supercrips - well, we disappeared entirely).

Brave is the other main box for admiring disabled people. We’re brave for existing, brave for suffering, brave for continuing to stay alive against such terrible circumstances - and we’re there to remind non-disabled people that they too will get through it - because, after all, we exist. And our existence is so awful, it’s so brave of us to survive, so their little suffering is nothing in comparison.

Pity

On the other side of inspirational is tragic. The disabled person is an object of sorrow with a life that isn’t worth living. People looking down on us, sad, but resigned to the reality of our awful lives. Lives that could maybe be made brighter for a small moment by contact with them, before collapsing back into the pit of misery that they must be.

And then there is the scrounger. The disabled person you’re not meant to believe, that you should treat as if they were the costly one, the fraud, the PIP claimant, the “are you really disabled?” the blue badge questioning - that disabled person who is seen as a drain on society, any admiration turned into solid suspicion.

Then there’s the abject and invisible, the person people can’t look at, so they look through instead, often people whose behaviour or dress sets them outside the societal norm in such a way that people fear them, and therefore ignore them, completely.

Boxes

None of these boxes are there for disabled people, nor do they describe us in any kind of authentic way. It feels like they’re there to describe what non-disabled people feel about us: admiration, pity, disgust - and they’re not permitted to feel equality. Not with us.

But at the same time, I can’t be the only disabled person who uses these boxes. Or maybe I am; maybe this guilt is entirely my own. However, when I want funding, I’m willing to lean into being inspirational, and when I need medical care, I come across as competent but brave, and when I’m let down by a service, then it’s the tragedy model I draw on. I wish I could call this resistance, but it feels more like collaborating with a dehumanising system to survive within it. It would feel like a luxury to resist these boxes entirely, and I can’t afford to do so.

But not everyone gets to move through different boxes. The fact that I can be read as inspirational rather than abject reflects my privilege - as a white, articulate, palatable disabled person.

Closing

The one thing I’m rarely allowed to be is an equal. I can become an object onto which positive or negative emotions are projected, but that object is never an equal of the non-disabled people whose gaze is pushing me back into whichever of the boxes serves their narrative best. I want to end by telling you that there’s resistance in this - that if I must be pushed into a box, at least I am choosing which box to go into. I want that to be true - but I know that this is still collaboration, not true resistance. Choosing which box I am forced into is ultimately just me choosing the most survivable way of being imprisoned.

The butterflies pinned to the cork didn’t get to choose their place in the taxonomy - or whether they wanted to be in it at all. Like them, I am forced into it, but I have the freedom to angle myself towards inspirational instead of abject, pick the pin that hurts the least as it holds me to the wall. But picking the pin that imprisons you isn’t an example of freedom - and it doesn’t feel like one to me.