Crip Time and Chronic Illness

Chronically ill people have a different relationship with the concept of time. Like other disabled people, many of us relate to a concept known as “crip time.” Crip time is commonly discussed in Disability Studies and crip theory, but I have also seen it talked about outside of these spaces among other disabled people. The term was coined by disability theorist Alison Kafer in the book Feminist, Queer, Crip to describe the ways disability can impact the way we experience time.

Something a lot of people forget is that a huge clue about chronic illness is in the name itself. People will be surprised that we're still sick, but we are literally "chronically" ill. People don't understand that not every illness is something you will eventually recover from. They'll ask when we're getting better, or why we're not better yet. We are chronically ill, our illness is something ongoing that will most likely last forever. It's scary, confusing, and lonely. As Alison Kafer puts it in the book Feminist, Queer, Crip, “What would it mean to explore disability in time or to articulate “crip time”? Temporal categories are already commonly used in formulations of disability; one aspect of cripping time might simply be to map the extent to which we conceptualize disability in temporal terms. The medical field in particular has a long tradition of describing disability in reference to time. “Chronic” fatigue, “intermittent” symptoms, and “constant” pain are each ways of defining illness and disability in and through time; they describe disability in terms of duration.”

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