Both because of and in spite of: Towards the reclamation of queercrip joy

Abstract

Queer, trans, disabled, and neurodivergent people are frequently used to represent pain, suffering, shame, and disgust in dominant heteronormative and ableist discourses. However, many queer, trans, and crip scholars, artists, and activists have reclaimed previously pathologized and denigrated experiences as sites of pleasure and joy. Importantly, this queercrip approach to joy does not position joy as an opposite or replacement for pain, but embraces joy and pain as simultaneous and co-constitutive. This essay explores the proliferations, potentialities, and limitations of queercrip joy as a site of resistance to cisheteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness. Specifically, we spotlight gender euphoria and disabled joy alongside the scholarship of authors like Sara Ahmed and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and the intersecting fields of crip theory, queer theory, trans studies, and affect theory. Ultimately, we argue that queercrip joy exists both because of and in spite of the pain of enduring oppression and physical and psychological pain. As such, queercrip joy is not merely a pure happy object, but a complicated formulation of intimacy, pleasure, pain, validation, refusal, and relationality–an indicator of the very attachments that allow us to be affected. Therefore, celebrating queercrip joy is an insufficient yet necessary tool for queer, trans, and disabled liberation.