Introduction

Disability and queerness are not just identities and components of one position in the world, but instead are political terms placed upon people to categorize them. To be disabled, like to be queer, is to live in the margins of a world not built for you, socially or physically. 

Professor Ellen Samuels uses the term ‘crip time’ to explain some facets of the disabled experience and how it impacts not only the day to day - but the human condition. In Samuel’s article Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time, she says, “crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings.”

As disability interrupts the lived experience, queerness can accompany it as an altered understanding of navigating the first hand. Queer disabled people live in an intersection that is structural in nature, living in a society that is not accessible and rarely tells their story. Intersectionality was a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American civil rights advocate and scholar of critical race theory. This framework encourages an understanding of how different social and political identities result in unique experiences of discrimination. 

The intersection of queerness and disability are two political identities that are not all encompassing - instead they are intertwined with gender, race, ethnicity, sex, age, class, religion, and possess varying degrees of privilege and discrimination in their own right. Disability, like queerness, looks different for everyone and impacts the daily life of all those who identify with the term. 

Disability in itself, is a multifaceted term that reflects large groupings of impairment to people’s daily lives. This includes long-term and short-term physical impairments, sensory impairments, mental and psychiatric conditions, developmental and learning disabilities, chronic health conditions, and much more. 

This digital exhibition is written to highlight the collection of literature in The ArQuives that navigates this intersection of queer disability through critical thought, artistic expression, histories, fiction, poetry, and expressions of community care. For those interested in understanding this intersection through different avenues, these 15 selected books will be broken down into three categories: Critical Thought, Expressions & Experience, and Disabled Sex. The literature is broken to fit different points of entry into the experience of queer disability. Critical Thought focuses on professional studies and higher ed. analysis, Expressions & Experience is suited towards a more artistic and personal interpretation, and lastly Disabled Sex focuses on the location of desire in the body - a focus that has a unique place in the discussion of queer disabled folks.

This digital exhibition is curated by Brian Ginther. Brian Ginther (they/them) is a Visual Arts and Art History student with a specialization in Public History from York University. Their artwork and research focus on gender, disability, religion, and the body.