Creaturely Crips: Affective Kinships and Interspecies Intimacies

Keywords: feminist disability studies, animal studies, transnational
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 13

Abstract

In November of 2018, the Canadian Down Syndrome Society launched a new social media activism campaign, “Endangered Syndrome.” The website for the campaign explains, “By the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s own criteria, the Down syndrome community qualifies as endangered in many parts of the world. […] We're going to be the first humans ever to apply to be on the Endangered List.” Engaging with feminist disability studies, feminist new materialisms, and animal studies, this presentation takes up the campaign itself, and the pushback that the campaign received, in order to envision an understanding of crip solidarity as not only a being with endangered non-human animals, but also a becoming with endangered non-human animals. I suggest that, although flawed, “Endangered Syndrome’s” activism can productively inform a feminist disability studies critique of transnational, extractive capitalism. To do this, I engage in a reparative reading of the activist campaign and explore the affective intimacies the campaign engenders. I ultimately ask, what would it look like to reach for, feel, and desire a shared horizon, a concrete possibility for a different world where creaturely crips, disabled, queer human animals and non-human animals alike can flourish in relation?