The dominant definition of disability in our society is the medical one. On the medical model, a disability is an impairment or functional limitation of an individual’s body. The medical model sees disability as something that should be fixed, cured, or accommodated. It locates the problem in the individual rather than the built environment. The issue, on this model, is not that society is designed to accommodate nondisabled bodies while excluding disabled bodies. It is that disabled bodies are functionally impaired and need to be fixed or granted special privileges. 

Disabled people must play along with this definition in order to obtain the accommodations and services that presuppose it. To qualify for disability benefits in the United States, one must have “an impairment that results from anatomical, physiological, or psychological abnormalities that can be shown by medically acceptable clinical and laboratory diagnostic techniques.” The Social Security Administration (SSA) adds, “a statement about the individual’s symptoms is not enough.” Nonetheless, applicants must also demonstrate symptoms of a medical condition. The SSA uses a rigid version of the medical model to separate the “deserving disabled” from the “grifters.” If disabled people want services, they must perform their disability in the prescribed way. Yet even this will not suffice if they do not also have medical “proof” of underlying illness. 

Many disabled people do not qualify for disability benefits or accommodations due to the SSA’s strict medical criteria, which are designed to restrict access to government support as narrowly as possible while preserving the façade of “caring about disabled people.” Seemingly, the government wants to suppress disability activism while continuing to destroy the welfare state. I have a type of disability that is largely excluded from disability benefits. According to the Centers for Disease Control, “an estimated 836,000 to 2.5 million Americans suffer from ME/CFS,” yet “about 90 percent of people with ME/CFS have not been diagnosed.” What good is the SSA definition of disability to me if it doesn’t grant me access to services that I may need? 

The SSA definition of disability, along with the medical model that it presupposes, is an example of what Marylin Frye and Maria Lugones refer to as “arrogant perception.” Frye writes, “men see with arrogant eyes which organize everything seen with reference to themselves and their own interest” (1981: 67). Women are like men, only less rational, less strong, less able-bodied. They are “mutilated males,” in Aristotle’s words. Lugones emphasizes that women also regard women, sometimes including themselves, with the arrogant eye (1987). The medical model is an example of arrogant perception in that it defines disability with reference to nondisability. Disabled people are like nondisabled people, only impaired, limited, mutilated. Disabled people are expected to internalize the arrogant gaze toward themselves by viewing themselves through a medical lens – as similar to nondisabled people but lesser. Indeed, disabled folks must adopt this lens, or at least perform arrogance, to qualify for disability benefits. Disabled people must take disability seriously to be taken seriously by the SSA and other service-granting institutions. 

Lugones observed that she needed to be more serious and less playful in certain contexts or “worlds” to safely navigate those worlds: “there are certain worlds in which I am not at ease and it is because I’m not at ease in those worlds that I don’t have that attribute [of playfulness] in those worlds” (9). She noted that White/Anglo worlds did not afford her the opportunity to be playful. Nonetheless, she could not avoid those contexts. As an Argentine lesbian philosopher, she had to be able to travel across worlds – from White/Anglo worlds to Argentine worlds to lesbian worlds – without adopting the attitude of the patriarch or the colonizer (3). The practice of world-traveling helped her cultivate loving perception, an ability to inhabit different worlds without attempting to colonize them, and playfulness, an unserious or “unruly” attitude.  

Disabled people must navigate different worlds, too, including the serious worlds of medical testing and diagnosis, the welfare system, and educational centers for accessibility. These worlds require the utmost seriousness, as one “confesses” (to use Tremain’s language) to various disorders. A playful attitude could, and most likely will, result in denials of services. If you do not identity as “impaired” by virtue of an underlying “abnormality,” you are not, by legal definition, disabled. Using non-medical language to describe your circumstances – for example, saying that you are marginalized by a historically contingent apparatus of disability – will not help you secure disability benefits or services. The SSA uses a stringent set of rules that disabled people must play by in order to win benefits. It’s a game of winners and losers, in which the least privileged people lose the most often. This is what Lugones refers to as “agonstic play” (15). Agonistic play “has to do with contest, with winning, losing, battling.” It creates “risk,” “uncertainty,” vulnerability. “There are rules that inspire hostility.” The SSA is an agonstic game. It pits disabled people against each other in a fight for ever-shrinking resources depleted by decades of neoliberal policies. It disqualifies disabled people who can’t obtain the “right” kind of diagnosis, even if this is only due to epistemic injustice or the limitations of diagnostic testing. It categorically rejects playing with disability, performing disability in a fun, unruly way, or rejecting strict boundaries between disabilities while stressing intersections across disabilities. 

Here is how the CDC defines my disability: 

Does that sound fun and playful to you? Or does it sound serious, tragic, and sad? The CDC defines alldisabilities by their negative symptoms, exclusively. As I have argued elsewhere, this conceptual framework negates the positive side of disability, which includes crip kinship, creativity, and joy. Indeed, medical definitions erase the value and very existence of crip culture, which Caitlin Wood describes as a “daring space of shameless flaunting,” in which “we find fellow crips who affirm and reflect our originality and beauty back at us, just as we affirm and reflect back to them,” and where “our crip bravado reaches out like sun rays and emboldens those who need our swagger the most – those strangers to disability pride” (2014: 2). The medical model perpetrates arrogant perception by colonizing disability and defining it in serious terms. Disability is nothing more nor less than a loss of ability, function, and purpose. Crip culture is a world of loving perception and disability play, in contrast to the somber and serious worlds of the hospital, the welfare office, the accessibility office, and other medicalizing spaces. 

 Some disabled people embrace the medical model because it promises them benefits and services that they may need and want. But other disabled people are disenfranchised by this model. This includes the estimated 90% of chronically fatigued people who cannot obtain diagnostic validation. Of the 10% who do qualify, they must play by the rules of the SSA. They must present themselves as functionally impaired in a way that comports to their diagnosis. Through these rules, institutions produce a rigid, homogenizing, legislative conception of disability. Disabled people are supposed to internalize this arrogant perception and perform disability on the terms set by mostly-nondisabled policy-makers and medical professionals.

Why should social institutions define disability? We don’t let them define race. We don’t let them define gender. Why should they legislate our bodies and community? We need to reclaim disability and stop letting governments, physicians, and the nondisabled majority define us. We must not bring the serious attitude of the medical model into crip spaces. But we can, whenever we feel safe doing so, bring the un-ruly attitude of crip playfulness into nondisabled worlds. This may seem daunting but there are liminal spaces between worlds in which we can contest compulsory able-bodiedness and the serious attitude. These “borderlands” tend to be more permissive of play and contestation because the “law of the land” is less clear (Anzaldua 1987).  

I am not the first philosopher to suggest that disabled people should define disability. In The Minority Body, Elizabeth Barnes argues that “disability is socially constructed from group solidarity”:

In other words, the disabled community defines itself – or should define itself – based on principles of affinity, solidarity, and justice. Barnes notes that there is disagreement within the disabled community, and disabled people “are not inviolable disability detectors” (45). Nonetheless, “the disability rights movement doesn’t make judgements about what is and what isn’t a disability at random. Their judgements are rule-based (even if the rules are not explicit or transparent, and even if the rules are sometimes incomplete)” (45). There is a logic behind the disability community’s inclusion criteria, which justified admitting some people and excluding others.

This is where Barnes’ constructionism departs from Lugones’s model of playfulness. When Lugones describes playfulness, she gives the example of two people playing with stones on a riverbank. This playful activity is not rule-governed but is based on imagination, curiosity, and joy:

When an activity is “ruly,” it is serious. Although Barnes admits that “rules are sometimes incomplete,” her emphasis on rules rather than play or risk-taking imports the seriousness of the medical model into crip culture. It risks creating and reinforcing an agnostic form of game-play. Whereas play destabilizes and subverts boundaries, rules police and maintain them. While I agree with Barnes that disabled people should define disability, I do not agree that we should adopt a rule-governed approach. Instead, we should playfully inhabit and interrogate disability.  

My worry about rules as gatekeeping mechanisms resonates with Tremain’s concern that identity-based accounts of disability inevitably exclude and marginalize certain disabled people and hamper disability justice: “a disabled people’s movement that grounds its claims to entitlement in the identity of its subject (‘people with impairments’) can expect to face similar criticisms [to the feminist movement] from an ever-increasing number of constituencies that feel excluded from and refuse to identify with those demands for rights and recognition” (2001: 635). This claim applies to the many chronically fatigued people who are excluded from the definition of disability on both the medical model (due to lack of diagnostic validation) and the social model (which defines disability as social disadvantage, exclusive of chronic pain). While Tremain rejects “identity politics” as a basis for disability inclusion, she is an outspoken critic of hegemonic definitions of disability. I submit that a playful attitude toward disability is compatible with Tremain’s aims, as it deconstructs and destabilizes any static definition of disability, producing fluid, malleable, intersectional, non-legislative conceptions of disability. Hence, crip play is compatible with the goal of discouraging gatekeeping and boundary-policing. 

Before closing, I want to draw a parallel between crip theory and queer theory, the latter of which embraces the central value of play. The centering of play as a tool of resistance is less common in crip theory, perhaps because disabled people must adopt the “serious attitude” of the medical model to obtain needed services. This may make it harder to relinquish this attitude even when doing so is safe and beneficial. Playfulness, in contrast, is prominent in queer theory. One of the queer theorists whom I was privileged to meet at a mentoring workshop, who works on playful resistance and gender games, is Rowan Bell. Bell observes that the gender play of ballroom culture, an African-American and Latino underground LGBTQ+ subculture, promotes “agential fluidity,” including (but not limited to) the ability to perform or model different genders, switch from one gender to another, and innovate or expand on existing genders (unpublished manuscript). This fluidity helps to deconstruct the notion of fixed gender and, perhaps, gender itself. (In the long run, the concept of gender itself may become indefinable). 

Bell’s argument can be fruitfully applied to crip culture and the modeling of disability. Disabled people can and do experience disability in an abundance of ways that defy simple classification and demarcation. Hegemonic definitions of disability cannot capture and classify the range of disability formations that exist in the real world, just as they cannot capture and classify the range of extant gender formations. Any set of necessary and sufficient conditions of disability/gender reifies stereotypes and erases the diversity and fluidity of disability/gender in people’s lives. Such conditions also erase the intersectionality of disability in the lives of cripqueer and other intersectionally oppressed people like me – people whose experiences cannot be captured by single-variable definitions. Crip theory can benefit from the tools of play and fluidity that are so prominent in queer theory, which can be used to deconstruct hegemonic, totalizing definitions of disability and create liminal spaces of playful resistance. 

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