Earlier this morning, I inadvertently posted a news item on Bluesky that included ableist language–namely, the term tone deaf. The article, which discusses the forms of structural oppression and discrimination that working-class Scottish students at the University of Edinburgh experience, was especially interesting to me given that my maternal ancestors were poor and working-class people who lived in and around Glasgow. In my early morning enthusiasm, I posted the article before I had finished reading all of it and thus had yet to notice that one of the students interviewed for the article invoked the term tone deaf to emphasize a remark.

In brief, the term tone deaf is ableist because, like so many other ableist terms and phrases (including moral blindness, morally blind, and “deaf to the implications”), it implies that disabled people lack knowledge, are “defective” knowers, not knowers, etc. For several years, I worked concertedly (in the philosophy blogosphere, in publications, and elsewhere in the profession) to convince philosophers that they should stop using the term blind review in their CFPs and announcements. This campaign has been largely successful, with most philosophers adopting some variation of the term anonymous to replace the ableist language. Nevertheless, some philosophers resist criticism of ableist language and persist in their use of it, as both a recent heated discussion on Daily Nous about the ableist use of the term blind and the appearance of the term in an article recently published in Hypatia demonstrate.

Indeed, as with so many forms of ableism that disabled philosophers confront in philosophy, the ubiquitous use of ableist language in philosophy continues to be normalized and depoliticized, including by feminist philosophers and other so-called progressive philosophers. Although an increasing number of philosophers of language devote their energies to articulating the character of gendered, racialized, and transphobic dog-whistles, slurs, and fig leaves, they have yet to scrutinize the varieties of ableist language that circulate in contemporary discourse nor to acknowledge the (admittedly rudimentary) critical work on ableist language that I have produced.

In short, the training to demean disabled people that philosophers undergo is so effective–that is, the subordination of disabled people is so integral to the everyday practice and apparatuses of philosophy– that philosophers often flagrantly reproduce it without embarrassment or shame, as this recent “Christmas tribute” to great (mostly male) philosophers demonstrates. In a previous post, I explain how the atrociously ableist language that the tribute employs operates to marginalize and exclude disabled people and disabled philosophers in particular.

Which brings me to the term crip, derived from the archaic term cripple, a signifier of otherworldliness, social ostracism, “useless eater,” defective, lesser humanity, and so on. Many disabled authors and activists began to use–that is, “reclaim”–the former term and various derivatives of it in the early 2000s; some prominent and noteworthy books in disability studies invoke the term in their titles. The claim that these authors and activists variously make is that their use of the term is both empowering to them and disempowers how the word has historically been used against us. Furthermore, the word crip has been especially linked to the development of queer theory in disability studies and has thus been regarded as denoting and connoting a particular intersectional position in disability theory and activism.

I am not convinced that the term crip operates in the way that the growing number of disabled authors and activists who invoke it think that it does.

First, I think that disabled people–authors, theorists, activists, and so on–have tended to put too much confidence in the replication of successful practices that other social movements have produced, failing to recognize the historical and political differences between the movements themselves; the social, institutional, and political contexts in which they emerged; how they emerged; the sorts of relations of power that they confront; and so on. I would argue, for instance, that the apparently reclaimed term crip retains the naturalizing and derogatory implications and connotations of the term cripple in more ways than, and to a greater extent than, the powerful and successfully reclaimed term queer has accumulated and retained earlier derogatory connotations of queer.

Second, I am (very?) suspicious of the enthusiasm with which some nondisabled philosophers have adopted the use of crip to refer to disabled people and the use of “crip theory” to refer to philosophical work on disability. Increasingly, the terms crip and crip theory appear, for instance, in CFPs and other announcements for inaccessible feminist philosophy conferences or edited collections that include bioethicists and other philosophers whose work is implicitly and explicitly harmful to disabled people. How many nondisabled philosophers who invoke the term crip advocate for disabled philosophers on search committees in their departments?

My worry is that the term crip has in fact become a sort of titillating dog-whistle for its predecessor. “We get to use the C-word! It’s politically correct and also seems cool to do so now!” If I am wrong about how the word crip has come to be strategically employed, I would love to know why nondisabled philosophers who otherwise disregard the injustices that disabled philosophers routinely confront in philosophy are so keen to promote it.