On heartbreak, livelihoods and art: affect and crip desire in art making assemblages

ABSTRACTThis article explores the affective dimensions of disabled, D/deaf, mad, and neurodiverse artists’ work through a livelihoods framework informed by the social and tacit dimensions of heartbreak. Heartbreak emerged during interviews with twenty artists in Canada in 2020, during a time of significant state-based policy changes that impacted disabled people’s livelihoods in the province of Ontario. Taken together, the artists’ stories form a rhizomatic cartography that takes crip wisdom and desire as significant elements of artmaking amid wider relational assemblages of affect. Drawing on Deleuzian and Guattarian concepts of desire and Puar’s difference-in/as-assemblage, researchers assert that although crip artmaking is not without joy, heartbreak is embedded in the politically aesthetic work of cultural production.KEYWORDS: Disabilitycrip artsdesireassemblagesaffectheartbreakrhizomatic cartography Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes1 We wish to thank a reviewer for their suggestion that we open the interpretation to include cripping health conventions.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.Notes on contributorsKimberlee CollinsKimberlee Collins is a PhD candidate at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. Her research emerges at the intersections of critical disability studies, climate justice and posthumanism to explore emotional responses to climate change and environmental degradation.Chelsea Temple JonesChelsea Temple Jones is an Associate Professor of Child and Youth Studies at Brock University. Dr. Jones' qualitative research focuses on disabled children's childhood studies and takes intellectual disability as a cultural phenomenon.Carla RiceCarla Rice is Professor and Tier I Canada Research Chair in Feminist Studies and Social Practice in the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences at the University of Guelph, Canada. She is founder of the Re•Vision Centre for Art and Social Justice and Principal Investigator of Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology and Access to Life.