Dykes, Disability & Stuff: Queer Ableisms and the Work of Cripqueer Print Cultures

Abstract:Drawing on feminist and queer disability studies methods, this article explores a print archive of disabled lesbian communities through newsletters such as Dykes, Disability & Stuff, and Hikané: The Capable Womon. These publications decentered a lesbian-feminist activism that excluded those who could not protest in public and attend lesbian events in inaccessible spaces. Swapping DIY access technologies, dating stories, and new modes of protest, they forged a print collectivity that cripped narratives of lesbian life. This essay homes in on three major themes that emerge across lesbian print cultures in the late twentieth century. I first discuss the tensions surrounding disability and labor in lesbian land movements, next the ableist elevation of “strength” in disabled and nondisabled lesbian cultures alike, particularly as they pertain to sexual expectations, and I conclude with a discussion of how disabled lesbians of color navigated the terrain between white disability communities and white nondisabled lesbian culture, as well as carceral surveillance. By looking to these queer critiques of ableism, we can understand how they foreground the current fields of crip theory and crip of color critique, and furthermore situate them within a longer genealogy of cripqueer and disability justice organizing.