Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-2021
Publication Title
South Atlantic Quarterly
Abstract
Since 2016, searches for and discussions of self-care in the United States have increased significantly. While authors who identify as people of color and/or queer critique the capitalist co-optation of this term by linking it conceptually to the work of Audre Lorde, engagement with disability remains conspicuously absent all around, given that Lorde’s use of this concept comes from her 1988 essay on cancer, “A Burst of Light.” This article proposes a reclamation of the radical crip, feminist, queer, and racialized roots of self-care offered by Lorde. Using crip-of-color critique, this article argues that a radical politics of self-care is inextricably tied to the lived experiences and temporalities of multiply marginalized disabled people. It attempts to hold the complexity of claiming time for ourselves to slow down, to take care, while also understanding the real urgency of our contemporary moment. This piece thus proposes that, while crip time is often about slowing and adapting models of time and productivity, crip time as a concept is also urgently needed to understand self-care outside of capitalist imperatives.
Keywords
disability, Audre Lorde, crip time
Volume
120
Issue
2
First Page
325
Last Page
342
DOI
10.1215/00382876-8916074
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Rights
Licensed to Smith College and distributed CC-BY under the Smith College Faculty Open Access Policy
Recommended Citation
Kim, Jina B. and Schalk, Sami, "Reclaiming the Radical Politics of Self-Care: A Crip-of-Color Critique" (2021). English Language and Literature: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/eng_facpubs/27
Comments
Peer reviewed accepted manuscript.