Cultivating Crip Polyphony, a Brain Fog Reading Practice, and an Art Practice, Disability Theory and Embodied Knowledge Research Methodology. Making Crip Autotheory.
This thesis by art practice and theory explores and makes a crip extension to the feminist methodology of autotheory. Taking place at the convergence of writing, art practice, theory, life, and research, it integrates disability-specific knowledge through feminist disability studies and crip theory, and engages with disability experience theoretically through these lenses. Guided by situated, reflexive research, this thesis examines socio-medical epistemic injustices and the uncertainty of embodied knowledge. Beginning with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), the research responds to the live emergence of long-covid in both the researcher and world, the subsequent revealing of a latent, progressive disability and the social, historical, political and epistemological power dynamics in misdiagnoses and medical-practice culture. Why doesn’t medical authority have answers for how people with long-covid and ME feel? What happens when medical gaslighting is believed? How can this socio-medical embodied state be unravelled through words and moving image to find out and explain?
‘Crip’ not only reclaims disabled identity, as ‘queer’ has, but also functions as a methodology. In this extension, crip attends to the unravelling of embodied knowledge, the discombobulation of the autobiographical, and the holistic cripping of one’s understanding of self, research, writing, and art practice, and as that made and found in praxis. In hollistic response, a discontinuity editing approach, borrowed from moving image, is engaged to form a thesis that is critically decomposed compared to traditional forms. Instead of a singular, unified writerly voice, this thesis embraces plural voices in Crip Polyphony. Across both writing and moving image, shifting tone, style, and register reflect the viral, pharmaceutical, and epistemological unpredictability of disability and one’s body, brain, and mind that thinks, writes and makes in time. Within this, this thesis identifies and addresses the circular problem of doing academic work with cognitive impairment by developing an alternative ‘brain fog reading practice,’ utilising memes from disability culture to read theory with shared embodied knowledge. Woven through the written thesis is the practice research documentation component as a visual essay, offering dissonances, resonances, and a mesh of possibilities between writing, art practice, theory, life, and research, through which crip autotheory’s meaning is communicated.
This work provides new thematic ground and a novel methodology for visual artists and writers, adaptable to trans studies and any other live body, brain and mind changes during research. Amid mass disablement due to long-covid and rising awareness of disability and neurodiversity, this thesis offers – not just the writing about disability – but a method for engaging and capturing the dynamic nature of ability/disability and it’s relationship with knowledge.
