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J. Logan Smilges, "Crip Negativity" (U of Minnesota Press, 2023)
00:57:06
An interview with J. Logan Smilges
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C
Welcome to New Books Network. My name is Clayton Gerard. My pronouns are he, him, and today I'm here with Dr. J. Logan Smilges, author of Crip Negativity. Crip Negativity imagines anti Ableist liberation Beyond the rubrics of access and inclusion. In the 30 years since the Americans With Disabilities act was signed into law, the lives of disabled people have not improved nearly as much as activists and politicians had hoped. Encrypt Negativity J. Logan Smilges shows us what's gone wrong and what we can do to fix it. Leveling a strong critique of the category of disability and liberal disability politics, Smiljes asks and imagines what horizons might exist for the liberation of those oppressed by Ableism beyond access and inclusion. Inspired by Models of negativity and queer studies, black studies, and crip theory. Smilges proposes that bad crip feelings might help all of us to care gently for one another, even as we demand more from the world that we currently believe to be possible. So, first of all, thank you so much for being here with me today. Dr. Smilges, I wonder if you'd begin the interview by telling us a little bit about yourself.
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Of course. Thank you so much, Clayton, for inviting me to be here and for talking with me. I recognize that a lot of time goes into these sorts of conversations, so I am. I am deeply appreciative. I am a queer, trans, disabled person who is deeply committed to disability justice and to traunt feminism. I am currently an assistant professor of English language and literature at the University of British Columbia, where I tend to teach courses in disability studies, rhetorical studies, and the history of medicine. This is my second book, and I would say the book that probably is closest to my heart of the two. Not that. Not that I. Not that my first one was not close to my heart. But, you know, despite what parents say, they always have a favorite.
- [03:56]
C
Yes. Awesome. Thank you for that introduction. I am looking forward to diving into our conversation today. I found crip negativity to be very generative and refreshing to read, so I just really appreciate all the work that went into that. I understand why it could be a favorite child in that sense, if we're making that comparison. But as we start this discussion, I was wondering if you could first tell us about how this book came about for you.
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Absolutely. I first started thinking about what would come to be called crip negativity in graduate school when I started started therapy for the first time. And I should clarify that I actually have spent the majority of my life enrolled in some type of therapeutic practice, but it was not until graduate school that it was in affirmative therapy rather than something like conversion therapy. And so when I arrived to this affirming, safer space, I. I was encouraged to start examining my feelings, which was something that I had not had the space nor encouragement to do as a child. And I very quickly discovered that I had accumulated a reservoir of bad feelings that I not only had zero vocabulary to talk about, but also had very little stamina to sit with and actually feel. And so the project of crip negativity came out of a prolonged period of reconciliation with my own bad crip feelings, which is of course, a phrase I use throughout the book to name bad feelings that people who confront ableism experience. And ultimately, it was the pandemic that provided the both the motivation and the conditions under which I was able to write this book. I had more time than I think I probably would have if I were going to campus and every day. And I also was watching my friends, my loved ones, grow sick and sometimes die in front of me. And so even as I was building a vocabulary and a toolbox to talk about my bad crip feelings, I was also feeling them grow and deepen in ways that I needed to write about because I needed a community to feel with them. And then the book happened.
- [07:03]
C
Love that. And the book just happened. I love how just flows out of you. But yeah, I totally understand and I appreciate you speaking to that and the difficulty of navigating a lot of these bad feelings because that's not often something that we confront in our society, specifically when they're, you know, like bad crip feelings or, you know, those kinds of feelings that are more on the margins and experienced by people on the margins. So kind of diving in deeper into the concept of crip negativity, you explain in the first chapter. That crip negativity quote captures a growing gnawing skepticism you feel toward the language of access and the category of disability. Would you mind describing for listeners the three pronged way that you define and use crip negativity or the three handed way that you describe?
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A
I will certainly try to. The basic definition that I give for crip negativity is that it refers to bad crip feelings being felt cripply. And if we break down that definition into its constitutive parts, I think we're left with perhaps that three prong definition that you refer to. One part or one prong is or are the bad crip feelings themselves. And bad crip feelings refer to any feeling, any bad feeling that a person feels while trying to survive an ableist world. And I intentionally use the language of crip rather than disability because I'm trying to sever the connection between ableism and disability. Which is not to say that disabled people do not have incredibly valuable knowledge about Ableism, but rather it's to emphasize that ableism is not owned by disability, that there are in fact many people who, for lots of different reasons, do not use or perhaps do not experience disability in the ways that we currently understand it, but who nevertheless feel themselves suffocated by ableism. And so bad crip feelings refers to bad feelings that lots of different people can feel while they're trying to navigate an ableist world. And then the second part of the definition, the being felt cripply part, refers to the fact that much of psychiatry is premised on the pathologization of affect, the pathologization of feeling improperly or badly. This is something that the scholar Janelle Johnson has written really, really beautifully and powerfully about. So to feel a feeling cripply is to feel too much of it, is to feel too little of it, is to express it in the wrong way, a way that others consider dangerous or harmful or inappropriate or ineffective or apolitical or de political, but in some way not useful or not expected. And so to combine these two pieces, both the bad crippling and the being felt cripply, is to zero in on a form of feeling that I think is both all too familiar to those of us who are confronting ableism on a daily basis and yet not talked about nearly enough in community, especially in critical community spaces such as the field of disability studies. And then the third, I suppose, prong of this definition is captured by the opening sentence of your question around my skepticism around the language of access and the category of disability. And this skepticism is not directed at the fact that people need access. I need additional access. Most of the people in my life need additional access. I am not skeptical of those needs. I'm also not skeptical of the fact that disability exists or that it is a useful category for people to understand themselves and to find people who are like them, sometimes even to organize as a collective. What I am skeptical of is the notion that all access is good and that disability is an apolitical or decontextualized phenomenon. Instead, I think that both access and disability, in order to be liberatory concepts, need to be situated within a broader matrix of power that includes factors we typically don't associate express explicitly with access and disability, including things like class and race and gender and sexuality and geographic background or citizenship status. These factors all play into a person's experiences not only of ableism, but of power more generally. And it's only when we consider these experiences in their totality that we can begin to situate access and disability in a kind of progressive, radical manner.
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C
Awesome. Thank you for speaking to that. I really appreciate how you illuminate the fact that all this exists within this matrix of power, and it's important to be skeptical of that. And I'd love to kind of segue this into a discussion about some of the methodology for the book and how you went about doing this work. So crip negativity draws from and also challenges queer negativity and the antisocial thesis that you discuss in the book. Another aspect of the methodology that I found really compelling was how you say crip negativity is, quote, informed by conversations in disability studies and mad studies on how people's experiences of disability, trauma, and madness can contour their relationships to temporality. So you're doing a lot of really interesting things in this book, in this very short book. So I would love to see if you could tell us about some of the methodology behind it and the interventions that you're making.
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A
I can certainly try. I'm an interdisciplinary scholar. That is the fact of the matter. I call together both methodologies and methods from whatever field I think are going to be most useful and most, I suppose, accountable to the objects that I'm talking about. And so, with the intention of disentangling ableism from the category of disability, I wanted to ensure that I was bringing in perspectives, including those from queer studies and mad studies and black studies, that don't always receive the attention that they're due, I believe, from the field of disability studies or more broadly in conversations about access and ableism. In queer studies and in crip theory, Popularized by Robert McRuwer. And in black studies, particularly in the kind of sub field of Afro pessimism, there are long and nuanced conversations taking place about negativity. I wanted to ensure that I was paying respect to those conversations not only by citing them in acknowledgment of their existence, but also engaging deeply with them to ask, what can these conversations that are already taking place tell us in disability studies and as disabled folks or as folks confronting ableism, what can these conversations tell us about how we should navigate bad feelings? And I learned quite a bit. And I don't want to summarize all of it, because that's why there's the book. But what I can say is that in queer studies specifically, which is the field that I was originally trained in for grad school, and it's, I suppose, one of the primary fields in which I intervene in my first book, in Queer Silence. But in queer studies, there is an established legacy of critical negativity, which you refer to as the antisocial thesis. And this legacy has received quite a bit of what I would say is legitimate criticism. It's a criticism often shaped around the fact that the antisocial thesis does not account for variation of negativity, the fact that not everyone shares the same bad feelings and not. Not everyone is offered the same resources or opportunities to excise those bad feelings. And so As a result, queer studies has somewhat backed itself into a corner where on the one hand, they have a legacy of negativity that isn't particularly useful to anyone who's not a white, non disabled gay man. And on the other hand, they have a kind of contemporary iteration of queer studies that has not yet found out what to do with bad feelings, if not use that problematic legacy of the antisocial thesis. And so my hope is that trip negativity offers something of an addendum to the antisocial thesis that at once acknowledges the value, the necessary value of sitting with bad feelings, while also attempting to embrace the fact that different people feel different bad feelings, that different people feel have suffered different consequences because of those bad feelings, and that bad feelings ultimately have different implications for the people who feel them, depending on the conditions of their lives. And it's the embrace of that kind of difference that was enabled for me through black studies, specifically through various folks engagements and responses to Afro pessimism. I was I learned so much from folks like Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten and Zakiya Ahmad Jackson, who write extensively about refusal, who write about forms of disengagement with the world as it is, that acknowledges wholesale the repercussions of such a disengagement of what happens when you say no. Because unlike what the antisocial thesis claims, saying no to the world as it is is not an easy task, and it often has debilitating, sometimes even fatal consequences for the people who do it. And so being able to to think across the risks and affordances of negativity was one of my primary objectives with this project and, and one that I hope crip negativity can can contribute to not only within the field of disability studies, but also in conversation with these other fields that I'm drawing on.
- [19:31]
C
Yeah, awesome. Thank you for that. I'm excited because I'm sure we'll get into more discussion about refusal and that aspect of crip negativity. But thinking a little bit more about the writing of this book. I really appreciate how vulnerable you were, and I mentioned before that it was refreshing to read because there are quite a few parts where you speak to a lot of your personal experience. There was one part specifically where you say, quote, some days my bad feelings are felt so cripply that I live in a heap of tears and blankets. Sometimes I feel despair, total fucking despair. So that in itself resonates with me. But I was also wondering about some of the reactions to this book and those kinds of sentiments specifically, since this is within the genre of scholarly writing. And what has the experience been? Has there been pushback or have people greatly appreciated it? I would love to hear some of that.
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A
I really appreciate this question because it gets at. It gets at something I think about quite frequently when I write. His shortest answer to your question is that I have not received pushback since I finished graduate. It was true when I was writing my dissertation that my advisor was. I'm not sure if I know the right word we could say with how vulnerable I was being. But I insisted on doing it then, and I am grateful that since that point I have not received much pushback. What I will say is that one of the effects I have noticed of being vulnerable in my writing, of sharing quite a bit of myself in my scholarship, is that sometimes other scholars go in on the autobiographical elements of my work rather than engaging critically with the argument that those autobiographical elements are meant to support a political and an ethical decision for me to situate myself in relation to my scholarship. And that's often the function of the autobiographical element. It's a way for me to say, here are the stakes for me, this project. Here is my relationship to the object that I'm talking about or the argument I'm making. Here are my relationships with the communities that I'm writing about. Here is why this field that I'm intervening is important. Those states or stating those states is, in my opinion, one of the most important, important things that a scholar can do, because it lets your reader know, here is who I am, here is why you should trust me, and here's where the limits of my knowledge are. I'm not claiming to know everything. I'm not claiming. I always want to engage as generously as I can with my interlocutors. And I hope that being honest about who I am in relation to my work will allow others to. To engage generously with me. However, I think sometimes those intentions. Well, perhaps it's not that the intentions are misconstrued, but rather the vulnerability that I offer in my work is taken to mean something different than I intend. I think sometimes other scholars don't know what to do with the fact that I'm sharing so much of myself. And so they just kind of respond almost with, like, a shock factor. What I find interesting and valuable, though, is that people who are not scholars, people who are activists and organizers or just lay people who read my work, including crip negativity, are the ones who are able to respond most critically and productively to the arguments that I'm Making because they more quickly are able to synthesize my disclosures along with my arguments. And for me, that's such a wonderful reminder of the fact that the work that I'm doing, the work that I tried to be doing, is work that is always going to be in conversation with folks beyond academia. That's what I want, and I'm so incredibly grateful that that's what's happening.
- [24:26]
C
Great. I love hearing about that because I definitely agree. I feel like there have been a lot, or quite a few conversations that I've been around more recently where people are trying to bring scholarly work to more public attention instead of just off in the ivory towers. And this like, disclosure that you're talking about, this like sharing the stakes in which you're writing, this is, for me personally, very powerful because I do find that a lot more important and significant than just a scholar writing about something because they find it interesting. So I appreciate you bringing that level of. What's the right word? Vulnerability. I guess I'll stick with that word to this work. So to kind of transition into the actual book and going through the various chapters that you've written. The first one has the provocative title of Access Thievery, or I guess the first chapter after the introduction, this opens up a discussion on how disability activism is. Is inflected by citizenship, race, white supremacy, CIS heteronormativity, and significantly, ideas of criminality. Would you mind describing what you mean by access thievery first and then also how you trace these connections?
- [25:59]
A
I. I can. Yeah. Access theory, for me, refers to all of the ways that sometimes people have to steal the access that they need to not only survive, but to thrive, to live comfortably and fully. The first chapter of the book, which I suppose is also the introduction, I am pretty critical of Access because the particular forms of access that I'm talking about are diluted, deeply liberal forms of what we might call integrative access, essentially accommodation. And yet, in the second chapter on access Thievery, I want to acknowledge and sit with the fact that people need access to this. So as critical as we want to be of access, particularly of some forms of access, it is also the case that we cannot get around the fact some of us need to additional access, different forms of access in order to get on with our lives. And access thievery refers to the specific strategies or techniques that people will use to secure the access they need to get on with their lives without necessarily receiving it from given. From given institutions or state bodies, sometimes because they don't want to use those existing routes sometimes because they can't use those existing routes, whether they are denied services or securing those services might incur other forms of inaccessibility or violence. But regardless, act of thievery is the extralegal and sometimes almost criminal or actually criminal ways that people receive or secure their access. One additional note that I'll make about that, about that chapter, is that it allowed me to think, to think really carefully about the about the ways that access is sometimes restrictable to what we might consider disability inflected needs. So often when, for instance, people are planning to host an academic conference, when they ask people, what are your access needs? Or what kinds of access should we provide? That question is almost always implied in the context of disability, right? What kinds of sign language interpreters do we need? What kinds of quiet spaces should we provide? And yet what access thievery really brings to mind is the fact that access is so much wider than these particular disability inflected needs. Because it is also the case that conferences can be inaccessible because they're too expensive, because they exist in cities that are inhospitable to trans and gender non conforming people, because they are being hosted at venues that do not properly pay their workers, because they are being held on grounds that are either historically or currently violent towards racialized populations. These forms of inaccessibility don't get talked about nearly enough when we think about access. And so Access Seabury is urging both the field of disability studies and disabled people, and folks beyond the category of disability more broadly, to think expansively not only about the definition of access, but also about the strategies that people are using in order to secure that access, often in ways that are not occurring in conference planning boardrooms, but are, but are taking place on the street, that are taking place in the bedroom, that are taking place via group chats. All different spaces that I talk about in the chapter that are not formal but are nevertheless essential to people's survival.
- [30:52]
C
Yeah, I love how you also mentioned thriving in addition to surviving. And you had stated that explicitly in the beginning of your answer, and you also mentioned it quite a few times in the chapter because it does make a difference oftentimes. And just common understandings, it's just, you know, access is what you need to be able to get into a building or any of those logistical things that you're speaking to. But there is this other level that access can speak to as well. So I appreciate you teasing that out and speaking to those pieces.
- [31:29]
A
Absolutely. And I'll add to that a phrase that I have been thinking about quite a bit since I finished writing the book, is the phrase reasonable accommodation, which is what gets used most often in academic and other institutional settings to refer to the forms of access that the institution is willing to provide. Right. What they deem reasonable. And I think. I mean, it's almost not even worth pointing out that the word reasonable is already ableist. Right. Like we're ableist from the very beginning. But setting that aside, it's also the case that, as you just pointed out, too often access is thought about in bare minimum terms. What do people need in order to be realigned with this kind of arbitrary norm that we're assuming other bodies are capable of fulfilling? And what I love about thinking with access, thievery, in addition to the expansiveness of the phrase in terms of the kinds of access that it includes across different kind of identitarian categories, is that it also invites us to think in terms of Paris. Right. I don't just want reasonable accommodation. I want unreasonable accommodation. I want so much accommodation that by the time I enter the space, I'm already light years ahead of everywhere else. That's the kind of accommodation I want, and I want that for everybody. I want all of us to. Video game terminology. I want all of us to receive all of the handicaps all of the time. I want life to be easy and I want it to be plush and gentle. And I think we are trained to think about access in meager terms, in scarce terms, but we don't have to do that. And as soon as we move toward the language of thievery, which I contextualize and explain quite a bit in the chapter, but as we move toward the language of ibery, it opens up our capacity to imagine both more forms of access and more quantity of access. Right. Just more plentitude. And I think that that's really exciting. That makes me really excited because it allows us to dream of a world of access, an accessible world with a culture of access, which is what Ada Hubrig and Ruth Asorio call it, a culture of access that we don't have right now and we can't even begin to pursue until we're able to imagine it.
- [34:19]
C
Yeah, I love that. It makes me think of terms that I've been hearing more recently of like disabled joy or mad joy, and how people are trying to bring those kinds of topics to the fore. And it's just a cool thought to be sitting here talking about crip negativity, but also how it can be so hopeful and joyful and Thinking about, you know, not just surviving, but thriving as well. And also how you're talking about the ways in which we're conceptualizing access of like reasonable accommodations like that directly perpetuates a lot of the bad Crip feelings that are some of the basis for this book. To go along with that, you talk a lot more about the bad Crip feelings felt cryptly in the following chapter where you talk about labor and the labor that's required to exist in a disabled mind body within our ableist world. And one of the strategies or techniques that you use in this chapter is what you call a life strike. As a crip negative response. Can you speak to what a life strike is and also potentially how this relates to a lot of what we're seeing in this cultural moment with strikes and protests more broadly, Thoroughly.
- [35:49]
A
The briefest definition or most concise definition I can offer for a life strike is that it is an intentional bowing out of one or more of life activities, that it goes beyond the labor required for your own self. Sustenance and the motivation for pursuing a life strike can be varied and many, but they often share the characteristic of the fact that life itself has become laborious. Everything you're doing, even if it's not explicitly work, has nevertheless taken on the feeling of labor. It makes you tired, it bores you, you are irritated. More often, you would prefer to be. I think one of the sentencing that I quite like in that chapter is when I say that life isn't working when life itself feels like work. That is the condition under which a light strike becomes useful. I use the language of a strike because I want to emphasize the absolutism of the movement to say, I can't do any more. It's not a compromise, it's not a negotiation. It's a boundary. I can't do this anymore. I cannot come to this meeting. I cannot have this conversation. I cannot continue this activity. It's a boundary. I can't do it. I also am in that chapter, really trying to think critically about the relationship between individual boundaries and collective modes of refusal. So while a life strike is something that is practiced individually, right. Each of us might have our own variations of a life strike. They can only take place effectively when talked about in community. Because none of us can exist entirely independently. All of us require on the collective labor of our communities or of the people we employ, or simply the people around us. All of us are dependent in that way. And so in the chapter, I envision light striking as a mode of both setting A boundary, but also communicating that boundary with the people that you are interdependent with in order to ensure that everyone is given what they need. And sometimes that means the light strike is not going to be possible in the way that you want it. Sometimes access friction exists in such a way that people are not able to provide what you need to strike, or you're not able to provide what someone else needs in order to strike. That's a reality. And it's one of. I think for me, one of the key sources of bad feeling is we are left with a world so tiresome we have to strike, and yet we are not provided with the resources we need to carry those strikes out. That is the. That is a source of bad Crip feeling. I also think it's the case, as we're seeing and have been seen for as long as collective labor movements have existed, that feeling, those bad feelings in community feels really good. And so life, striking though it is, this individual practice is something that, like all of the crypt negative practices I talk about in the book, is something that must be practiced in the context of a broader Crip negative communion wherein bad Crip feelings can be shared and exchanged and simply sat with or sat in for as long as they need to be.
- [40:28]
C
Yeah, thank you for speaking to that. Transitioning to the next chapter. You speak about Crip negativity as critique and you say, quote, ableism is sometimes just a fancy word for society that doesn't give a fuck. And that's a very poignant way to capture the damaging feelings and conditions that ableism causes. I would love to continue on this thread about how you position Crip negativity to be a mode of accountability. And we've discussed quite a few ways just in this conversation. But I wanted to see if you could just briefly and clearly state the possibilities of Crip negativity and what the Crip negative critiques can bring to us in scholarship or in activism or just culturally.
- [41:27]
A
In the final chapter of the book, I introduce Crip negative critique as having really two different forms for functions. One of them is to intensify a more traditional disability critique. It's an intensification on one hand because it bends disability critique back toward the category of disability. Right. It's really, it's reciprocal, self reflective in that way. And on the other hand, it's intensified because it does not concede, it does not acquiesce to the forms of access and accommodation that are typically espoused under the banner of disability rights activism. Right. It says that's not enough. It's not enough. We want more, we deserve more, and we will not be satisfied until we receive more. Right? So one kind of expression of crip negative critique is this intensification of more traditional disability critique. But the other expression of crip negative critique, and the one that I think I have been feeling more intensely or indulging more regularly since the publication of the book, is that sometimes the crip negative critique recognizes that criticism in and of itself, the act of critique doesn't give us what we want it to. That sometimes the labor, emotional or otherwise, that we expend issuing the critique is not worth the payout because we already know the person we're critiquing doesn't care or isn't going to listen, or the person that we are speaking the critique to already agrees with us, so we don't need to tell them. And so a negative critique includes a kind of space or opportunity for critics to not critique, to choose to just sit with their bad feelings. And sometimes sitting with those bad feelings is itself a form of critique, not because it's projecting it onto the object deserving of the criticism, but because it's allowing the critic themselves to envision a world in which that problematic object does not exist or has been reconciled or rectified in a way that's productive. And that in itself, I believe, is valuable. That is useful, because it's not until we have sat with our own bad feelings that we can begin moving forward into the kind of liberated future that we ultimately want want to occupy. And so what I try to do in that last chapter is show how those two expressions of negative critique can exist alongside one another, how they can both intensify the forms of disability or anti ableist critique that we're already used to engaging, and how it can also leave room for us to abandon that critique, however temporarily, just so that we can be with our bad crip feelings and that being with is itself a form of feeling them cripply.
- [45:14]
C
Yeah, I love how you have thought through these responses so critically and thoughtfully and carefully. And I would love to discuss that more because throughout the book you're talking about balancing these bad crip feelings and in addition to experiences with structural, political and ideological issues. And you conceptualize a lot of the major concepts in this book as specifically crip negative responses, like access, thievery, a life strike, and critique. Those are verbs in some sense. Why was it important to you to not just theorize about crip negativity, but also focus on crypt negative responses?
- [46:03]
A
I Love that question, because it's absolutely something that was intentional for me. When I started writing this book, I wanted to prioritize the fact that even though the language of Crip negativity may be new, the crackdle of Crip negativity and certainly the existence of bad Crip feelings are the furthest thing from new. All of us are familiar with bad Crip feelings. I believe even people who don't typically fall under the rubric of disability or who don't claim disability. I believe all of us are familiar with bad Crip feelings because all of us are implicated by ableism. All of us are familiar with these feelings. And many people have been engaging variations of acts of thievery and light strikes and Crips critique or Crip negative critique, regardless of the language that they were using to describe them for as long as anti ableist efforts have been around. So I wanted to emphasize these practices or these applications of crypt negativity as a way to honor the fact that they already exist and that disability community and anti ableist communities have so much to teach us about survival and thriving that don't nearly get captured enough in the existing vocabulary of the field of disability studies. And so while I know already that this particular book is insufficient, it doesn't capture everything that it could have captured or that I wish it would have captured. My hope is that it is gestural. Right. I tried to come up with some language that gestures toward a much wider field of existing Crip negative strategies that are already in practice if we begin listening and paying attention. And I think in a way that is an extension of a lot of what I was doing in my first book in Queer, trying to expand our sensorium a little bit to think about iterations of queerness that don't typically fall under the rubric of queerness. And here in Crip negativity, I'm trying to expand our grammar for modes of Crips living that don't always fall under the rubric or the grammar of disability.
- [48:45]
C
Yeah, I love that. And how you specifically mentioned shining a light on these practices and applications that have been going on for as long as anti ableism efforts have existed, as you mentioned. I think that's one of the powerful parts of the book, is reading it. You're like, oh, this makes sense because this is what I see happening here. Or I was practicing access thievery and didn't even notice it. And you know, those kinds of things. So I really appreciate that and that you're highlighting these applications in addition to the theoretical contributions that they make to kind of wrap up. And I don't want this to be a spoiler for the end of the book, but I will say it's one of my favorite parts is when you're mentioning. You talk about kind of the conditions of falling apart and decay and how these kinds of ideas and processes can fit in with Crip negativity, specifically in an abolitionist frame of reference, in some ways. So how does crip negativity invite us into a condition of abolition and open up better ways to. For us to care for one another?
- [50:06]
A
I'll start by giving credit to someone whose work was really useful. Sympathetic Little Monster by Cameron Awkward Rich was an essential book for my theorizing of negative critique in particular, and how much of the language around falling apart, decay, and even abolition, in a way, were derived from one of the particular poems in that project that I analyzed in the last chapter. And for me, abolition, as I have talked a little bit about before, is a mode of refusal, is a mode of saying, this world as it is is not enough for me. I want more. I deserve more. And in order to insist on that deservingness, sometimes we have to let go of a lot of the things that we know well and that, because of that familiarity, make us feel comfortable, including forms of integrative access, which we might also think of as accommodation that I critique pretty, pretty thoroughly over the course of the book. And yet, by letting go of those familiar objects, we're invited to care for one another in ways that we might not have previously thought possible. And these forms of care are very much tethered to bad feeling. There is. There is a mode of care that I'm not always sure I know I have, that I. That I have good words to describe because I, even in the book, tend to resort to descriptions of scenes. But it's a mode of care between two or more people that feel like shit. And they know they're going to keep feeling like shit, and they're not really sure what would make them feel less like shit. And so instead they stop trying to move out of the shit and they just accept the fact that for right now, shit is what we've got. But thank God I'm not the only one sitting in it. And that decision to be with someone in their negativity is some of the most beautiful, tender care that exists. It's that form of care that has saved up my life more times than I can count. And it's that form of care that I believe everybody deserves to experience because it does not insist that they feel differently. It only insists that they feel alongside. And that's something we can do. That is something that even while we are letting go of what is familiar and safe and comfortable, we can still do because we don't have to do it by ourselves.
- [53:23]
C
Well, I love that response, and I don't know that there's a better way to wrap up this conversation, so I'll just leave it at that. But thank you so much for being willing to speak with me, Dr. Smilges. And is there anything we didn't get a chance to touch on that you would like to talk about or any upcoming projects or something you would like to share with listeners?
- [53:45]
A
I would love to talk about a new project that actually, I don't think I've talked to anyone else. You get an exclusive. That's right. But I am. I am finishing up my first novel, which in many ways is an attempt to narrate or story many of the, I suppose politics in crypt negativity as well, as well as my first book, Queer Sirens. It's a dark academic novel, if you're familiar with that genre. I agree. I think so. And it has been one of the more emotional and yet satisfying projects that I've worked on. It will probably still be a while until it sees the world, even though at last count I think I'm at about 130,000 words. So I got to wrap it up here.
- [54:53]
C
Wow, that's interesting.
- [54:54]
A
I got to wrap it up, but I am very excited for eventually when I get to share it with folks.
- [55:03]
C
That's awesome. I am excited for it too. I can't wait to hear more about it and see it come out. But yeah, depending on when you're listening to this episode, maybe you can check it out then if we're a couple years in the future. But that's awesome to hear about. And again, just thank you so much for joining me, Dr. Smilges. Like I said, this book was incredible and refreshing to read. So thank you so much for the time and effort and thoughtfulness that you put into the book and for being willing to share it with us out in the world.
- [55:36]
A
Well, thank you so much for having me, Clayton. It was such a pleasure.
- [55:40]
C
Thank you.