How you language is who you are; language shapes your identity, relationships, and experiences. The Crip Linguistics Reader is a wide-ranging and groundbreaking collection that challenges normative ideas about what is considered “good language.” This volume draws on the expertise of contributors across a variety of fields in the humanities, social sciences, and the arts; these writers bring an interdisciplinary and critical disability perspective to languaging by challenging dominant paradigms in linguistic inquiry. Essays include a wide range of topics, such as examining the relationship between disability and race in the context of language, investigating the compulsory nature of specific forms of language education, elucidating forms of linguistic care, and exploring the transmission of ableist ideologies about language. An essential read for scholars and educators, this collection showcases Crip Linguistics as an analytical framework that will transform ideological boundaries of language and communication along with our understanding of what languaging can be.

Octavian Robinson (he/him) is associate professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Center for American Sign Language and Deaf Equity at The Ohio State University.

Erin Moriarty (she/her) is assistant professor in Anthropology at the University of Virginia. She is also an honorary Research Fellow at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Jon Henner (he/him) was associate professor of Professions in Deafness, in Specialized Education Services, School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Foreword
by Michele Friedner
 
Preface
 
Acknowledgments
 
Declination, Defiance, and Disruption: An Introduction to Crip Linguistics
Erin Moriarty and Octavian Robinson
 
Fast
Amy Gaeta
 
Part One Cripping Linguistics
 
1 Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: A Crip Linguistics Manifesto
Jon Henner and Octavian Robinson
 
2 Rupture as Ontology, Methodology, and Resistance in Crip Linguistics
Suresh Canagarajah
 
3 Why Crip the Ear, Why Crip Hearing Spaces?
Lynn Hou
 
4 Crip Linguistics for (Second) Language Acquisition
Elena Koulidobrova and Deborah Chen Pichler
 
5 Order
John Lee Clark
 
Part Two Disability Rhetoric, Race, and Linguistics
 
6 White Supremacist Themes in Linguistics
Maureen Kosse and Alayo Tripp
 
7 Caveat Emptor: “Language Gap” Rhetoric Is in the Business of Measuring, Labeling, and “Fixing” Children
Megan Figueroa
 
8 Accent for Sale: The Collusion of Racism and Ableism in the Marketplace of Pathologized Speech
Betty Yu, María Rosa Brea-Spahn, and Vishnu KK Nair
 
9 Prayer to a God Who Failed Me
Amy Gaeta
 
Part Three Compulsory Fluency
 
10 Performing Belonging and Suppressing Being: Linguistic Fidelity and Performativity as Tools for Domination
María Cioè-Peña
 
11 Enforcing Normal Speech: Uncloaking Oralism as an Agent of White Supremacy, Settler-Colonialism, Capitalism, and Nationalism
Octavian Robinson and Warda Farah
 
12 Crip Sensibilities and the Limits of Oralism in Early British Deaf Education
Jason S. Farr
 
13 Gender and Stuttering in the Early 20th Century
Evan P. Sullivan
 
14 Oralism
John Lee Clark
 
Part Four Care Work
 
15 Linguistic Care Work
Kirby Conrod
 
16 Not Your Story to Tell: Amplifying the Voices of Disabled Library Workers
LaTesha Velez
 
17 My AAC Is Part of My Gender Presentation
Tuttleturtle
 
Part Five Transmission of Ableist Language Ideologies
 
18 From the Desk of Frances Parsons: Spreading the Gospel of Total Communication
Erin Moriarty and Octavian Robinson
 
19 Crip Linguistics at the Final Frontier: Representations of Language as the Sign of Disability in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Johnathan Flowers
 
20 Prologue: Terms & Conditions
Amy Gaeta
 
Afterword
Anne Charity Hudley and Melissa Sofia Lewis
 
Glossary
 
Contributors
 
Index