CRIPPLE

A term used to describe people with mobility impairments, especially impairments affecting one or more limbs, cripple is an ancient term, first recorded in the Lindisfarne Gospels of the tenth century. Cripple is both a noun and a verb. The noun form refers to a disabled person (e.g., “FDR became a cripple after he contracted polio.”), while the verb means to disable or impair—to make a cripple of (e.g., “A fall from a horse crippled actor Christopher Reeve.”). The adjective form, crippled, has also been commonly used (e.g., “hospitals for crippled children”).

The term was used as a disparaging epithet as well a descriptor, and in the latter half of the twentieth century, cripple fell into disfavor for two key reasons. First, it came to be viewed as a negative and derogatory label, one that focused shaming and stigmatizing attention on one aspect of a person's body and away from the person as a whole. Second, disabled people began to realize that the term focuses on one disability category and does not adequately describe the wide range of impairments that affect people with disabilities. With a growing emphasis on common experiences of disability, the term was seen as limiting and not particularly useful. By the end of the century, cripple had become rare in public discourse, though it remained a favorite metaphor of journalists, especially headline writers.

But even as the term receded from common parlance, disability rights advocates, artists, and scholars began to reclaim cripple and similar terms (e.g., gimp), recognizing the power available in taking over andredefining terms that had previously been used to oppress them. The reclaimed term was often shortened to crip-clearly derived from the older term, but transformed. Activist and writer Laura Hershey (1999) explains: “It was short and harsh and uncompromising. It was and wasn't cripple. It reminded us of our history, but it took us forward. Crip transcended our past subjugation by making fun of an old-fashioned word.”

Spurred by the advances of the disability rights and independent living movements, people with disabilities began actively promoting crip culture and crip pride, and the transmuted term crip became an important symbol of that cultural transformation. Crip came to be seen as less exclusionary as well, since the term was really about claiming a disability identity, claiming a space in crip culture, not about a particular class of impairments.

Some writers have continued to prefer to use cripple to describe themselves, preferring among other things the word's greater specificity than more generic terms such as disabled or handicapped. “As a lover of words,” Nancy Mairs (1986) writes, “I like the accuracy with which it describes my condition: I have lost the full use of my limbs.” Another benefit for Mairs is the reaction the word receives: “People—crippled or not—wince at the word cripple, as they do not at handicapped or disabled. Perhaps I want them to wince. I want them to see me as a tough customer, one to whom the fates/ gods/viruses have not been kind, but who can face the brutal truth of her existence squarely. As a cripple, I swagger” (p. 9).

...