Embracing My Folds: Feeling through A Crip Genealogical Lens

Keywords: Crip Theory, Transgender Rage, Fat Studies

Abstract

This autotheortical exercise leverages the work of Fat, Trans, and Crip scholarship to consider the places where these disciplines overlap. Looking at themes of hanger, softness, and communal care the author works to locate how theory and practice work within the skin of a Fat, Trans, Crip, Poor white trash person living in the Midwest. 

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This conversation will get uncomfortable. It always does. There is something about being a Fatty and a Tranny that makes people look away, even if they do not want to. The alternative is that they stare, often feeling comfortable asking too much. Living in a white, fat, trans, neurodivergent body that experiences chronic pain means I am used to this sort of shuffle. While the folds of my identity have formed over the years with a changing body and politic, a few have been with me since the beginning. I was birthed into a white trash family of fats who experience systemic class despair but also greatly benefit from white supremacy. 

I have always been fat. While I am estranged from my mother due to queer and transphobia and an onslaught of familial abuse, one of my only regrets about severing that tie was leaving a few of my childhood items behind. One of those prized possessions is a Champion Chubby trophy from a baby pageant I won as a toddler. While I have strong feelings against child pageantry as an adult, I will not lie to you, I want that trophy. It is a reminder that my fat has always been with me. It was with me when my leg folds were being judged in a crowd. It was with me in elementary school, when a boy named Curtis oinked in my face and I made his nose bleed. It was with me when I had to special order a formal dress for middle school prom, and again the first time I got told my severe menstrual cramps would slow down “if I could lose some weight.” My fat wrapped around me time and time again as people of many genders told me that they wanted to fuck me but keep it between us. 

I have always been trans. Even when I did not know the term. Even when I could not see it in myself but could in others. My transness was not defined until my early thirties, and I blame fatphobia for that, both external and internal. Fatness blinded me and those around me from questioning my gender. Before transition, I described myself as a mix between a Fat Miss Frizzle and Miss Honey (from Matilda). I would embrace Frizzle and my love for sharing knowledge but never our shared love for physically morphing our expression through camp aesthetics and other bendings of the norm.  Miss Honey feels safe in a way I have always strived to be. Kind and patient, but always a strong advocate. Now, I understand that this is due not only to my personality but also to structural forces that told me what being a “good fat” was. Always kind, helpful, and a soft place to land. Miss Honey has a neutrality to her that allows others to get what they need from her, while she rarely advocates for her wants and desires. The Frizzle and the Honey within me worked as a sort of shield from an interrogation of who I was and who I wanted to be. 

Like my transness, my neurodivergences are a deep fold that was overlooked and unnamed for most of my life.  Growing up in a body assigned female at birth to poor, working class, underinsured folks meant that a diagnosis was never for me. It was not until I had experienced severe adult intimate trauma that I was given language for the ways my brain works. Once that cat was out of the bag, so many things made sense. 

Not only am I white, but I am WHITE. My super fair complexion and ginger hair make it impossible for me to spend too much time in the sun. I come from a family that works hard to uphold their whiteness. While I want to center my whiteness and the privilege it holds, I also want to center my constant goal of being a race traitor whenever and wherever I can. I reject white supremacy, am an abolitionist, and I work to utilize my privileged position inside the academy to rebuke it and funnel resources and knowledge out of it in any way possible. Theorists including De’Shaun Harrison have helped me understand that my fat and trans identities place me further from whiteness than closer to it, as Fatness and Transness were created alongside Blackness and Disability to further white supremacist tactics. [1] Harrison writes that “One’s body is their own, but how Bodies are collectively engaged—and where they exist in proximity to power—is dependent completely on what identities one embodies.”[2]

Chronic Pain is a newer formed fold. One I am watching curve before my eyes and feel within my joints. It began building as a young person with severe migraines, often stress-induced. After I broke my back in my early adulthood while working a physical retail job, daily underlying pain became the norm. It changed how I can move in my body. As I age, generational arthritis and joint pain are creeping in, showing me that this fold will always be developing and morphing based on my mood, the weather, or the physical conditions in which I am in.  

The following pages serve as an embrace of these folds. A public display of my body, bodies like mine, and the affects that move them. While each could be taken independently through a deep dive into Trans, Fat, Crip, or Critical Race Theory, I want to embrace where the folds touch. Where the experiences show a connection between these marginalized positions to highlight the importance of testimony within an “affective commons” of a Trans, Crip, Fat, Poor White Trash scholar. The main vehicle with which I will be driving is found in the labor of love that is Crip Genealogies, edited by Mel Y. Chen, Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich (Chen et al). Here I rely on their “Introduction” to set a framework to discuss the fold overlaps that are hanger, breakage, and communal care.

Crip Genealogies offers perspectives and frameworks from some of the most prominent thinkers in Crip and Disability Theory. Chen, Kafer, Kim, and Minich open the anthology as a guide to where the field(s) have been and where they hope they will go. Their collection does not stray away from making it very clear that “the praxis of crip is about being in relation to each other in such a way that risks a falling out with disability studies” and “indexes a wide range of positions, orientations, subjects, and acts, not all of them academic.”[3] This position of being in conflict with your field is not something that is contained to Crip conversations. I read them within the realms of Trans, Fat, and Critical Race theories. We live through them in community-organizing spaces. So much circles back to whether we are trying to make space for more of us or work to build something completely new, something we have not even imagined yet. 

Here is where I want to draw my first connection in the fold overlaps within Trans, Fat, Crip. They rely on work from voices who were never supposed to enter the academy. The scholarship relies on folks who were never going to fit in the boxes/genders/size ranges/race/class that the university was built for. There is a shared knowing that we are a guest who could and have been uninvited. I chose to focus my lens on Crip Theory and Fat Theory because I think it may be the most accessible vessel to speak through, as fatness and disability are both something that can touch just about anyone, at some point in their life. Bodies are constantly in shift and even if you are not a person who will move from one gender to others, learn that your racial and ethnic identities are other than what you have been told, or someone who never experiences a class shift, you can get fat and your ability will change. [4]

I follow many of their leads by not just talking about folds, but MY folds, through auto-theoretical practice as an act of resistance dedicated to the multitudes of ancestors, elders, peers, and youths who have had pieces of themselves violently erased or silenced. This models what Chen et al asks of us in Crip Genealogies: “never forget the knowledge that does not emerge in the sight of institutional knowledge management, that escapes its notice. The knowledge that has to be hidden for survival. Theory in the flesh.” [5] Shifting between and through my identities and the theoretical conversations happening within them, I also model Cathy Cohen’s call for “destabilization, and not the deconstruction or abandonment, of identity categories” in “Punks, Bull Daggers, and Welfare Queens” which “recogniz[es] the many manifestations of power, across and within categories” as a queering/cripping of form. [6]

"Hunger: Eating as Manifestation"

I will never forget the first day I felt hangry. I was new to testosterone and had been told many things about starting HRT, but no one prepared me for HANGER. I had been lost in work for hours and forgotten to eat or drink anything, which was not uncommon for me. When I emerged from my work haze, I felt a fire in my belly. I panicked. Food was urgent and I would stop short of nothing to eat. My partner at the time walked in the kitchen as I was slamming cabinets and frantic. They asked me a simple question, but I could not hear them. When they called me out for not listening, I yelled back at them. As a trans person themselves, they caught on to what was causing me to act so far outside my norm. I eventually ate something, and the hanger left, but the fire it started in my belly never did. That fire eventually helped me leave an abusive relationship. It helped me survive.

In the early days of my HRT experience, people would ask me what I liked most about my hormones. I often told them that T cut my give-a-damn by about a quarter. It allowed me to not offer so much of myself that I was overconsumed, something I was/am intimately familiar with. Looking back, I understand that T helped me ground in my body in a multitude of ways. It also helped me realize my divine power. It helped me reconnect to my gut biologically and spiritually. It allowed me to recognize the hanger I had for a better world for myself and those that I love.

Hunger is a near-universal experience, starving on the other hand is not. While folks may understand what it is like to skip a meal, malnutrition up to and including death is a slow and painful way to die. [7] While I have never been starving physically, I have witnessed folks and been part of the systematic starving of rights that marginalized people experience in this country, particularly in terms of public policy and healthcare. 

In Crip Genealogies, the editors discuss “the feelings that guide [their] method.”[8]  The first feeling resonated hard with me and gave me the vision for this piece. They offer up the question: “Might crankiness be a crip method?” [9] My stomach growled, I have felt and heard this all before, through the concept of Transgender Rage. [10] I felt the fire in my belly again. Of course, my Transgender Rage is also Crip Rage and Fat Rage and Poor White Trash rage. I have been starved by the system through a multitude of my experiences. I have found nourishment in community and mutual aid and I have tasted what the future could be.  And it pissed me off.

Here, I present my first fold for consideration. Hanger. Here I take the understanding of hunger and place it alongside crankiness/rage to explain the feeling in my gut that must be hanger. It is one of the things that drives me to keep going, fighting, writing for change. Hanger, like “crankiness, is a yearning for more.”[11] A willing-to-do-just-about-anything to be fed and feed folks I care for, even when that makes me out to be “a hangry monster.” A monster for taking up space, wearing crop tops, letting my body hair freely grow, sitting when I need to fucking sit, and pushing back at and within the institution and at other systems that uphold white supremacy.

This type of “hanger” can be read as negativity based on normative standards explored in Crip and Trans theories. J. Logan Smilges posits it in Crip Negativity. They define “crip negativity” as “bad crip feelings felt cripply. It refers, on one hand, to the many bad feelings that disabled, debilitated, and otherwise nonnormatively embodyminded people encounter with some regularity: pain, guilt, shame, embarrassment, exhaustion, fear, and anger, just to name a few.”[12]It is also present in Hil Malatino’s Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad. Malatino works to expand “the genres of trans living” that we are often allowed to engage with: hero worship, demonology, and victimology. In Side Affects, Malatino complicates the narrative of what it means to feel bad in your body as a trans* person and the ways that we survive. One of the genres in their work is rage. “Rage is an orienting affect. It moves us. It is a repellant affect, meaning it scares away certain others and, in doing so, propels us as well. It is our vest of porcupine quills, that which makes us prickly, that which prevents proximity, deters the closeness of threatening forces… It can form a force field; it is a radiating affect that distances.”[13]

A few months ago, my fat, hot, talented, queer witchy friend Micki and I were having lunch together. We got on the topic of manifesting, and we promised each other that we would eat together when we needed some fat power. Normally, we call a meeting of the fats when we are overwhelmed or disconnected from ourselves. We help each other ground. We had seen several manifestations have significant movement after several lil lunch dates together. We also found a space to hold each other’s overlapping folds through support and connection. This was and is an act of resistance. 

On Being A Soft Place to Land

This next fold is precious to me. I call this fold softness. I must be clear here, that the soft I speak is not to be confused with weak. The soft I speak of wraps people up, covers them in warmth, and protects them through bumpy terrain. I have always liked holding space for others. A shoulder to cry on. An arm to have around you. I am the kind of person that gets asked for hugs, “because they are so warm.” Sometimes this fold makes me vulnerable, other times it is a lot to carry. This softness has led me to engage in a variety of doula roles: through birth and other transitions. I have assisted in several births over the last 15 years and a multitude of gender transitions and coming-outs. Coming outs as queers, as fats, as abolitionists. I’ve always considered myself less of a teacher and more of a guide for others to learn with. 

Chen et all discuss other modes of crip genealogies, ones I hope to expand on in the future. For now. They speak of joy, responsibility, and desire as key to our crip futures. Their conversation highlights how important communal support and formation are to us surviving and thriving. 

My favorite theoretical pieces are often delivered in the form of a conversation between thinkers. Deleuze modeled this with folks like Guattari and Foucault. [14] I have witnessed it at conferences through panel discussions. I have borne witness to street theorems around my kitchen table. But the most recent pivotal conversation I engaged with is the conversation between Stacy Park Milbern and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in “Crip Lineages. Crip Future” as part of Crip Genealogies.

In their conversation, Park Milbern and Piepzna-Samarasinha situate the understanding of “disability doulaship.” They situate how disabled people of color are often supporting folks through the process of “rebirthing themselves as disabled.” They highlight the amount of labor marginalized folks must take on to help those coming after, understanding that “without crip intervention, we are frequently left alone to figure out how to be in our bodyminds and in this ableist world. They offer that we “view coming into disability identity as a birth, not a death, which is how the transition(s) are seen by ableist culture.” [15] They describe how this “warm doulaed space creates a container that changes not only the entire way both individuals can experience disability but the ways disability communities can be formed.” [16]

Peipzna-Samarasinha draws light on the fact that their access to disabled BIPOC elders is limited, but access to ancestors is vast. This is because they often die young, not just from illness, but systemic violence. Later in the conversation, they recenter “Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera as crip ancestors because they were both chronically ill, trauma-surviving, Mad, trans women of color and sex work organizers.”[17] “Crip Lineages. Crip Future” asks us to remember that “we mourn our dead, we become our dead, but are our dead also weapons and resources, seed banks?”[18]

Reading this, I immediately connected this to my work in Queer and Trans theory and ancestral memory. It took me back to Jen Jack Geiskings’ understanding in “Mapping Lesbian and Queer Lines of Desire”[19] and visioning our ancestors as constellations that burn much brighter after their death. A rebirth. This also aligns closely with Malatino’s understanding of a “T4T Praxis of Love.”[20] We care for each other, because no one else will. 

“Crip Linages. Crip Futures” defines “crip kindness” as “the wealth and skill where we notice each other’s pain face and offer a chair, ask in a low key way if we can help with a service task, sit without speaking, drop a bottle of tincture next to someone having a panic attack, raise thousands of dollars for someone to buy an accessible van, or mail a stranger an extra prescription.”[21] This is the same action of letting your fat friend access your closet for a big event, sharing HRT when your buddy is out and can’t get into a doctor, passing down binders, and giving your tips to someone’s top surgery fund. 

Being a soft place to land, a helper, and a caregiver has always come naturally to me, I think in some part because of my folds and where they fall. Park Milbern and Piepzna-Samarasinha gave me a new name for this type of care, “access intimacy.” Access intimacy is like being a practitioner of Crip, Fat, and Trans Magic. And it is something I feel called to share with others. 

On Incompleteness:

Chen et al “seeks to let go of didactic obligations such as the drive for completion or definitiveness” as a crip method, and I am adopting that model as my own, here. While I can speak to my folds in their current state, like my body they are always in flux. [22] They are more prominent in some moments and easily overlooked in others. They will change based on position, circumstance, and pressure. To care for them and make space for their realities, I must not only recognize them but work to situate them in my movements, expressions, intimacies, and politic. It is an act of constant folding and unfolding. This work serves as a beginning point of understanding how Crip Theory will continue to influence my work and how I move with my folds.

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Notes

[1]  “fatness is formed as a coherent ideology through the creation of (anti-)Blackness and therefore does not intersect with Blackness, but exists with Blackness itself—is what leads others to determining that fatness is unDesirable” 

[2] Harrison. Belly of the Beast. 19

[3] Chen, Mel Y., 1969- editor, Alison Kafer editor, Eunjung Kim 1974- editor, Julie Avril Minich 1977- editor, and Therí A. Pickens writer of foreword. “Introduction.” In Crip Genealogies. Durham : Duke University Press, 2023. 2.

[4] Especially in the era of Covid, as long Covid has forever changed many of our health trajectories.

[5] Chen et al. “Introduction.” 11.

[6] Cohen, Cathy J. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ 3, no. 4 (1997): 497. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3-4-437. 

[7] As I write this now, I must stop to feel rage in this moment for the multitudes of people who are starving to death in Gaza. Palestinians that are starving slowly while bombs and other forms of violence are killing them fast.

[8] Chen et al. “Introduction.” 21.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Stryker says that “Transgender rage is a queer fury, an emotional response to conditions in which it becomes imperative to take up, for the sake of one’s continued survival as a subject, a set of practices that precipitates one’s exclusion from a naturalized order of existence that seeks to maintain itself as the only possible basis for being a subject.” 

Stryker, Susan. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix.” GLQ 1 (1994): 249.

[11]  Chen et al. “Introduction.” 22.

[12] Smilges, J. Logan. Crip Negativity. 1st ed. Minneapolis: Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023.8.

[13] Malatino, Hil. Side Affects: On Being Trans Ans Feeling Bad. University of Minnesota Press, 2022. 106-107.

[14] See: Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995. “A Thousand Plateaus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia.” Edited by Félix Guattari 1930-1992, Pierre-Félix Guattari 1930-1992, F. (Félix) Guattari 1930-1992, and Feliks Gvattari 1930-1992, 1987. and Morar, Nicolae, 1979-, editor, Thomas Nail editor, and Daniel W. (Daniel Warren) Smith 1958- editor. “Between Deleuze and Foucault,” 2016.

[15] Park Milbern, Stacey, and Leah Lakshimi Peipzna-Samarasinha. “Crip Lineages. Crip Futures.” In Crip Genealogies. Durham : Duke University Press, 2023. 104.

[16] Ibid.

[17]  Ibid, 109.

[18] Ibid, 109.

[19]  Gieseking, Jen Jack. “Mapping Lesbian and Queer Lines of Desire: Constellations of Queer Urban Space.” Environment and Planning. D, Society & Space 38, no. 5 (2020): 941–60. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775820926513.

[20]  Malatino. Side Affects.

[21]  Park Milbern, Stacey, and Leah Lakshimi Peipzna-Samarasinha. “Crip Lineages. Crip Futures”. 111.

[22] Chen et al. Introduction. 11.

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References

Chen, Mel Y., 1969- editor, Alison Kafer editor, Eunjung Kim 1974- editor, Julie Avril Minich 1977- editor, and Therí A. Pickens writer of foreword. “Introduction.” In Crip Genealogies. Durham : Duke University Press, 2023.

Cohen, Cathy J. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ 3, no. 4 (1997): 437–65. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3-4-437.

Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995. “A Thousand Plateaus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia.” Edited by Félix Guattari 1930-1992, Pierre-Félix Guattari 1930-1992, F. (Félix) Guattari 1930-1992, and Feliks Gvattari 1930-1992, 1987.

Gieseking, Jen Jack. “Mapping Lesbian and Queer Lines of Desire: Constellations of Queer Urban Space.” Environment and Planning. D, Society & Space 38, no. 5 (2020): 941–60. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775820926513.

Harrison, De’Shaun L. Belly of the Beast:The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness. North Atlantic Books, 2021.

Malatino, Hil. Side Affects: On Being Trans Ans Feeling Bad. University of Minnesota Press, 2022.

Morar, Nicolae, 1979-, editor, Thomas Nail editor, and Daniel W. (Daniel Warren) Smith 1958- editor. “Between Deleuze and Foucault,” 2016.

Park Milbern, Stacey, and Leah Lakshimi Peipzna-Samarasinha. “Crip Lineages. Crip Futures.” In Crip Genealogies. Durham : Duke University Press, 2023.

Smilges, J. Logan. Crip Negativity. 1st ed. Minneapolis: Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023.

Stryker, Susan. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix.” GLQ 1 (1994): 237–54.

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About the Author

Arlowe Sue Clementine is a storyteller, archivist, performance artist, and PhD student in women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Kansas. They currently focus on intergenerational healing and connection for queer and trans people from and living in the Heartland.