Title: Chimeric Crip Doulaing: Werewolves, Crip Childhood, and Dancing Deviant Mothers. Abstract: This paper engages crip doulaing as a method and mode of care. Through reading the hybrid, genre-defying film Good Manners (2017), the author reflects on crip care, mothering and embodied writing. The critique emerges as a powerful sensual place in which crip children and crip families, as well as crip caretakers, begin to imagine the bubbling future. Crip kinship leads us towards a new imagining of crip love and crip children and crip creators and crip doulas: in the hybrid figure, we see something mixed and mingled. Otherworldly child-werewolf Joel is born into an otherworldly aesthetic. The child transforms and structures the possibility of merging toward the future, which is the return of a past love that has always lived. Werewolf children and their crip-doulas open doors to reimagining mothering and children within a crip framework that challenges traditional norms of kinship and ableism. This is a radical embrace of the rhythms of time and care work. Drawing on the power of contingent unity through difference, this reading furthers current conversations surrounding crip temporality and care work through an ethos of care. The non-self same chimera hybrid film as horror and fantasy, the chimera's pregnant body as Ana and fetus Joel, the chimera child werewolf-boy, and the chimera caretaker as a lover. These are becoming chimeras within the film, challenging us to think about bodies of crip time that bridge past/future/present, eternally splitting into more ways of joining others in difference. This attempts to temporalize the non-self in and outside of time, to find swerves in the road to everywhere. Writing is a web in which the writer weaves a world. The net I spin becomes the time and space I am stuck on this paper. I risk losing myself on this web or perhaps even revealing myself. Arriving at this paper, I entwine a film, Good Manners (2017), my life as a mother and as a child, and thinking theories culled together to create something new. I come with a desire to speak to the joy of crip chimeric childhood and mothering. The essence of crip time is in its moments of joy. The past, present, and future come together, leading us to the unknown dance of stories to be lived, written, and pursued. Reflecting on childhood and mothering, I will interweave both into the three-bodied chimera. We are birthing; in the past, we were born, and in the future, we will birth. The emphasis is on we. We are a chimeric and crip identifier. You meet I in us. This is the flux. We are written in the bodies of the bio-chimera-maternal-laboratory. Director Juliana Roja explores crip themes through the story of a young woman named Clara who becomes the nanny for the unborn child (Joel) of a wealthy, pregnant woman named Ana. Clara discovers the hidden secret beneath the plot; Ana is pregnant with a werewolf. As the film progresses, Clara and Ana's relationship intensifies, with plenty of sultry pausing and suspenseful drama betwixt. This dark fairy tale ties together the chosen family: Clara, Joel, and Ana. Love can connect the past with the present. In the dark spaces of fantasy is a return—nostalgia as potential. The film has been read as a queer film that challenges Brazilian horror films and examines how race, class, and sexual orientation work in the ‘context of horror and the uncanny’ (Oliveria 32). Fantastical films provide fodder for the hungry critic's appetite. This essay will engage in the visually enticing aesthetic of Good Manner’s matte-painted backgrounds, dramatic color choices, and campy werewolf imagery. The moon dictates the night and the scene of the film. Captivated by the lunar, it becomes a maternal time. The film is incredibly lyrical, the eerie, otherworldly comforting lullabies throughout the film. The rhythms of music provide a sense of connection to another space, an innocent, childlike space. The theme allows the film to be more severe and more playful. The musical backgrounds shift to the effectual moods which rhythmically dictate the film. The movie playing with its own body, speaks to the rhythms of the monstrous cultural body made real in the biological body as the pregnant body grows; as the boy becomes a werewolf, these growths are accompanied by their internal rhythms, none of which can be fully clocked. But they can be felt. The film’s moodiness is as much sad as it is joyous. The film's length, at just over two hours, demands patience, an extended call to ponder on the fantastical times of extended becomings of time, motherhood, and childhood. Punctuating the life of werewolves is a lunar rhythm, as the human-animal is pulled by the moon, becoming a monster. Joel, the werewolf body, challenges us to see what love and care for another means. Even if the other may kill us. Eat you. In her role as Joel's mother, Clara is a mother not of biological reproduction but a mother of love with a child she must now protect. This is the joy of choosing the impossible. It was never a choice, but in the end, it does not matter; it is more the accepting of a call. Agape, or a mother’s love, runs throughout Brazilian culture and with it comes impossible mothers and impossible games, but perhaps somewhere in these games, agape emerges as refigured. Perhaps Clara, captivated by the same moon that shines towards you, embarks on an unknown future of crip doulas. Motherhood Manifesto and Crip Methods This body politics draws on recent articulations of kinship as more than bloodlines; reading through a crip lens can inform what Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman call kin-aesthetics. Kin aesthetics is a philosophical idea that can help us imagine how texts redefine our social relationships. Judith Butler postulates that in the fictional world, we can begin to imagine crip kinships beyond bloodlines. Sami Shalk states that ‘speculative fiction can defamiliarize (dis)ability, race, and gender in intellectually and politically productive ways. By shifting our taken-for-granted social norms, speculative fiction makes unconscious preconceptions about (dis)ability, race, and gender more readily apparent, challenging readers to think outside of the accepted definitions of these categories.’ (40) Within this film reading, I can imagine and reflect on the lived realities of caretaking in a world where we don’t exist with werewolves. Themes of care, mothering, queer, and crip kinship are seen in an imaginary space that dissolves the frameworks structuring our current straight hold on alternative imaginings. To make a home with pregnant bodies, crip doulas, crip-kin, and werewolf babies, the family we choose and who choose us, demands a crip-ship. We are building a ship that crips and crip kin can sail. My ship is this page, and the film is my first mate. I am not sailing to home; instead, the ship is our homing—an intertextual rhetorical imagining in the form of academic writing and speaking and thinking. The film’s fantastical family opens doors to those we know now and those we may have never known, inspired by the phenomenon of an echo. It is embodied writing. This is a risk, and indeed, I could write another way. And I likely will, at some point in the future, but I want to write like this, and I believe writing like this communicates something distinctive. I want to undress, the prison of the third person. This paper articulates a crip-doula as a mode of reading film, and composing criticism. ‘Crip doulaing, naming disability as a space to be born into worldmaking, a word marking the potential for collective action and radical reimagining’ (Kafer, 425). Crip doulaing is about more than the birth of those disabled at birth or of disabled mothers giving birth. It is that. But it also names ‘disability as a space we can be born into… again and again as we acquire new disabilities or discover words for things that have been there all along.’ (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 241). This is a radical embrace of the rhythms of time and care work, the socially identified and radically articulated ways in which we are born, again and again, with a difference. as a method draws on witnessing and assisting the birthing of writing and reading through an ethos of care. This aligns with a crip method that ‘might function as a body of thought, or as thought about bodies’ (McRuer, 76). Such a theory is a form of composition theory that engages the embodied author and the bodies without. Through weaving blood to ink, a crip composition situates itself, against the God Eye From Nowhere, as Donna Haraway has shown, we place a partial patch over the author’s I, and blink into the night. In the film, a magical tale, we comingle with monsters. The crip body emerging is a monster body; a werewolf film uniquely opens doors to such a reading. Sami Schalk analyzes speculative fiction and discusses how the fantastical defamiliarizes the reader or viewer, which encourages readers/viewers to question ‘(dis)ability, race, gender, and sexuality’ (161). In so doing, we open doors to this fantastical world. I was turning inside to break out. I want to escape the blood. In this, I call towards the past and its aborted dreams. Robert McRuer writes, ‘To adapt or crip the concept of worldmaking, ‘more people than can be identified are engaged in the critically disabled project of navigating the ableism upon which neoliberalism relies and remapping the ableist spaces neoliberalism has constructed’ (93). And to that end: I make some rough drafts. Pregnancy and Normative Biological Clock Checkers We are brought to a scene familiar to anyone who has ever been pregnant. A doctor’s examination where Ana is receiving an ultrasound. The filming is starkly white and sterile. Ana and Clara are passive in the biomedical gaze of the doctor and the fetal imaging ultrasound. Ana’s appointments at the doctor follow typical biomedical surveillance of fetal growth. In the exam, the doctor shows the ears, eyes, and nose and then asks if she wants to know the sex. Unsure, she decides why not; it is a boy. Her one question is, ‘is he normal’ the doctor says he is healthy. The fetus kicks, and Ana is frightened. The doctor assures her that this also is normal. Fetal imaging is part of what I call the biological Chronos of temporality. Its images secure a timeline that can predict due dates, despite the insufficient realities of such calculations. It clocks and maps the womb through sonic waves designed to find enemies in war and underwater. It sees only what it is trained to see, enemies in the unclear territory—attempting to make lines in waves. There are other temporal resonances in the pregnant body. At home Clara puts a fetal heart monitor over Ana’s belly; we hear the heartbeat and a different effect than the 2d image. Does the heartbeat, like a horse galloping, print a new vibration that verifies the non-unity of anything but the beat? Ana is in love with horses; she shows Clara a photo of a horse earlier in the film. She has a music box with a horse, whose lullaby occupies the sounds of fairytale and nostalgia that run throughout the film. The horse beating sound of a fetal monitor operates on the Doppler effect, discovered in 1842. The fetal doppler works on the same principle as the ultrasound machine; the frequency and variation of waves are much higher, meaning only a trained ultrasound technician can use the device. Clara and Ana efficiently operate an at-home fetal doppler machine and listen to the results. Something changes in such frequencies. The echolocation changes based on its reader and its time and space of use. They told me I would have a 13-pound baby. I was two weeks late, and the pressure was setting in, I went to the hospital to appease the family around me. How could I put the baby at risk? They scanned me and said go home, we will schedule you for Monday. I cried, my midwife said it was my decision. And I did everything, I saw a magical acupuncturist and I went into labor, I did not go back to the hospital. I had a 9-pound baby at home with my midwife, my partner and I felt rhythms of be-coming others that were unlike anything. The spacing of birthing is an intensity of becoming that unlocks the body, unlike any other pleasure. And it was the most powerful and strong and amazing energetic flux of my life. We don’t hear positive birth stories, because that’s not good for business. Luna’s Embodied Crip-Chimera Time Following the doctor's orders, Clara removes bloody bags of meat from the refrigerator and replaces them with large heads of lettuce. One night under a full moon, Clara finds Ana at the refrigerator. She is looking for meat, and Ana approaches Clara passionately; she violently kisses her and bites her tongue, drawing blood. The following day Ana has no memory of the encounter. Clara begins to drop her own blood into the food she prepares for Ana. Ana is not aware of the blood flavoring but eagerly eats her food. As the sexual relationship between Ana and Clare develops in the film, Ana’s pregnancy develops, and Clara’s caretaking enters more mysterious realms. Clara is doing her own type of clocking of Ana’s growing pregnancy. Using a lunar calendar to note Ana’s weight and vitals, she notices the link between the full moon and her behaviors. Clara and Ana’s sex is tender and powerful. The love between the spaces we find ourselves in. Ana has run out of money, so Clara helps her pull diamonds off her boots to sell. Or both. Following Ana, one full moon begins to sleepwalk, and Clara follows her into the streets, where in an abandoned parking lot, she picks up a cat and kills it drinking its blood. The nighttime sleepwalking horror contrasts sharply with the two's more brightly lit tender daytime encounters. In all the film's approach to these scenes, there is a doubling of perspective; we see Clara watching Ana; Clara is behind Ana and her gaze fixated on her as she sleepwalks, as she workouts during the day, as she is at her OBGYN appointments. In the light of the full moon and the scenes of lunar marking, we enter the world of maternal lunar linkages. Like the lunar body, the pregnant body is based on rhythms of nature; these rhythms are embodied in other bodies. The moon pulls the ocean in and out, and the moon is pulled in by the pull of the Earth's body. Lunar time is circular, but it is not a return of the same. It is not a circle that can always be predicted and interpreted equally. The lunar pull is a rhythm that symbiotically interacts with bodies that are themselves changing. Pregnancy itself cannot fall into an image of eternal maternal time in Freeman’s thinking; the pregnant body, the lived pregnant body, is not ever a repetition of the same body. It is uniquely embodied intra-acting with its spaces, times, and fetal kicks. The pregnant body queers the future and the past, confounding the self in its growing all ways. Flattening the image of pregnancy into chronology, line, or a sonogram depends on an outcome; that futural view of pregnancy depends on a particular image of a child born, a certain future. There is another futural view that extends itself and folds into everything. As Clara prepares a meal for Ana after realizing her need for meat, despite the doctor's orders and wanting to avoid her killing cats, she cuts herself while preparing Ana’s lunch. Clara’s blood drips into the food, digesting and tending to the needs of Ana; together, they are forming love with the tender gauze of sensuality. Dripping, tenderly, rewriting the wounds. Unless I forget, that can happen as well. Clara embraces an embodied knowing of how to care for Ana, the thirst for blood must be quenched. In this way, the embodied temporality of our childhood and our mythologies and pasts haunts us, the weight of embodied time can feel like a prison, or it can be a structure through which we engage creative risk. A love story emerges. Ana was dancing as Clara watched. Her pregnant body moved with the music; they danced together on Ana's 30th birthday. She was dressed in black sequins and dancing to Brazilian cowboy music. A rich white woman was pregnant, dancing, drinking, smoking, and laughing. However, Clara, a beautiful black caretaker woman, accepts her. She dances with her on her birthday and makes love to her. The pleasure of bad mothers, rarely seen, barely whispered—a joyous momentary escape of the expanding leaking body. In film we can create that which we can barely dream. Ana dances her way out of the screen and into the chaos of mad mothers dreaming in and out of history. A Dionysian frenzy. But muted. Let us not forget the challenge that formed that night. In the dance, Ana and Clara emerge as lovers; it is in joy we find our way. Our way is always eluding our ste Ana tells Clara that her family has cut ties with her because she is pregnant with the child of a one-night stand with a stranger, and her fiancé left her. She decided to keep the baby despite her family and fiancés and societies demands that she should. And this fairytale would seem to necessitate a beautiful birth according to a teolegy of pregnancy that depends on the creation of a human being. ‘Pregnancy can enable changes and connections that spread or spiral outward in the world and do not acquire meaning only in a prospective or retrospective sense.’ (Browne, 2022, 458). Reframing pregnancy as suspended or expanded time defamiliarizes the teleological assumption that pregnancy must result in a birth. She advocates for seeing pregnancy as paused time, or suspended time, the time taken out of any order. It can thus be reconceptualized as generative despite its endings; care becomes a form of caring for a specific person in a specific place, not because of an ideal outcome in which risk is managed. Clara the Crip-Doula The birth of Joel. The birth is in the middle of the movie, transitioning the film from Ana and Clara's relationship to Joel and Clara's birth. Joel punches his way out of the womb leaving Ana with an open belly and bleeding to death. He lies on the floor, tangled in their umbilical cord still attached to the shared placenta he dragged out of Ana's body. Clara sees Joel crying on the floor, and he looks at her; she wraps him, cleans him. The camp werewolf baby emerging from Ana, ripping through her belly and dragging their placenta with him, is not like a baby. But he looks at Clara, his eyes call to her. Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of werewolves as anomalous, contagious, and epidemic pact asks us to think of the politics of the fantastical and non-human. Crip alliances can be considered the same; perhaps we need a politics of sorcery (Deleuze, 243-247). The placenta feeds the child. The umbilical cord connects mother to child via placenta. Absorbing nutrients energy, broken down into the food of the child. Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelly author of Frankenstein, herself died in after birth. Clara is a crip doula, attending a home birth. The birth did not go well, but she was there for her before and that caretaking is a resistance to the biomedical clock. The maternal body did not reject the fetus; the fetus rejected the maternal. And she tried to leave him beneath the moon in Sao Paulo. After wrapping Joel, she takes him to the edge of a river bank under the full moon and warns her not to turn back, but she does. She almost didn’t take the call of the crip-doula. This was the choice to make the world, and the film's second part begins. The rhythms of disability challenge the world of factories and clocks. But he looks at Clara, his eyes call to her. Calling to Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of werewolves as anomalous, the pact that is contagious and epidemic, can the monster, mother, baby and crip come together? Crip alliances can be thought of the same; perhaps we need a politics of sorcery (243-247). Crip doulas are eternal maternal figures that refigure the clocks of normativity to open cracks in the world for be-coming ourselves. Writing can do that too. The werewolf is a hybrid, or chimera, a human-animal; the wolves’ becoming-animal is repetitive and tied to lunar rhythms. Kateřina Kolářová defines a chimera as a metaphor that envisions monstrous differences as a disability (240-241). The hybrid power of werewolf child opens doors to such chimeric power to ‘continue to produce untidy, crooked, queer, twisted bent, crip versions of pasts. Only they will provide for more generous horizons of the present and future’ (246). The chimera of power in the mother-child relationship or the mother-fetal relationship pits the two against each other; the chimeric exchange ensures their places on the lower rings of the power tree. Every day there are 259 births every minute. Every one of these people giving birth needs specific care, not based on when they are due, their risk profile, or the potential of their future child. But their body is changing in ways that limit their ability to fit into the production clock. Werewolves need crip-doulas at every full moon. Birth is something to be experienced, not to be denied. Do you want to sleep through sex? Through life? Through love? Is it the animal nature of such a process that makes us disgusted and wish to wash it away? It is because it is a specifically female experience that holds the residual memory of a primordial time - that might if we dare enter the time, return us to the spaces of our eternal return. I don’t know what to say of the totalizing force of such a birth. I can hear the critics ringing in my ears. I know that not all women are women, and gender is a performance, and that the nature of identity is placed precariously between politics, subjectivity, becoming, time, history, and science. I must go there. If we continue a discourse that completely evades the realities of experience, we will stand in the shadows of our UberMensch. In 2015 the Brazilian president declared that women should not get pregnant due to Zika virus and the threat of disability from it. Unique in its call, a national call to avoid pregnancy. Strange as this was, it happened again in April 2021 when the president asked for women to delay pregnancies due to COVID and the rise of a particularly bad variant that would affect children. Jeffrey Cohen writes that the monster's body is cultural. Born of a particular cultural moment, ‘of a time, a feeling, and a place…the monster exists only to be read’ (4). The monster challenges the finality of death and the return of birth. The monster is at the borders of difference. Here the monster delays or perhaps surpasses the borders of cultural acceptability and abjection. The monster returns. The doubling effect of contagious disability and the mother's responsibility uncannily reinforce the idea of mother-fetal responsibility in this game of false rules and deniable responsibility. Be-coming Crip Children and Werewolves Joel's safe room is hidden behind cabinets. A bare cement room like a dungeon: a string of colorful lights, a worn-out teddy bear, a mattress on the floor, a growth chart. Two chains attached to handcuffs on the cement wall. This is where Joel must go every full moon. He is gently measured, sung to, kissed, and loved as Clara locks him away and then lies in his bed. She pulls out a picture of Ana, softly singing to the photograph and remembering Ana. When Joel awakes, Clara comforts him with a bath. She shaves his arms, clips his nails, and tends to his wounds. I think of the many nights I bathe my children before bed. I remember reading stories, staying up with sick children, and attending with love to them. In film class, I was surprised that most students interpreted this scene as Clara attempting to normalize Joel. A sign that she did not accept his wolfiness. All of us fail to brush our hair at least sometimes. How much do we get our becoming animals? Or is the prison a structural reality and not a mother's burden to bear despite that she must? Upon viewing the locked-up room, I started crying—an eruption of tears. I know many crip doulas feel the same way: the endless doctor appointments, physical therapy, speech therapy, and the required caretaking. ‘We carry stories of resilience and survival, stories of growth and trauma. In sharing our crip stories, we unearth legacies of colonialism and nondisabled supremacy’ (Kafai, 65). Let us learn how to write ourselves in ways that constellate our critical cries into crip compositions, the monstrous decomposing body of self, into the text. My version of this is not for a werewolf, but I might do the same if I had a werewolf. What other option does she have? María Cepeda writes self-reflections on living with a mental disability, saying that passing as normative ‘demands great effort, passing was a gesture of defiance or a trickster strategy that subverts the academic status quo’. The mother raising a child in a world where werewolves are to be killed—isn't that also a protection and a sacrifice? The lousy mother image arises as we picture the mother who restricts freedom, but the child is not given the proper care. This film attempts to show that, yes and no, the mother does whatever one can, including various ethical risks that one takes as a caretaker, a lover, and a person in relation to others. Cepeda's writing is a mode of survival; her reflexive ethnography is a weapon she bears that she acknowledges could have adverse effects against her. This strategy may, for some be anxiety-inducing; for others, it builds resilience. ‘Instead of a banal, humanistic universalization of queerness/disability, a crip theory of composition advocates for the temporary or contingent universalization of queerness/disability.’ (McRuer, 157). An alliance of crip doulas come together to open doors for others; crip doulaing allows us to be there for one another in a unique moment, for a unique time, united by our differentials, a space/time affect that births futures to come. But for every failure, I remember other times as well. I have these openings in the world and somehow, we did something right; time stopped. My daughter was walking down a flight of stairs. I suddenly saw her start to jump, and then it was a flip, and I saw myself go to her. Time and space did not matter then; I do not know how but I jumped to her, and I caught her—time stopped, and within that moment, I saw 100 different lives unfold in 100 different ways, and luckily, I caught this one. Time does that, sometimes. Is this a way to think of the chance that The long view allows one to see all possible events and seize the one that is next, in fact, because that is the one to seize. This is also the suspension of time; when I was there, it was. It was a suspended moment in which body, mind, movement, clocks, and space all interacted in specific ways that fell outside of other times. My memory of it still creates this, if this can happen and does happen, what else might happen? Can we play with time? In love, caretaking, and mothering, one must be able to hold some ground, to be the object of resistance. This is inevitable. This failure cannot be avoided. Caretaking requires some imposition of value into our children's diets. Or do they impose as well, I think we are gathering ourselves against forces that rely on squashing our dreams. The love of the space of being-with becoming love. This is often the requirement of feeding what we have and our budgets can afford. And then there is the gut needs of those with severe dietary restrictions. Allergies, autoimmune, The Politics of Children’s Diets, is laden with judgments by well-meaning outsiders and kin. This is not just childish behavior; it is how we define ourselves in relation to our friends, family, and work; at times, we are pushed, and at times we push. This is to learn our boundaries. The boundaries are leaky. Joel's rebellion has severe consequences; he turns into a werewolf and kills his friend Marco. Spinning the wheel of fortune, she searches for her son, roaming the city and dropping breadcrumbs to lead her baby home. Their love is a magic bond linking Joel back home to Clara Crip time challenges the past and future from the perspective of the present. When we go too far back into memory, we forget where we are; when we spend too much time in the future, we forget about joy in the now. And in Clara's search for Joel, she questions her choices, and she has no way to stay lost in the past or stuck in the future. She must act. The passionate present walks us between the past and future to act as we can or rest if necessary. Joel eats meat. And Joel also goes to the dance. Waking up unaware of his murderous night, he draws a mustache on his face to embody adulthood and perhaps the imagined freedom accompanying it. He ventures towards the joy of the outside world. At the dance, he turns into a werewolf, becoming an animal. He has the power to tell his friends to run. Please run. The crowds begin to see the boy-werewolf, and a history of fantastical stories of towns rallying around monsters takes form. Clara shoots him in the leg and sneaks him back to the comfort of their cement prison room. Chained to the wall, the crowds gather their pitchforks and lights and run to their door. As Clara tended to Joel's wounds, she chained him to the wall, sang him a lullaby, and said, ‘I do not want you to be hungry.’ As the crowds break into the house and their voices come closer, pounding on the door, she unchains him. Briefly, they look at each other. He recognizes her even as a werewolf and her demeanor eases as he shifts. They grab each other's hands and stand together, letting go of their clasp and facing the cement room door, and the film fades away to black. It is them against the world. And this is how it is. Crip kin are everywhere. In this film’s crip chimera, we connect to a microchimeric krip-cin-aesethic. As Bradway and Freeman insist, our kindred are part of kinship worldmaking that must, ‘understand kinship as a way of doing relationality that is also always a way of thinking relationality — kinship as embodied, aesthetic, and erotic theory.’ (18). I felt a connection to Clara as the tears erupted; I knew that somehow in this fantasy world, someone knew what it meant to love someone and must do things you do not want to. I do not lock my children to basement walls. I do take my son with CP to physical therapy and neurologists and occupational therapists at varying tempos, depending on the advice of doctors and schools. He does wear a brace at night—it is soft, but it's not comfortable. Some nights he does not wear it. But he wants to, or sometimes he does, and sometimes he does not. The brace helps stretch the tightness of spastic muscles in his calf. I do not have close to the number of interventions right now that other crip children and caretakers might have. I have close and distant kin who need much more complex care, from feeding tubes to major surgery to force decisions between leg lengthening or amputation. I have crip kin with seizures and need the room clearing to make space to soften the space for their safety. Crip connects us, as we know not when crip can come. Illness and age haunt us, and this we are starting to know. But what of our crip children and our crip childhood. If we were all children once, can we remember and desire the rhythms of childhood? The love shared between us connects us – this is the stickiness of temporal pauses and reflections. And these crip kin children are also from our past, and I will have more crip kin in the future. The haunted past of echoes of crip kin institutionalized and lovingly embraced in pasts where crip caretaking at home was a rarity. And I have crip creeping daily into my focus, to my ability to keep on task, to order the world for those I love. I want a crip-doula when I find myself falling from myself. This all creates a burning desire to continue writing and thinking and loving and dancing and enjoying in the name of the crip child. Not a future unknown child but all crip children everywhere, here, now, and in the unknown future and past. Crip is a relational identity, a positive way of rewriting ourselves in relation to negativity. It is not the Sacred Child that justifies atrocities against the future. It is not in his name. In the process of intake for therapies and education services, a social worker had a one and half hour conversation with me, including a large section of questioning regarding how I felt during my pregnancy. Was I sad at all? Did I experience any trauma, even moving or sickness? Did I take any medicine? How was the birth? The causal linkage of mothers affecting visual processing learning issues through intrauterine psychological trauma is weak at its very best. The point is to make you look back, take stock, and ensure you are not one of the worst: a drug user, a poor deranged pregnant monster mommy who is abusing your child and will need intervention. Of pause, that makes me compose a choreography of compulsory normativity. My privilege is a form of power to push through such witch-hunting with little dirt on my shoulder. Nevertheless, the linkage between the past and the fact that I may be to blame, not just for reading, but for my child’s atypicality, my own invisible neuro-divergence, somehow maybe they do know my father died during my first pregnancy. Do they know I am not normal and how normal do I have to be to navigate this tightrope of normalcy? Would that count? The intra-actions that measure and make deviant mothers are ritualized in school, insurance, doctors, physical and speech therapy intakes—the narrative of failed normalcy. The mother next door may not be inhabiting the world one imagines. Despite the advances in reproductive technology, care for reproducing people and their creations and losses and kin are nowhere to be seen. The leaking stained, and tired are everywhere. They are in your genes or gut, and they even once wiped your butt. Or if they didn’t, someone did. And that someone is another leaking, stained and tired one. But the reality of pregnancy and birth and miscarriage on the body completely alter anyone's physical ability to work; the caretaking involved in the first years of a child’s life is incredibly demanding for mothers of young children who are disabled or not have intensive needs that current society does not accommodate. And for the mother of a disabled child facing the already impossible world of mothering, they are faced with a double burden of now narrating their deviancy in the Able-National state to barter for care and attempt to deflect societal witch-hunting to find their evil ways that resulted in the swerving variant. Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell define able-nationalism as “the degree to which treating people with disabilities as an exception valorizes able-bodied norms of inclusion as the naturalized qualification of citizenship” (113). Through structures of medical and educational systems, parents narrate their children’s disability in a story of overcoming. This narrative is overwhelmingly about valorizing the values learned from the disabled child’s life story. As Amanda Apgar points out, these reinforce ableism, heteronormativity, and white supremacy through chronological overcoming narratives. Apgar advocates reading parental narratives on disability as relational and that we “embrace the instability, along with the tensions produced in the body of narratives – the inevitability of care, of failure of recuperation, of reiteration – as productive in the possibilities to which they point: the margins.” (p. 174)… but yet a mother’s love persists. And something clogs up the systems of capital and control. Perhaps a crip-doula composition creates openings toward a non-linear narrative and reading that might break the book. What we are missing is empathy. Can we see ourselves inside each other, in this time, another time, and another place? What song would lead us into each other’s dreams? Nevertheless, joy is not always there without pain. Eli Claire's poetry states, ‘we cannot afford to forfeit imagination.’ (256). Margaret Price reminds us how time also hurts. Motherhood is heavy with its tempos of demands. Is there any joy in our failures? Falling brings us forward to the future, ever less gracefully, yet atypically we move towards something. Within the rhythms of cyclical crying, there is no prediction. That is what is possible about opening the materiality of our rhythms in time. All at once, we have biomedical time, measuring babies' growth via wave technology that vibrates a map, the fetus kicks, marking its womb space, and the placenta remains at the end marking its own time-space. Maternal care is marked by the allegory of eternal love but interrupted by the impossibility of the sacred maternal, and then the rhythms are not so easily domesticated. The routine is revolutionized by listening to the waves; it is not in the measurement. Finding one way out, it is the sensations of routine that mess up our act. And we can vibe to another rhythm; we can see that we all share an emerging spatial, rhythmic possibility of taking on the praxis of crip-doula. One cannot predict the baby's cry or when madness returns when sickness comes. Conclusion The crip child is every child, the monster mother is every mother, and the crip-doula is an ethical response that occurs in crip time. I have tried to weave together a web. The web is messy, full of leaky bloodlines and bodies and meat and sex and memory and desire. This is the work of being with becoming. We might all see ourselves as a mother, as a child. Our bodies are children; our memories and abject desires are children. Let us crip doula our own children into being. These children are crip. These mothers are expanding the realm of thinking crip to the mother provides, for me, a way of writing my body into the disembodied text. The font is my blood, and the risk is exposed. Dare the ink stain the body? Do the birthmarks write me, or am I writing them? The webs we weave are not only weaving us—they are being woven. May this inspire another spinstress-ing crip queer child to spin a web of chimeric imagining. The three-headed Chimera is only frightening in the rearview. Mommy doesn’t see the rearview. She is seeing herself seeing you. The ‘mother, ’ sacred and deviant, sees herself being seen and sees you being born, as her and as her changed by you and as her changed by another and as he changed into another. The mother is not a static figure: she is dismembered, remembered, and sacrificed in the name of the true sacred – love. Open the crypts to childhood and let the monstrous emerge. Mommy Baby Monsters dance at night. To the light of the moon, shining in. Works Cited: Apgar, Amanda. The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 2022. Butler, Judith. ‘Kinship beyond the Bloodline.’ In: Bradway, Tyler and Freeman, Elizabeth. Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form. 2022. New York, USA: Duke UP, 2022. https://doi-org.proxygw.wrlc.org/10.1515/9781478023272 Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke UP. 2010. Clare, Eli; ‘May Day, 2020’ South Atlantic Quarterly 1 (April 2021); 120 (2): 255–256. DOI: https://doi-org.proxygw.wrlc.org/10.1215/00382876-8915952 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 2018. ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses).’ In Classic Readings on Monster Theory, edited by Asa Simon Mittman and Marcus Hensel, 3–25. Amsterdam: UP. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781942401209.006. Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari Félix. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Massumi Brian. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP. Haraway, Donna. ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,’ Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3, Autumn 1988, p. 575-599 Kafai, Shayda. 2021. Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice & Art Activism of Sins Invalid. Kafer, Alison. ‘After Crip, Crip Afters.’ South Atlantic Quarterly 1 April 2021; 120 (2): 415–434. DOI: https://doi-org.proxygw.wrlc.org/10.1215/00382876-8916158 Kolářová, Kateřina. ‘The inarticulate post-socialist crip’ Culture—theory—disability: Encounters between disability studies and cultural studies (2017): 231–249. Khúc, Mimi. Making Mental Health through Open in Emergency: A Journey in Love Letters. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 April 2021; 120 (2): 369–388. DOI: https://doi-org.proxygw.wrlc.org/10.1215/00382876-8916116 McRuer, Robert. 2006. Crip Theory. New York: NYU Press. McRuer, Robert. 2018. Crip Times. New York: NYU Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. Being Singular-Plural. Edited by Werner Hamacher and David Wellberry. Meridian. Oliveira-Monte, Emanuelle K.F. ‘Queering Brazilian Horror: Race, Class and Sexual Orientation in As boas maneiras (2017)’ REGS, 2021, 47, 1 31-50 https://doi.org/10.14321/jgendsexustud.47.1.0031 Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. 2018. Care Work. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Price, Margaret. 2021. ‘Time Harms: Disabled Faculty Navigating the Accommodations Loo’ South Atlantic Quarterly120, no. 2: 257–277, doi: 10.1215/00382876-8915966. Rosi, Braidotti. 2006. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Ryan, Sara & Katherin Runswick‐Cole. 2008. ‘Repositioning mothers: mothers, disabled children, and disability studies.’ Disability & Society, 23, no. 3, 199–210, doi: 10.1080/09687590801953937 Samuels, Ellen, and Elizabeth Freeman. 2021. ‘Introduction: Crip Temporalities.’ The South Atlantic Quarterly. 120, no 2. Schalk, Sami. 2018. Bodyminds Reimagined. Durham: Duke UP. Shildrick, Margrit. 2022. ‘Maternal–Fetal Microchimerism and Genetic Origins: Some Socio-Legal Implications.’ Science, technology, & human values 47, no. 6: 1231–1252. Snyder, Sharon L., and David T. Mitchell. 2010. “Introduction: Ablenationalism and the Geo-Politics of Disability.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 4, no. 2: 113–125.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
BlogA collection of collective writings and musings. Archives
December 2024
|