Can a movement genuinely challenge ableism while embracing language that, for some disabled people, remains a painful reminder of a long history of stigma, discrimination, and devaluation? This question emerged as I reflected on Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch's (2019) Crip Technoscience Manifesto. While I appreciate the authors' commitment to disability justice, self-determination, and the recognition of disabled people as active agents of social change, I remain deeply uncomfortable with their use of the term "crip." As a wheelchair user with a physical disability, I cannot separate this word from its origins in "cripple," a term historically associated with stigma, discrimination, and the devaluation of disabled people.
Hamraie and Fritsch argue that disabled people are not passive recipients of care or technological solutions but experts and designers of their own everyday lives. Their manifesto challenges technologies, architectures, and infrastructures that fail to recognise disability as a meaningful form of human difference. Rather than accepting demands to cure, fix, or eliminate disability, the authors advocate for practices of resistance, collective access, and social transformation. I strongly identify with these principles, particularly the insistence that disabled people should have the authority to shape their own lives and environments.
However, I find a contradiction between these emancipatory ambitions and the deliberate use of the term "crip." I recognise that reclaiming historically derogatory language can be an empowering political act. For some disabled people, transforming an offensive word into a symbol of pride and resistance may represent a rejection of the stigma imposed upon them. Nevertheless, reclamation does not automatically erase a word's history or the discomfort it may continue to evoke. What feels empowering to one disabled person may feel hurtful or exclusionary to another.
My concern extends beyond personal discomfort to the normalisation of this terminology within academic discourse. When scholars adopt "crip" as an established theoretical concept, there is a risk that its use becomes increasingly accepted without sufficient consideration of those disabled people who reject it. Disability is not a homogeneous experience, and no individual or academic movement can claim to represent the preferences of an entire community. This raises an important question about power: who has the authority to reclaim language, and whose voices are heard when that language becomes part of disability scholarship?
The tension is particularly significant because Hamraie and Fritsch explicitly challenge dominant forms of expertise and advocate for disabled people's agency. If disabled people are indeed experts in their own lives, as the manifesto argues, then this expertise must also include the right to determine how they wish to be described. The freedom to embrace reclaimed terminology should be accompanied by an equally respected freedom to reject it.
Ultimately, my discomfort with the word "crip" does not diminish my support for the manifesto's broader vision of disability justice. Rather, it reflects my belief that genuine inclusion must acknowledge differences within the disability community itself. A movement committed to dismantling ableism should remain attentive not only to the structures that exclude disabled people but also to the language through which it articulates its own political ambitions. Reclamation can be an act of empowerment, but it should remain a personal and collective choice, never an expectation imposed on those it seeks to represent.