Robert McRuer

Crip Theory in the Hetero Factory

Schools, workplaces, and domestic spaces may indeed function as “hetero factories,” designed to produce and secure the hierarchized binaries heterosexual/homosexual, man/woman, masculine/feminine. The factory itself, however, as both a literal and metaphorical site for the production of modern subjectivity, can only function efficiently by simultaneously producing and naturalizing the identities able-bodied and disabled; the identity of the “able-bodied worker” emerged with the rise of industrial capitalism and those populations unable to work in the factory found themselves newly comprehended (and often incarcerated) as “disabled.” This presentation examines how the history of heterosexuality and heteronormativity are embedded in the history of able-bodiedness, and vice versa: the system of compulsory able-bodiedness that in a sense produces disability is thoroughly interwoven with the system of compulsory heterosexuality that produces queerness. If queer theory at this point, however, has a certain amount of academic legitimacy and even, in some quarters, institutionalization, the same cannot be said of “crip theory,” an extension and contestation of disability studies. This presentation thus proposes to crip the hetero factory, assessing the field of contemporary queer theory through this emergent critical discourse.