Downers: Crip Affect and Radical Relationalities

Taking up prior formulations of crip affect, I explore the positionality of the downer as one whose body complicates global economies of social and political encounter. Engaging with neoliberal formulations of embodiment and the co-constitutive forces of heteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness (McRuer, 2006), I look at the ways in which many theoretical and political disability justice projects position disability as complementary to consumer capitalism, producing normative frameworks into which certain abnormal embodiments can be incorporated. I propose that the downer, as a relational body that proliferates social dis-ease and economic dysfunction, mobilizes crip affect ironically and creatively. Through processes of becoming (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Kim 2015; Puar 2015), downers resist assimilation into biomedical frameworks, and in doing so, propose generative forms of social, economic, political, and corporeal unintelligibility. This article is, itself, an exercise in becoming downer. It renders habitable an ostensibly uninhabitable positionality.