Katarzyna Ojrzyńska

The article analyzes Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer (Schwules Museum, Berlin, 2022/2023) – the first international exhibition which centred on the intersections of queer and crip history, culture, and activism. Drawing on the theoretical framework of cultural disability studies, Ojrzyńska examines its key thematic areas, such as inclusion, aesthetic beauty, history, and resistance. Informed by the minoritarian ethics of representation, Queering the Crip… showed how a museum exhibition can serve as a site of inclusivity and a resource for inclusive practices, nurturing solidarity and a sense of connection across various categories of social exclusion, invisibility, and marginalization, with major focus on “quip” identities, to use the neologism put forward by Quiplash. It expanded the Schwules Museum’s reach beyond those members of the queer community who fit in the bodily and mental “norm” as well as stimulating reflection on the place and role of disability in culture and society. In fact, the exhibition presented disability and queerness as identities and alternative ways of being in the world that can intersect and have a strong subversive political, ethical, and aesthetic potential.

The article explores possible intersections between cultural disability studies and the blue humanities. It opens with a discussion of cultural representations of atypical aquatic mammals and fish. Yet, the main focus is placed on various contemporary literary texts (Mateusz Pakuła’s Wieloryb: The Globe, John Wilson’s From the Depths, and Kaite O’Reilly’s In Water I’m Weightless), which were written either by or for artists with disabilities. As will be shown, all of them allude to water or/and marine environment in order to comment on disability, its social constructedness and context dependence, and the conservation of biological and cultural diversity. In doing so, these texts challenge the fixedness of the disabled/non-disabled binary and subtly hint at a possibility of transgressing the traditional opposition between the human and the animal. This in turn points to the potential of applying the oceanic perspective, or what Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters call ‘wet’ and ‘more-than-wet’ ontologies, in disability studies.