Both because of and in spite of: Towards the reclamation of queercrip joy

Abstract

Queer, trans, disabled, and neurodivergent people are frequently used to represent pain, suffering, shame, and disgust in dominant heteronormative and ableist discourses. However, many queer, trans, and crip scholars, artists, and activists have reclaimed previously pathologized and denigrated experiences as sites of pleasure and joy. Importantly, this queercrip approach to joy does not position joy as an opposite or replacement for pain, but embraces joy and pain as simultaneous and co-constitutive. This essay explores the proliferations, potentialities, and limitations of queercrip joy as a site of resistance to cisheteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness. Specifically, we spotlight gender euphoria and disabled joy alongside the scholarship of authors like Sara Ahmed and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and the intersecting fields of crip theory, queer theory, trans studies, and affect theory. Ultimately, we argue that queercrip joy exists both because of and in spite of the pain of enduring oppression and physical and psychological pain. As such, queercrip joy is not merely a pure happy object, but a complicated formulation of intimacy, pleasure, pain, validation, refusal, and relationality–an indicator of the very attachments that allow us to be affected. Therefore, celebrating queercrip joy is an insufficient yet necessary tool for queer, trans, and disabled liberation.

Keywords

Gender euphoria crip theory trans studies affect theory disability

Introduction

Queer and trans joy has become an important part of contemporary queer and trans resistance and activism. On social media and in the streets, t-shirts, infographics, posters, and stickers increasingly display slogans like “queer joy is resistance” or “trans joy is radical.” These slogans serve as a form of affective resistance to dominant discourses that paint queer and trans lives as tragic, sad, or sick. Celebrating trans joy in particular pushes back on the overwhelming focus of transnormative narratives on dysphoria and distress by proudly proclaiming that trans people can live, happy, joyful, thriving lives. Disabled advocates too have pointed to the way that, to many, disability and joy seem to be irreconcilable opposites, with disabled happiness unthinkable amidst the overdetermination of narratives of grief, pain, and burden. However, building alongside queer joy narratives, storytelling campaigns on social media such as #DisabledJoy highlight the important ways that joy exists not just in spite of disability, but because of it. Indeed, disabled artist Isabel Mata argues that in a world where “we have to keep ourselves alive on top of all of the other stuff going on … [f]inding joy is the only thing I can do” (as qtd. in Métraux, 2023). In this way, queer, trans, and disabled joy are identified as not just joyful for the sake of it, but as resistant and liberatory–a way of moving towards livable futures.

We approach queer crip joy as two queer disabled young people and scholars. Kai Jacobsen is a neurodivergent and transmasculine nonbinary person. Their current research is focused on trans autistic people’s experiences of accessing gender-affirming care, and they have previously published research on gender euphoria (Jacobsen and Devor, 2022). They are also a graduate student and a white settler living in what is colonially known as Canada. Megan Ingram is a white uninvited settler and multiply-disabled queer artist-activist-academic, where queer encompasses their gender, sexuality, and political orientation to the world. We offer up our multi-hyphenated identities here to foreground how our positionality informs our thinking. Crucially, beyond our own individual identities we are also longtime friends and collaborators.

Our relational scholarship draws on a long tradition of queer and crip collaboration as method. For example, Jules Rosskam and Chase Joynt frame their friendship and collaboration as trans artists and academics as a practice of “thinking out loud together” as a kind of “public intimacy” that centers trans people’s embodied and relational knowledge (2021: 19). As our friendship and collaboration is indebted to Chase Joynt as a mentor, we are building on an intergenerational trans canon. Our scholarship centers the people, places, and relationships in which knowledge production takes place as inextricable from that knowledge, not merely coincidental or circumstantial. As such, we ground our writing in relationality and the coalitional politics we practice in our everyday lives and relationships. These practices include both collaboration and a move towards ‘desire-based research’ (Tuck, 2009) that attends to not only marginalized communities’ oppressive sociopolitical contexts, but also the world-building potential of resilience and joy.

In what follows, we begin by situating our analysis of queercrip joy in relation to queer and crip theory, emphasizing the generative potential of thinking queer and crip together. We then highlight how hegemonic discourses frame queer, trans, and disabled people as tragedies, scapegoats, and affect aliens. We contrast these overdetermined narratives with community understandings of gender euphoria and disabled joy, arguing that queercrip joy exists both because of and in spite of pain and oppression. Ultimately, we argue that celebrating queercrip joy is insufficient yet necessary for queer, trans, and disabled liberation.

Queer and crip studies

Queer and crip theory both emerge as forms of resistance to medicalization and normativity. Both trace their roots to activist and artistic circles beyond the academy, and indeed, the histories and futures of queer and crip theory are intertwined. Robert McRuer argues that crip theory has a “similar contestatory relationship to disability studies and identity that queer theory has to LGBT studies and identity” (2006: 35). That is, just as queer theory challenges the assimilationist politics and biological essentialism of LGBT studies, crip theory similarly challenges the assimilationist tendencies of disability studies. Both queer and crip theory draw on a politics of refusal–of legibility, of assimilation, and of the normalizing power of the medical gaze to define, diagnose, and pathologize. Further, both queer and crip are reclamations of slurs. By leveraging the power imbued in these words, both queer and cripple are recognizable as “cousins: words to shock, words to infuse with pride and self-love, words to resist internalized hatred, words to help forge a politics” (Clare, 2015: 84). Resultantly, practices of queering and cripping “challenge oppressive norms [and] build community” (Sandahl, 2003: 38).

Despite their theoretical usage as arguments against identity politics, queer and crip are both used as identity labels for individuals and communities. Both are intentionally expansive and slippery terms; queer is commonly used as an umbrella term for a variety of sexual and gender minority identities, and crip similarly is used by disabled people of all experiences, not just physically disabled people (Clare, 2015; Kafer, 2013). We locate neurodivergence under this crip umbrella and at times distinguish it from disability to emphasize the complicated political legacies and presents that separate neurodivergence from disability and the distinct cultures that have formed around each category (Beck, 2023). The histories of exclusion–of neurodivergent people from disabled spaces, and of intellectually disabled individuals from neurodivergent ones—make the coalitional politics of theorizing disability and neurodivergence together rife with both tension and potential. While these tensions are beyond the scope of this article, including neurodivergence and it’s “ways of looking and talking back to power” in our theorization of crip orients us towards non-normative and queer ways of conceptualizing disability (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al., 2020: 228).

Indeed, thinking queer and crip together produces generative, expansive, and insightful theorizing. Crip theory draws on queer theorists’ assertion that heterosexuality is a compulsory performance to argue that able-bodiedness, too, is a compulsory performance. McRuer (2006) argues that compulsory heterosexuality necessarily involves compulsory able-bodiedness, and vice versa. Thinking queer and crip together, then, draws attention to how medicalization and pathologization have been used to discipline both queer and disabled people as well as how cisnormativity and heteronormativity are based on a foundation of able-bodiedness (Kafer, 2013). Following McRuer (2006) and other queer and crip theorists, we use “queercrip” to frame queer and crip as co-constitutive. When discussing queer and disabled people and communities more generally, we use “queer and disabled.” We intentionally use queercrip for its expansive, generative, and radical potentialities, as well as to allude to their verb formations—to queer and crip joy. We use queer expansively to refer to people who diverge from cisheteronormativity and a variety of sexual and gender minority identities. While individuals’ experiences of queercrip joy are grounded in the specificities of their bodyminds, queercrip joy is not the exclusive domain of any one category of gender, sexuality, or bodymind.

The affective turn – towards discourse and feeling

Understanding how thinking queer and crip together destabilizes the comfortable performances of gender and able-bodiedness requires a move beyond the discursive structures of queer and crip towards the way that they feel. In recent years, disability and queer studies have experienced an “affective turn,” a move to challenge the erasure of affect that has persisted in western scholarship and explore the cultural structuring of emotion (Shefer and Munt, 2019). Accounting for affect is particularly crucial when considering the experiences of disability and queerness, as it invites embodiment and social attunement back into the discussion–avoiding concerns of “writing the body out of theory” (Hemmings, 2005: 548). Some have argued that affect has a pre-discursive freedom of attachment that allows for affective connection to anything (Sedgwick, 2003). Conversely, we situate our exploration of affect within the political arena to attend to the ways that certain bodies, ideas, and subjectivities become overburdened with affective attachments. In this way, we understand affect as integrated within, rather than counter to, the discursive. As such, overdetermined narratives about certain bodies (namely, queer and disabled ones) lead to unequal affective performances.

Understanding the political implications and unequal distribution of affect provides the foundation for exploring how queer and disabled subjects are discursively and affectively constructed. The emotions that queer and disabled subjects experience in contemporary western societies are inextricable from the social context of the cisheteronormative idealization of the nuclear family and reproduction, the neoliberal valuation of productivity, and the subsequent austerity measures that seek to reinforce these systems. These valuations of difference emerge in the specific context of white supremacy and settler colonialism in North America which are intertwined with cisheteronormativity and neoliberal capitalism. The constructions of disability and affect explored below are rooted in the continued dichotomization of abled/disabled, cisgender/transgender, and straight/queer by hegemonic western dialogues (Lovern, 2021). While we frame our discussion in relation to these affective politics and ideologies due to their hegemony, they cannot fully encapsulate the complexities of diverse experiences of queerness and disability globally or even nationally.

However, this material and philosophical emphasis on difference is telling, as difference itself works to maintain the status quo. While in many Indigenous languages, and languages globally, the term “difference” does not have an attendant hierarchized moral value (e.g., normal/abnormal, right/wrong), in a North American English one, difference is conceptualized as “bad” (Lovern, 2021). This is because, in a cisheteronormative neoliberal context, subjects exist not only within a financial economy, but a moral and affective one, wherein actions and emotions construct subjects as more or less valuable (Hughes, 2012). The ideal subject in these economies is independent, gender-conforming, heterosexual, and orients towards the expected life trajectory of social, gendered, and biological reproduction and productive autonomous adult lives under the capitalist system. As disability “endangers the carefully constructed myth of the ‘able’ body and self which is foundational to the neoliberal social order” (Liddiard and Slater, 2018: 3) and queerness disrupts the social norms and expectations of gendered and reproductive futures (Edelman, 2004), queer and disabled subjects resultantly find themselves the affective objects of resentment.

Resentment—the feeling of indignation, ill will, or anger directed at others—is an affective practice that emerges as a “reaction to a relational situation” (Fassin, 2013: 260). Resentment is thus a direct reaction to the ‘other(s)’, creating an us-vs-them dynamic (Mulligan and Brunson, 2020).This division between the self and other is further articulated by Fassin (2013) who differentiates between the genuine feelings of alienation and domination of the oppressed (ressentiment) and the misdirected ideological rancor of the non-oppressed (resentment). It is the conceptualization of resentment as misdirected ideological rancor that Hughes (2015: 993) takes up in his assertion that “[r]esentment embraces a ‘blame culture’ perfectly suited to the fabrication of scapegoats; the others deemed responsible for many of the problems, ills and evils of the world”; a role assigned to “the oppressed, in general, and disabled people, in particular.”

Queer and disabled subjects are positioned as scapegoats within this blame culture, often aligned with the downfall of institutions, fears around children’s futures, and the consequences of capitalism working as intended. These fears are exemplified in the current moral panic around youth increasingly identifying as queer, trans, and/or neurodivergent. Political attacks on gender-affirming care for youth have been driven in part by the belief that vulnerable autistic and/or mentally ill teens are being falsely led to identify as trans by social media (Hsu, 2022). This “social contagion” is also reflected in concerns that teen girls are developing tics after watching TikTok videos of people with tic disorders, which some researchers have described as a “mass social media-induced illness” caused by “challenges in post-modern society” (Müller-Vahl et al., 2022: 256). Assertions that children are being “groomed” or manipulated into these identities positions queer and disabled subjects as scapegoats for the perceived ‘moral decline’ of society and ‘infection’ of institutions. In addition to scapegoating, queer and disabled people are also positioned as objects of disgust or, importantly, unhappiness. Ahmed (2010: 14) asserts that affects do not merely reside in a subject “and then move outward towards objects. Feelings are how objects create impressions in shared spaces of dwelling.” All objects therefore arrive into social contexts with “an affective value already in place, which means they are already invested with positive and negative value” (Ahmed, 2010: 34 emphasis added). Queer and disabled subjects and bodies as cultural objects therefore do not arrive neutrally into the context of blame culture but emerge already affectively imbued with resentment and are devalued for that perceived negativity.

Affect aliens and the unthinkability of joy

For trans people, the affective burden of resentment stems from the overdetermined association between transness and suffering that renders trans joy unthinkable. Transphobia operates structurally by denying and restricting trans people’s access to life chances–the resources and opportunities that enable quality of life (Spade, 2015). Spade (2015) highlights how life chances are unequally distributed according to transphobia as well as racism, misogyny, ableism, colonialism, and other axes of oppression. As such, queer, trans, and disabled people all experience the unequal distribution of life chances and futures according to their social location. For example, trans scholar Jules Gill-Peterson has argued that the current wave of anti-trans laws sweeping the United States “aim to fully disenfranchise trans people from public life beginning in childhood” (2022). By banning life-saving gender-affirming care, the state leaves trans people vulnerable to suicide and denies trans children the chance to become trans adults. These bans compound the existing slow violence of oppression that create the conditions of poverty, violence, homelessness, incarceration, and illness that trans people disproportionately experience (Spade, 2015; Westbrook, 2023; Yarbrough, 2023). In addition to the clear material consequences of structural violence and deprivation, these conditions of oppression also have symbolic and affective consequences for trans, queer, and disabled people. They make it difficult for us to imagine ourselves as happy adults in the future and for trans and many disabled and queer youth to imagine themselves as adults at all. As such, experiencing joy and love for one’s self and community is a discursive and affective impossibility.

Highlighting the violence and discrimination that queer, trans, and disabled people face is undoubtedly important, and commemorating the lives lost to transphobic and ableist violence and suicide communities play important roles in activism. However, this can also lead to what stef shuster and Laurel Westbrook call “epistemic foreclosure,” where transness (and in the case of our theorizing, disability) become synonymous with tragedy, suffering, and pain in the popular imagination (2023: 3). Laurel Westbrook argues that overfocusing on violence can create the appearance of a “vulnerable subjecthood” in which all trans people are inherently and constantly vulnerable to violence at all times (2021: 15) This emphasis on vulnerability is mirrored in disability discourses that construct disabled subjects as both abject and infantile–a community who is both “good to mistreat and good to be good to” (Hughes, 2019: 831 emphasis original).

This duality of mistreatment/charity facilitates very specific futures and identities for disabled people that are paralleled in the discursive construction of queer and trans futures. In one form of structural oppression, disabled people are denied the resources and opportunities that enable quality of life such as inaccessible medical care and enforced poverty through disability welfare plans that offer sub-sub-poverty rates (Hughes, 2015; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2022). However, in a more insidious move, the discursive construction of what constitutes a ‘good’ life and the incitement by medical professionals and the broader public towards this life make certain lives unimaginable for disabled people (Mosleh and Gibson, 2022). Kelly Fritsch argues that neoliberal biocapitalism¹ incorporates some disabled people through assimilation and tokenistic inclusion while abandoning others deemed less desirable. Indeed, “some disabled people flourish in the future precisely because their futures gain traction through neoliberal biocapitalist practices and that these tractable futures demand that others have no future” (Fritsch, 2016: 12). Disabled people can therefore be made profitable through either rehabilitation into productive workers or through extraction for profit by institutions, adaptive technology manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, therapy providers, and the rest of the disability industrial complex. Trans people are similarly incorporated into neoliberal biocapitalism to the extent that they can be made profitable. Dan Irving has argued that trans communities have “responded to pathologization and erasure by cultivating social subjectivities that demonstrate their ability to contribute to economic progress” (2008: 55). This is reflected, for example, in advocacy efforts to demonstrate that gender-affirming care is cost effective because it improves trans people’s wellbeing and therefore reduces their overall healthcare costs. Both trans and disabled people, therefore, are valued under neoliberal biocapitalism for their profit potentials.

Neoliberal biocapitalism also manifests in the emphasis on developmentalism in medicalized disability discourses. Developmentalism constrains the lives of disabled people in ways that cut off the potential for alternate affective attachments to their disability, experience, and identity. Disabled people are held accountable to normative developmental trajectories, with any deviation pathologized as ‘atypical’ or ‘abnormal’, and for individuals with congenital or childhood onset disabilities, as the ‘failure’ to meet normative milestones (Mosleh and Gibson, 2022). The labeling of disability over the lifespan in terms of deficit and aberrancies acts as another form of epistemic foreclosure. Resultantly, disabled people “risk internalizing the idea that they are inherently ‘broken’ and in need of fixing in order to live a ‘good’ life” (Mosleh and Gibson, 2022: 129). Under this discourse, disabled joy is only seen as possible through assimilation and cure with disability itself as an unhappy object.

Developmentalism in the medicalization of disability is paralleled by the “cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2011) of homonormativity and transnormativity. Queer youth are promised that “it gets better” and that they can overcome the pain of bullying and suicidal ideation as they grow into homonormative adults (Grzanka and Mann, 2014). Trans people are similarly encouraged to embrace transnormative “affective narratives that frame life ‘pre’ transition as characterized by a reductively bleak emotional surround and cathect life ‘post’ transition to a bright-sided promise of social ease, domestic comfort, and existential peace” (Malatino, 2022: 20). As such, queer and trans joy are only seen as possible through assimilation into homonormativity and transnormativity, making deviation—and queerness and transness themselves—into unhappy objects.

Understanding disability and queerness as objects of resentment and unhappiness is crucial as social and affective bonds in contemporary western society are built through a collective orientation towards shared happy objects (Ahmed, 2010). Under western neoliberal capitalism, these objects include the cisheteronormative nuclear family, independent living, and a well-paying normative career. Individuals are expected to both orient towards these objects and progress linearly towards them in pursuit of the ‘good’ life. When individuals deviate from this linear path and therefore fail to reaffirm others’ normative affective responses, especially happiness or ‘success’, they disturb (Ahmed, 2010). The (dis)orientation of trans, queer, and disabled subjects away from these assumed trajectories “gets in the way of other people’s enjoyment of the right things” (Ahmed, 2010: 67). By failing to invest in normative happy objects and reproductive futurism, queer and disabled subjects are positioned as ‘affect aliens’ who “affect others in the wrong way” (Ahmed, 2010: 67). It is this capacity to “be affected in the wrong way by the right things” (Ahmed, 2010: 67) or perhaps be positively affected by the ‘wrong’ things that brings us to the question of queercrip joy. While scholars have accounted for queer/trans/crip failures to perform and affectively orient towards normative objects, little scholarly attention has been paid to the affective objects that queer, trans, and disabled subjects do orient towards and what that reorientation might mean. Resultantly, we now turn our attention towards how joy is articulated and experienced in trans and disabled communities.

Moving towards joy

We conceptualize joy in this paper widely, drawing on its previous theorization as an emotion that shares “conceptual space with other positive emotions such as gladness, elation, [and] happiness” (Johnson, 2020: 6). In conceptualizing queer and trans joy, we frame gender euphoria as an affect falling under the broader conceptual umbrella of joy, with the distinction between the two being one of intensity. Indeed, Massumi (2015) asserts that affect is about intensity, and in many ways is intensity, with the strength of an experience indicating the experience itself. We therefore conceptualize euphoria as an intensification of joy, wherein all euphoria is joy, but not all joy is euphoria. Thus, while we speak to gender euphoria specifically as it relates to trans joy, we do so not to collapse the two, but to indicate how joy can be experienced as a ‘mixed-emotional state’ encapsulating this breadth of experience and intensity (Fredrickson, 2001).

Trans joy

Perhaps the most prominent form of trans joy is gender euphoria. Jacobsen and Devor define gender euphoria as “positive emotions resulting from affirmation of one’s gender identity or expression” (2022: 126). The term encapsulates a wide variety of experiences, feelings, and sensations trans people may have related to their gender and body, such as a “joyful feeling of rightness,” (Beischel et al., 2022: 8) and can describe both intense ecstatic joy as well as calm contentment (Austin et al., 2022; Beischel et al., 2022; Jacobsen and Devor, 2022). While gender euphoria has only recently received academic attention, the term has been used in trans communities for decades (Jacobsen and Devor, 2022).

A recurring theme in the limited body of literature on gender euphoria and trans happiness is the joy of challenging gender norms. In Kai’s previous research on gender euphoria, nonbinary and genderfluid participants described combining seemingly contradictory gender expressions as euphoric, such as lingerie and a beard, or long hair and a deep voice (Jacobsen and Devor, 2022). Other scholars have framed these forms of creative gender expression as a form of resistance to gender norms. In their qualitative interviews about trans joy, shuster and Westbrook found that many trans participants found joy in being part of a marginalized community “because it enabled them to question the world around them and their own lives and use those questions to enable personal growth and positive social change” (2022: 9). Similarly, other scholars have found that some trans people describe challenging gender norms as key to cultivating authenticity and a positive self-concept and as a form of embodied resistance to cisnormativity and transnormativity (Ogle et al., 2023; Tebbe et al., 2022). As such, creative, contradictory, and expansive gender presentations are joyful not merely because they affirm one’s identity, but also because they challenge normative ideas of what forms of gender expression are valuable and appropriate.

Disabled joy

Disabled joy has remained so unthinkable in normative academic spaces that keyword searching “disability” and “joy” or “disabled” and “happiness” into a research database returns only articles that lament the loss of quality of life and happiness with disability onset, and the disability gap in happiness across welfare states. While research on disabled pleasure and self-care have minimal yet powerful scholarship clustered around them (for an example see Kim and Schalk, 2021), disabled joy as an overarching affect that moves beyond narratives of care and overcoming remains undertheorized within the academy. We highlight this difference to note the ways that conceptualizations of disabled joy can encompass these practices of radical self and mutual care, while also expanding beyond them to account for ways of being that are rooted not in care practice, or even counter to what may be deemed as care (e.g., pushing yourself to the point of pain/symptom flare to have an experience). However, an abundance of writing on disabled joy is present across genre-crossing books such as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s (2022) The Future is Disabled and Alice Wong’s (2020) Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, and the expansive presence of blogs, Instagram profiles, and organizing in disability community (e.g., #PandemicJoy, #DisabledJoy). Disabled joy is found in challenging ableist assumptions of ability, in getting a new mobility aid and gaining access to things previously closed off, in the access intimacy that one experiences with those who just get your access needs (Mingus, 2011), in stimming, and in the comfort of eating a safe food after a difficult day.

Disabled joy exists in both the moments of joy that may seem normative and align with what brings a non-disabled individual happiness, but it also opens up entirely new ways of being and feeling in the world that may be unthinkable to those without the embodied experience of disability. Indeed, for non-disabled people, as Piepzna-Samarasinha (2022: 301) writes:

Our vibrant, weird, improbable crip bodyminds enjoying ourselves in ways the abled and normal may not have ever considered has the power to shock and upend both their ableism and their idea of the way things—bodies, movement, life—are supposed to be.

The capacity to find joy in new, expansive, and disability-specific ways is crucial to understanding the liberatory potential of disabled joy. In many ways, places, and bodies, disabled joy exists not despite disability, but because of its very presence and the way it shapes lives and relationships.

Because of and in spite of: Joy beyond binaries

Both trans and disabled joy trouble the classification of experiences, emotions, and lives as ‘bad’ or ‘good’. Finding joy in experiences that normative ideas of a ‘good life’ may see as failures disturb the assumption that ‘negative’ affects are always bad, and ‘positive’ affects are always good. As affect aliens, queer, trans, and disabled people can find joy and euphoria in orienting towards the ‘wrong’ happy objects (gender and sexual non-conformity and disability), or away from the ‘right’ ones (cisheteronormative and non-disabled futures). Queercrip joy is more than finding new happy objects—it is refusing to collapse ‘positive’ affects and ‘negative’ affects into a mutually exclusive binary.

While gender euphoria and dysphoria are opposites in that euphoria describes positive gender-related emotions and dysphoria describes negative emotions, gender euphoria and dysphoria can also be experienced simultaneously (Beischel et al., 2022; Jacobsen and Devor, 2022). While the absence of dysphoria can be experienced as a kind of euphoria, euphoria is not merely the lack of dysphoria, nor is dysphoria simply the lack of euphoria (Beischel et al., 2022; Jacobsen and Devor, 2022). Rather, they are two separate but related concepts. Trans euphoria, as an intensity of joy, exists both because of and in spite of the pain of dysphoria. Disabled joy exists both because of and in spite of the pain of impairment, inaccessibility, and isolation. While many cisgender people experience moments of gender affirmation and discomfort, the intensity of euphoria and dysphoria distinguishes trans experiences. Similarly, while non-disabled people may know the feeling of leaving the house after an injury, of being in a comforting space, or of having a new hobby, the intensity of joy and care that comes from symptom resolution, environmental safety, or special interests differs in its intensity. The euphoria of a flat chest after top surgery exists because the flat chest has not always existed; the all-consuming full body joy of savoring food exists because of latent chronic nausea, nausea that may still linger as one eats–the experience’s affective intensity is created in many ways in opposition, while allowing for the coexistence of lingering “bad” experiences. And yet, joy, and thus euphoria, also exist in spite of this dysphoria and grief–in spite of the all-consumingness of pain, and the overdetermined narrative of trans, queer, and disabled sadness, tragedy, and suicidality.

Disabled, queer, and trans joy ultimately exist in the grey space of these intersections–both because of and in spite of the material, sociopolitical, and affective realities of these identities. Eli Clare calls for a “messier story” of disabled and trans joy, arguing that “there is no real way to reconcile my lifelong struggle to love my disabled self exactly as it is with my use of medical technology to reshape my gendered and sexed body-mind. I can either try to fix the contradictions or embrace them.” (2017: 177). By embracing these contradictions, we can find joy in disrupting, in killing the joy associated with the fantasies of reproductive futurism and business as usual, and in body modification, surgery, and/or the refusal of medical care. Queercrip joy expands beyond the limits of normative understandings of joy in ways that render it affectively alien–an alienation that can move us towards liberation.

The limits of queercrip joy

As alternatives to the distress-focused conceptualization of transness that revolves around dysphoria and the deficit-oriented assumption of disability as counter to the ‘good’ life, euphoria and joy serve as alternative affects to orient around. While dysphoria and grief are something to move away from, euphoria and joy are something to move towards. However, positioning euphoria and joy uncritically as the goal conceptualizes transition, acceptance, and in some cases ‘cure’ as a process of creating the conditions for happiness. And yet, euphoria and joy do not eradicate dysphoria or pain, nor guarantee constant happiness. While these ‘positive’ affects can make the ‘negative’ ones more bearable, it cannot rid the world of transphobia, homophobia, ableism, racism, and the many other forms of oppression that structure queer, trans, and disabled people’s lives.

While emphasizing euphoria over dysphoria can resist the pathologization of transness on an individual and cultural level, it falls flat as a political strategy. Positioning trans joy as evidence that transness is not an illness or disorder implicitly positions trans dysphoria, depression, and negative affect as evidence that transness is an illness. This tactic does not disrupt the ableist logic that justifies the harms of psychopathologization, it merely seeks to exempt trans people from these harms. Positioning trans as happy and therefore healthy and good distances trans people from disability and madness, reinforcing ableism and sanism (Pilling, 2022). Notably, Cameron Awkward-Rich (2022) argues that the proponents and beneficiaries of trans happiness discourses are primarily white non-disabled transmasculine people, whose access to whiteness and masculinity allows them to distance themselves from other racialized, feminized, and disabled trans people. As such, while trans joy discourses enable some trans people to escape some of the harms of oppression and pathologization, they fail to disrupt the power structures that maintain oppression. The palatable trans person is similarly reflected in disability pride narratives that rely on assimilation into cisheteronormative and white supremacist ideals of overcoming, defeating, and eliminating shame, symptoms, or disability itself, as evident in the trope of the Paralympian. Even in texts where disability pride is based in a rejection of overcoming narratives, the incitement to see pride as the emotion to orient to and the “end” of the disability acceptance journey creates another affective expectation that in many ways parallels developmentalist narratives. In both cases, the mechanisms of ableism and sanism seek to distance queer, trans, and disabled people from themselves as well as from each other to block coalitional politics.

Overcoming shame and pain in pursuit of joy requires subjects to perform a particular affective narrative to be seen as the ‘right’ kind of queer, trans, or disabled person. Normative joy narratives that rely on linear trajectories mimic the very same curative and developmental narratives that have pathologized and constrained queer, trans, and disabled lives. Here, the linear development narrative from disability to cure parallels the assumption that disabled joy requires an affective trajectory from grief and sadness to pride and happiness. Similarly, while many trans people experience increased euphoria and decreased dysphoria as a result of accessing gender-affirming medical care, transitioning should not be understood as a linear trajectory, let alone one with an clear affective move from dysphoria to euphoria (Jacobsen and Devor, 2022).

Queercrip joy does not require the erasure of physical or psychological pain, of dysphoria, or of any number of ‘negative affects’ in a move towards ‘positive’ affects such as euphoria. Indeed, merely replacing dysphoria with euphoria as the defining emotion of transness, or grief with pride as the defining emotion of disability still require queer, trans, and disabled people to perform a particular affective narrative to legitimize their identity. As Hil Malatino writes, “Transitioning doesn’t have to be wholly curative, or even minimally happy-making, in order for it to be imperative. It doesn’t have to guarantee survival in order to be necessary” (2022: 3). Indeed, Frye (1983) asserts that oppressed subjects are often required to perform a degree of happiness and cheer, placing them in an affective double bind. Oppression, to Frye, involves signaling one’s docility and acquiescence to the situation at hand–“to participate in our own erasure” (1983: 2). These affective performances uphold the fantasy of normative happy objects and reinforce the affective alienation of oppression. It is from these parallels of structural oppression, the limitations of purely ‘positive’ affects’, and the location of queer trans and disabled people as affect aliens that we formulate the potentials of queercrip joy.

Towards queercrip joy

Queercrip joy is more than just joy and euphoria; it is a complex formulation of intimacy, pleasure, pain, validation, refusal, and relationality. Queercrip joy resists the easy binaries of positive/negative affects to instead embrace joy and pain as simultaneous and co-constitutive. Queercrip joy exists both because of and in spite of the pain of enduring oppression and physical and psychological pain. As such, queercrip joy is not merely a pure “happy object” (Ahmed, 2010), but embraces the affective messiness of re-orientating towards new, ‘wrong’, or ‘unhappy’ objects and futures. Queercrip joy allows us to feel the grief of non-conformity, the shame of failing to align with the ‘right’ political horizon, the dysphoria and dysmorphia of bodily difference, and still understand that we can have a ‘good’ life and that our lives can be happy, full, livable, and imaginable.

While queer trans and disabled liberation cannot be predicated on happiness, we argue that happiness can still be one of the goals of liberation. Queercrip activism embodies what Jules Gill-Peterson calls a “powerful articulation of desire that leads directly to concrete material politics” (Gill-Peterson, 2022). Enabling joy requires changes to the material conditions that produce unhappiness. It requires access to gender-affirming care without gatekeeping, the right to refuse medical care when it is unwanted, affirmative and accessible mental and physical health care when it is wanted, an end to poverty, freedom from incarceration in jails and psychiatric facilities, safe and secure housing, and ultimately, an end to all the forms of oppression that impact queer, trans, and disabled lives.

One example of an approach to queercrip joy that centers these material politics is Trans Day of Snack. The day originated in a tweet discussing the perils of Trans Day of Visibility and what could replace it, in which one user, Lilith, jokingly suggested Trans Day of Staying In and Having a Nice Snack. Tuck Woodstock, creator of the trans podcast Gender Reveal, took this tweet seriously and created a Trans Day of Snack mutual aid program in 2021 (Rhodes, 2023). In 2024, the project sent over $13,000 in snack payments to 655 trans people living in US states most affected by anti-trans legislation as well as nearly $22,000 in mutual aid payments for 217 trans people in need of immediate financial support to meet their basic needs, including medication and disability care supplies (Woodstock and Yin, 2024). Of course, there is no snack in the world that can bring about trans liberation. But free pizza and $100 in mutual aid can make life a little bit easier and more joyful for trans people. Trans Day of Snack refuses visibility as a prerequisite for joy or liberation and instead turns towards mutual aid and community-building. Trans Day of Snack is an effort to create the material conditions that enable trans joy that exemplifies the practice of affective care we term queercrip joy.

The pursuit of queercrip joy as a political strategy dares to imagine better futures in which all queer, trans, and disabled people not just survive, but thrive. Queercrip activism requires new strategies to prefigure joyful and livable futures. Westbrook argues that trans activism must move beyond memorializing lives lost to violence and instead employ strategies that help create the conditions for livable trans lives. A similar invocation of livable futures is taken up in Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s book The Future is Disabled where they assert that recording “the disabled survival strategies, communities, and tech we create by and for ourselves as disabled BIPOC people” is part of imagining and moving towards a crip future (2022: 23). We argue that celebrating queer, trans, and disabled joy, and moving beyond binary understandings of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ affects and objects is one such survival strategy that can move us towards these livable futures.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Megan Ingram

Kai Jacobsen

Note

Megan Ingram (they/she) is a queer disability studies scholar and documentary filmmaker who holds an MA in Sociology from Queen’s University in Canada.

Kai Jacobsen (they/them) is a trans health researcher and MA student in Sociology at Carleton University in Canada.

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