Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability
A powerful, inventive, galvanizing book, explicitly and insistently theorizing the centrality of disability to the politics of austerity, without ever resorting to polemic, yet never satisfied with mere critique. Crip Times is a necessary book for our times.”
Alison Kafer, author of Feminist, Queer, Crip
Crip Times demonstrates the hallmarks of Robert McRuers scholarship, highlighting his formidable skills as a writer and theorist. We’ve needed a text like Crip Times to unpack the cultural logics of neoliberalism as it attends to disability and austerity, and McRuer does so with an approach that transcends disciplines and national contexts.”
American Literary History
Although neoliberalism constantly tells us There Is No Alternative, McRuer meticulously documents and analyzes those who, as the late Manning Marable urged, celebrate our passionate discontent with the way things are.”
Jack Halberstam, author of In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives
A brilliant, ambitious, and wide-ranging book, Crip Times reveals the centrality of notions of disability to global austerity politics. McRuer has crafted new, original, and dazzling theoretical architectures with which to move forward.”
Jasbir K. Puar, author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times
This riveting collection of essays is a fascinating rethinking of what sex and disability could feel like together, affirmatively and generatively. Opening with a candid, frank introduction that moves deftly between the autobiographical and the political, the volume mounts a serious challenge to the sex-ableism of queer theory and the tendency to think of sex and disability in negative terms. Having read about pregnant men, the vagaries of touch, amputee devotees, and sex addiction, the reader will emerge uncertainly about what exactly sex is, who has it, and with what. More trenchantly, these works demand an acknowledgment of how notions of ableism severely limit broader experiences of sexual erotics, intimacy, and arousal. Kudos to the editors for undertaking this important project.”
Siobhan B. Somerville, author of Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture
This is a big collection, literally, politically, and theoretically. With essays drawing on sociology, anthropology, literary studies, history, and cultural studies, as well as some more lyrical, performative, and autobiographical, Sex and Disability will be indispensable for a wide range of audiences in gender studies, disability studies, queer studies and beyond.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, GLQ
Sex and Disability well demonstrates the environmental insight that embodiment is never solitary, never finished, never the work of humans alone.
Nina Mackert, H-Disability, H-Net Reviews
Mollow and McRuer have edited an important book. The collection is an exciting contribution to the fields of disability, queer studies, and queer theory. Every chapter is an inspirational read but taken together, the contributions provide insightful discussion with layers of reflection that would be difficult to incorporate otherwise. The volume not only shows the multiple ways sex and disability are intertwined but also invites readers to think beyond established understandings of those concepts, thereby challenging boundaries and transforming ideas of disability and sex.
Anson Koch-Rein, Hypatia
The book’s main contribution lies in asking: ‘What happens to our models, central arguments, and key claims when we politicize sex and disability together?’ The range of answers in this collection demonstrates how generative this approach can be for rethinking issues of bodies, desires, and identities. It will surely inspire future work at this rich intersection in feminist disability studies in particular, where sexuality meets gender and disability.
Ellen Samuels, Disability Studies Quarterly
“The queer rejection of heteronormative futurity found in Mollow’s essay, and the broader acknowledgement of a wide spectrum of crip sexual politics, discourses, and positions in the pages of Sex and Disability, offer an important counterpoint to the Hollywood version of disabled sex represented by The Sessions.”