ABSTRACT
In her early, important elaboration on the politics and continued efficacy of queer theory and politics, Judith Butler asserts: ‘If the term queer is to be a site of collective contestations, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings, it will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes’ (1993, 228). Similarly, a decade later, Robert McRuer and Abby Wilkerson, in their elaboration of a queer influenced and inflected disability studies and politics, argue that ‘suggesting that “in a free society everyone will be disabled,” is not necessarily universalizing dismissal, fetishistic appropriation, or exploitative truth of the system; it is instead a recognition that another world can exist in which an incredible variety of bodies and minds are valued and identities are shaped, where crips and queers have effectively (because repeatedly) displaced the able-bodied/disabled binary’ (McRuer and Wilkerson 2003, 14).
