ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the importance of monitoring the social progress of genre material, but its theoretical focus lies with the progressive and interesting contemporary uses of disability in horror. It engages with disability-focused writing with an emphasis on the recombinant pleasures of genre – what working in a genre framework can mean, can add, and can subvert – stepping outside the box, examining what is in it. “The Language of Time” was the most surreal and experimental piece of the evening, mixing the puppeteer’s aesthetic of Cthulhu-like monsters with a crip time narrative of nonlinear sensory immediacy. Crip Time has become a generative principle for many who think about nonnormative temporalities, to the point where the term has taken off from its grounding in a particular woman’s disabled specificity, enforced incarceration toward much more generalized theorizations. Multiple genre memories are referenced in this image: from size-shifting Alice in Wonderland to references of flocked wallpaper and its associations with repressed femininity.
