Disability Nationalism in Crip Times

The article puts queer postcolonial and transnational theory in conversation with disability studies in order to reflect on what might be called, adapting Jasbir K. Puar, "disability nationalism in crip times." Surveying the ways that queer theory has analyzed gay identity and the heterosexual-homosexual binary in postcolonial and transnational contexts, the article considers some of the reasons why disability studies has not followed the same trajectory in relation to analyses of disability identity and the able-bodied-disabled binary. Through a reading of Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo's play Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, the article contends that the geopolitics of disability in the current world order require analyses of bodies beyond borders—specifically, of impairments that are not immediately legible within the identity-based or nationalist terms that generally characterize the field and movement.