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Contends that disability is a central but misunderstood element of global austerity politics. Broadly attentive to the political and economic shifts of the last several decades, Robert McRuer asks how disability activists, artists and social movements generate change and resist the dominant forms of globalization in an age of austerity, or "crip times." Throughout Crip Times, McRuer considers how transnational queer disability theory and culture—activism, blogs, art, photography, literature, and performance—provide important and generative sites for both contesting austerity politics and imagining alternatives. The book engages various cultural flashpoints, including the spectacle surrounding the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games; the murder trial of South African Paralympian Oscar Pistorius; the photography of Brazilian artist Livia Radwanski which documents the gentrification of Colonia Roma in Mexico City; the defiance of Chilean students demanding a free and accessible education for all; the sculpture and performance of UK artist Liz Crow; and the problematic rhetoric of "aspiration" dependent upon both able-bodied and disabled figurations that emerged in Thatcher's England. Crip Times asserts that disabled people themselves are demanding that disability be central to our understanding of political economy and uneven development and suggests that, in some locations, their demand for disability justice is starting to register. Ultimately, McRuer argues that a politics of austerity will always generate the compulsion to fortify borders and to separate a narrowly defined "us" in need of protection from "them."

Theorists of neoliberalism have placed dispossession and displacement at the centre of their analyses of the workings of contemporary global capitalism. Disability, however, has not figured centrally into these analyses. This essay attends to what might be comprehended as the crip echoes generated by dispossession, displacement, and a global austerity politics. Centring on British-Mexican relations during a moment of austerity in the UK and gentrification in Mexico City, the essay identifies both the voices of disability that are recognized by and made useful for neoliberalism as well as those shut down or displaced by this dominant economic and cultural system. The spatial politics of austerity in the UK have generated a range of punishing, anti-disabled policies such as the so-called 'Bedroom Tax.' The essay critiques such policies (and spatial politics) by particularly focusing on two events from 2013: a British embassy good will event exporting British access to Mexico City and an installation of photographs by Livia Radwanski. Radwanski's photos of the redevelopment of a Mexico City neighbourhood (and the displacement of poor people living in the neighbourhood) are examined in order to attend to the ways in which disability might productively haunt an age of austerity, dispossession, and displacement.

This article attempts to "think disability" using the theoretical framework laid out by Gayle Rubin in her 1984 essay "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality." After considering how Rubin's essay was already arguably engaged with a disability politics (or, more broadly, a politics of embodiment), it reads "Thinking Sex" alongside another 1984 text, Deborah A. Stone's book The Disabled State, arguing that Stone's text, like Rubin's, is concerned with how capitalism sorts bodies and behaviors into dominant and subordinated categories. The Disabled State, however, can also be read as anticipating, from a disability studies perspective, queer analyses (such as Licia Fiol-Matta's book A Queer Mother for the Nation or Jasbir K. Puar's Terrorist Assemblages) that do not emerge until much later—analyses stressing the uneven biopolitical incorporation of seemingly marginalized subjects into the contemporary state. The article concludes with reflections on sex surrogacy and the Netherlands, using that location as an exemplary site for examining the complex and contradictory position of disability and sex in relation to the contemporary state.

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 A Sexual Culture for Disabled People -- 2 Bridging Theory and Experience -- 3 The Sexualized Body of the Child -- 4 Dismembering the Lynch Mob -- 5 "That Cruel Spectacle" -- 6 Pregnant Men -- 7 Touching Histories -- 8 Leading with Your Head -- 9 Normate Sex and Its Discontents -- 10 I'm Not the Man I Used to Be -- 11 Golem Girl Gets Lucky -- 12 Fingered -- 13 Sex as "Spock" -- 14 Is Sex Disability? -- 15 An Excess of Sex -- 16 Desire and Disgust -- 17 Hearing Aid Lovers, Pretenders, and Deaf Wannabes -- Works Cited -- Contributors -- Index

This collection brings together scholars and artists in disability studies, sexuality, queer theory, and feminism, to show how much sexuality studies and disability studies have to learn from each other.