Crip Couture as Radical Care: Fashion, Art Therapy, and Disability Art

Crip Couture is arts-based research and an umbrella term that I created to describe an aspirational theory and set of artistic practices that articulate how disabled people might engage with beauty and fashion without referencing the dominant culture’s distortive and oppressive standards of normalcy. As an artist-scholar, I counter medically, socially, politically, and culturally oppressive forces by creating wearable art that incorporates disabled people’s full, intersectional identities, or what Tobin Siebers calls our “complex embodiment.” Crip Couture as a practice is also a form of radical care work, which is non-hierarchical mutual support between individual disabled people, and a form of shared culture making. Crip Couture is an example of Aurora Levine Morales’s articulation of “homemade theory,” which, through what Audre Lorde calls the “power of the erotic,” brings together personal and collective disability narratives, activism, community building, and collective artmaking to produce and assemble a disability culture archive toward the end of disability justice. This dissertation is itself a disability culture archive that includes a critical examination of disability representation, a Crip Couture Manifesto, photographs and a discussion of my original Crip Couture body adornments, documentation of disability community art-making projects, and my own life writing that explores my childhood in Taiwan, young adulthood, activism, work as an art therapist, and doctoral research.