The Inarticulate Post-Socialist Crip: On the Cruel Optimism of Neoliberal Transformations in the Czech Republic
Abstract
This text proposes a cripistemology of post-socialist rehabilitation into/through neoliberalism in Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s. It discusses the ways in which disability semantics as well as ideological structures of compulsory health and able-bodiedness served to fuel the optimism of the first post-revolutionary years, and reveals the ways in which the possibility of crip epistemologies and politicised crip horizons were foreclosed.
The example of Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s facilitates a more capacious inquiry into the toxicity of attachments to optimism-an affective politics of positivity more generally, and for disability theory specifically. The text also speaks to the absence of disability from theories of neoliberalism and formulates a crip critique of the affective politics of neoliberalism for which Lauren Berlant coined the term "cruel optimism."