What is resilience for people with disabilities? What is recovery?
Narratives of illness, trauma and disability are often framed to emphasize recovery. Reflecting on resiliency, constructed ideas of normalcy, and “crip time,” Ellen Samuels writes: “Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings” (2017).
In working with disabled performers, disability scholar and artist Petra Kuppers notes the connection between the material oppression experienced by people with disabilities and the performance space. She writes: