The Inarticulate Post-Socialist Crip. On the Cruel Optimism of Neoliberal Transformations in the Czech Republic" The Inarticulate Post-Socialist Crip. On the Cruel Optimism of Neoliberal Transformations in the Czech Republic
Abstract
The article proposes a cripistemological reading of post-socialist rehabilitation in Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s. It discusses the ways in which disability semantics and 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 politicized 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 article also argues for more intense engagement with disability in theories of neoliberalism and formulates a crip critique of the affective politics of neoliberalism for which Lauren Berlant coined the term "cruel optimism."