Crip Camp Response - 4/16

One of the most striking things that “Crip Camp” does is never desexualize the people in Camp Jened. This refusal is itself a form of disability justice in action. Outside of the utopia of this camp, campers were desexualized and asexualized by their communities. Often, they were seen as sick rather than as people. Judy Heumann describes how growing up disabled, you are not seen as “a man or a woman, you are simply seen as disabled.” The film makes it clear that people with disabilities were too often denied gender and sexuality. It even treats a crabs outbreak at camp as evidence of the campers' sexuality and a testament to their agency as human beings. I found the movie to be an effective way to break down the stigmas that still affect the disability community today. Most mainstream representations of disability (if they even exist at all) portray disabled people as these inspirational figures whose value lies in their suffering or their triumph over it. They are rarely portrayed as desiring, funny, or sexually active. “CripCamp” shows how complex and deep disability is, never failing to treat its subjects as three-dimensional characters. In a world that rarely depicts people with disabilities as anything but asexual angels (or monsters), I find the realistic representation in “Crip Camp” necessary to be shown to everyone who is not educated about disability activism. 

This connects directly to a core principle in disability justice frameworks that we talked about earlier in the semester: that disabled people are whole people, with the full range of human desires, contradictions, and interiority. The film doesn't treat sexuality as a footnote or a scandalous detail; it treats it as ordinary, which subtly makes the perfect point. Camp Jened was transformative not because it taught campers politics, but because it gave them the experience of being unremarkably human for the first time. That experience of wholeness is what radicalized them. They had tasted a world that didn't diminish them, and they went home determined to build it.