How to crip your sign language linguistic theory

Abstract

The language practices and experiences of racially and ethnically minoritized users of signed languages have been largely ignored or marginalized within signed language linguistics. We bring a critical disability raciolinguistic perspective to crip linguistics to interrogate the White colonial logics, including essentialized competence, boundedness, and homogeneity, that underlie the foundation of signed language linguistics. We then consider some assumptions which would need to be rejected and embraced to work toward a crip linguistic theory. We conclude that a critical disability raciolinguistic-compatible coalitional linguistic theory that enacts a crip ethos toward language is one that we can and must try to manifest.