What is “normal” anyway? Who supposedly defines what it is, and from what perspective? How can we create new and alternative images and break down barriers—in the mind, and beyond?

Those are some of the key questions for Crip Magazine. Feel free to leaf through the copy here. The artist Eva Egermann has been publishing this magazine full of text and visual contributions since 2012.

“Crip”, originally a derogatory word, was reclaimed and re-appropriated in the 1970s. During the First Republic, the word “cripple” didn’t just have negative connotations—for eleven years, a magazine with the same name “Krüppel” appeared regularly—until 1938. And the first self-help organizations were founded in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Crip Movement or Disability Rights Movement is also known as the Independent Living Movement. There is a large screen behind you with a bench in front of it. Next to the bench is a monitor where you can select videos, among them many on the movement’s history in Austria since the 1970s.

Crip Magazine questions images of so-called disability and offers new ones. The magazine is geared toward self-determination and self-empowerment. The second edition on display here includes a text by Elisabeth Magdlener.

She is the founder and chairperson of the organization CCC** – Change Cultural Concepts and she is on the board of Ninlil – Empowerment and Counselling for Women* with Disabilities*. Elisabeth Magdlener is a cultural studies scholar and teaches courses on Queer DisAbility Studies and Body Discourses. She is constantly working to build different academic-activist consciousness-raising projects and has published widely on the topic. She is also a dancer and member of the worldwide community dance movement Dance Ability and performs with A.D.A.M. – Austrian Dance Art Movement.

Whether in scholarship, activism or art—Elisabeth Magdlener speaks out against the categorizing and labelling of people:

“It’s extremely important to me that people are not divided into norms and boxes based on certain characteristics or traits. For the most part, society makes disability what it is, and uses it to define people. For instance, until I was eight years old, before I went to school, all of the specialists kept thinking, again and again, that I was not intelligent because of my physical disability. As a child I was often timid and quiet. And because I am a little hard of hearing, I was a little slower to respond. Today I am a cultural studies scholar and hold two university degrees.”

Disability is largely made by society. So, who is dis-abled also depends on the situation:

“Disability is not a permanent condition. I am not always or exclusively disabled, because disability depends on the situation. When I write for my lectures and workshops on the computer, at that very moment, I am not disabled. Disability is also not just an individual condition. I am often disabled by society like when buildings are not accessible. Disability is always used to describe a defect of a person, instead of being accepted as one form of lived reality that exists alongside so many others. All people are affected by disability. Because all people can be or become disabled at any point in time, over and over.”

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