POSTPARTUM AND DISABILITY: A Feminist Call for RJ-Crip Criticism

Our chapter offers an approach to seeing and strengthening the links between reproductive justice and disability justice as they play out during postpartum. Theorizing what we term RJ-Crip criticism, we explore reasons why disability has a troubled relationship with postpartum and opportunities for apprehending how deeply upending postpartum is. Focusing explicitly on the third pillar of reproductive justice-the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments-we analyze three central rhetorical problems regarding postpartum: visibility, invention, and temporality. After interrogating how normative, capitalist, heteropatriarchal forces structure medical and public understandings of postpartum, we examine how Black feminist advocates leverage crip interventions to these problems, paving the way for alternative futures. In cripping postpartum, we caution feminist rhetorical scholars to see critique as both an act of analyzing past actions and reconstructing the future. Leaning into Black feminist activists already doing the rhetorical work, we hope to encourage future feminist rhetoricians to see worldmaking as important and necessary to critique.