Black queer femme writer Kim Katrin Milan created the phrase “femme science”19 to mean femme skills, technologies, and intelligences. For me, it was revolutionary to hear someone state that femmes had actual, particular skills, talents, sciences, and cultures. I’m not sure when I started hearing and using the terms “crip skills” or “crip science”—probably roughly around the same time. But it meant something. It meant something to name and talk about all the crip skills I was seeing and learning that I and other disabled folks had. It meant something because, well, the deficiency model by which most people view disability only sees disabled people as a lack, a defect, damaged good, in need of cure. The idea that we have cultures, skills, science, and technology runs counter to all of that. In a big way.

Naming that also means having to field some able-bodied blank stares. Able-bodied people are shameless about really not getting it that disabled people could know things that the abled don’t. That we have our own cultures and histories and skills. That there might be something that they could learn from us.

But we do, and we are. So here are some things I’ve noticed as hallmarks of crip emotional intelligence, skills we use within our cultures and with each other.

— Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha