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We are not the first to try to get ahold of this phenomenon. It has gone by many names—sad militancy, grumpywarriorcool, manarchism, puritanism—each of which emphasizes different elements and sources. In this book, we call it rigid radicalism. Our research and experience lead us to think that its origins are as diverse as the phenomenon itself. Some say rigid radicalism comes from the way heteropatriarchy poisons intimacy with trauma and violence, while separating politics from everyday life. Others point to origins in the narcissistic and guilt-ridden individualism nurtured by whiteness. Or it is the way schooling replaces creativity and curiosity with conformity and evaluation. Or the humiliation of a life organized by capitalism, in which we are all pitted in petty competitions with each other. Or the way cynicism evolves from attempts to avoid pain and failure. Or it is identity politics fused with neoliberalism. And the terror and anxiety of a world in crisis. And the weakening of movements and a decline in militancy. Or it is the existence of radical milieus as such. And the deep insecurity nurtured by social media and its injunction to public performance. Or it is morality or ideology or the Left or the Maoists or the nihilists or the moralists or the ghost of Lenin. Probably there is some truth to all of these: it is definitely a tangled web.

— Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times by Nick Montgomery, Carla Bergman (Page 18)

One key difference between a conspiracy theorist and an activist, for lack of a better word, is that the conspiracy theorist holds that the best defense is more and better knowledge (read my website, listen to my explanation, investigate what you know) and the activist holds that the best defense is creating another world. An anti-oppression approach might start on the level of the epistemic, but it always leads toward action in the world, to speculative ontological commitments to different futures. The point is to change the world, this world, and so the point is complicated, compromised, and impossible to conceptualize, let alone achieve alone. People doing movement work usually get lots of things wrong, which might not be such a problem—if the purpose of the work isn’t to be right. Instead, our purpose is to contingently make it be that something that deserves a future has one. Almost all the people I know who are doing activist work, effective or not, are trying to move beyond the epistemic and into the ontic—we are attempting to prefigure something.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 235)

The shimmer here between the necessity of imagined tomorrows and control of the too-quickly-arriving tomorrow is the space of the kind of creativity signaled by prefigurative political practice. Delany repeatedly emphasizes the sense in which, as he writes:

Science fiction is not “about the future.” Science fiction is in dialogue with the present. We SF writers often say that science fiction prepares people to think about the real future—but that’s because it relates to the real present in the particular way it does; and that relation is neither one of prediction nor one of prophecy. It is one of dialogic, contestatory, agonistic creativity. In science fiction the future is only a writerly convention that allows the SF writer to indulge in a significant distortion of the present that sets up a rich and complex dialogue with the reader’s here and now. (176)

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 226)

I suggest that we can think about postidentity disability politics in a similar way. Identifying into critical disability praxis doesn’t rely on a fixed experience, or a stable identity. We know that the category “disabled” is already so heterogeneous that there has never been a set of defining characteristics capable of encompassing the scope of disabled lives and how to live them. Nor has inhabiting any given disabled identity produced any particular politics. The strand of disability work I follow rejects the idea that what we’re looking for is just a better set of diagnostic or definitive criteria. And we know that the social categories practiced at all these sites are more tangled when we hold in mind other vectors of vulnerability and empowerment, oppression and privilege. Further, we know that disability theory and practice can and often has involved people who don’t identify as disabled, who worry they’re not disabled enough to “count,” who understand themselves to be enabled by systems of oppression but whose lives are shaped and entangled with disabled lovers, friends, comrades, or family, and so on. Identifying into disability praxis means that everyone, however situated, can shape their life’s practice in a way that contributes to self-determination and coproduced freedoms.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 208)

In this chapter, I argue that speculative fantasizing about disability futures can attune us to the possibilities for imagining worlds not identical to the world we’re currently in. We can pursue SF modes, to follow LaBare’s terms, that open practices of what Angela Davis calls identifying into a new world, shaping ourselves toward that world such that we call it into being as a prefigurative practice. I argue that we can do this however we are currently identified in terms of disability.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 202)

Worlds to Come Imagining Speculative Disability Futures

How do we craft a practice for imagining and living a future that does not simply replicate and intensify the present? My thinking here is cued by Octavia Butler’s comment in the context of a panel discussion on science fiction: “It’s dangerous to assume that whatever we’ve been doing, we’re going to keep doing that. You know: the future is more of the same, only more advanced. . . . It’s dangerous to assume that we can actually see the future by only looking at the technological advancements we’ve made so far” (Octavia Butler: Science Future, Science Fiction 2008).

I think her point holds as well for the idea that it’s dangerous to assume that the future is more of the same in terms of the social relations we experience now and project as a possible “then.” Imagining and practicing futures that are not “more of the same” is difficult, necessary work. In this chapter, I frame a usable futurity in terms of queer disability prefiguration—living in the present a world we want to create, and crafting that world through our living—as a form of speculative fiction, a practice of world-making creativity.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 200)