In the Conclusion to this book, we move from looking back to assembling a future. This chapter shows that the metaphorical uses of disability that have been examined throughout the book remain with us in the present. And it attempts to set out some approaches towards ending this practice of making meaning out of bodies. This will require, the conclusion argues, more than a commitment to neoliberal diversity initiatives and to inclusion (though inclusion remains nonetheless urgent) – it will require us to decolonise the way that we look, and to disassemble the classical tradition in favour of models that insist on the receiver’s accountability. Maria Oshodi’s 1992 play Hound is an important text in this chapter, which looks beyond the line, or inheritance model of classical reception to the example of Stacey Park Milbern’s ‘crip ancestorship’ model. Ultimately, the conclusion is invested in the core questions of this book: what kind of an ancient world would we need to imagine, who would we need to take as our ancestors, and how might we organise the models that figure our relationship with it and them, in order for a more equal future to become our reality?

This chapter uses Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s 2009 performance piece “The River” to provide an overview of queer disability studies in the United States. As with many cultural workers writing about disability from queer perspectives, Piepzna-Samarasinha complicates concepts of pride and identity; explores the effects of diagnostic categories; and yearns for queer crip futures. Sexuality plays a significant role in her piece, but Piepzna-Samarasinha avoids a straightforward narrative of liberation; pain, precarity, and debility co-exist here with pleasure. In order to situate Piepzna-Samarasinha’s work within a larger context of disability justice and queer disability studies, the chapter supplements her narratives with those of other contemporary theorists, artists, and activists. With an emphasis on the questions that queer disability studies poses for the study of literature and other cultural forms, the chapter attends to both the resonances and the friction between queer studies and disability studies.