Necessary Confusion: Making Queer-Crip Access
Confusion is often an uncomfortable or disorienting experience. It tends to introduce uncertainty, impede progress, and undermine efficiency. Because of this, the most common response to confusion is one of avoidance. This impulse is reflected in the existing scholarship on confusion – which either works to resolve it directly, or understands its resolution as an eventual and desirable outcome. The implicit premise of this work is that it is always desirable and possible to resolve confusion. However, this is a faulty premise which illustrates the lack of critical consideration that confusion has received up until now.
Necessary Confusion addresses this gap in scholarship by rejecting the implicit premises of past work. Rather than seeking to resolve confusion, my project begins with the understanding that sometimes – for some bodies, minds, and ways of being – there is no resolution for confusion. Confusion here is not just an impediment to thought, but also an affective, embodied, and relational phenomena. Building on this understanding, my work tries to stay with confusion, aiming to find out what it might have to offer when we stop trying to resolve it. In particular, my project explores how a queer-crip approach to confusion can activate it as both a strategy of resistance and an opportunity to prioritise access.
To more deeply explore the potential of confusion, my project will use artistic methods to expand the vocabulary for confusion beyond the verbal and into the visual, somatic, and temporal. This expanded language will then be used to help build a queer-crip understanding of confusion that engages it on its own terms – rejecting both the drive to resolve confusion and the reactionary approach of celebrating it. Through this framework, my project will explore how confusion may point towards collaborative, relational, and access-oriented ways of working together.