Crip theory's central premise is that homosexuality and disability share a pathologized history, and despite a developing consciousness of the intersection between queer theory and disability studies, less notice has been taken of the connection between heterosexuality and able-bodied identity. Robert McRuer argues that this identity, more so than heterosexuality, still principally masquerades as a non-identity, as the normative and natural order in society. McRuer further propounds that the system of compulsive able-bodiedness, which he suggests produces disability, is completely entwined with the system of compulsive heterosexuality that produces queerness. Furthermore, compulsory heterosexuality is contingent on compulsory able-bodiedness, and vice versa.

In Crip Theory neoliberal capitalism is taken as the dominant economic and cultural system in which, and against which, sexual identities have been imagined and composed for the last twenty-five years. McRuer advocates a “coming out,” and has surveyed the primary institutional sites where compulsory able-bodiedness and heterosexuality are produced and secured and where queerness and disability are partially and inadequately contained. The aim of this accessible, and often personal, text is to critically resist contemporary concepts of able-bodied heteronormativity by examining how crip theory is situated in relation to disability and gender politics through a series of legal, medical and purely personal case studies.

The social institutions in question are domestic and legal, McRuer moving on to areas of religion and rehabilitation; later in the text, covering educational, media and financial establishments and their individual impact. Through this multi-dimensional view of society, McRuer insists that the system is flawed in that it has so far refused to imagine bodies and desires that “fail” to fit into normative notions of physical ability and sexuality; thus this book contends that “another world is possible”.

McRuer illustrates the need for individual and global demonstration, having personally worn an “HIV POSITIVE” T-shirt at a Maastricht meeting in 2004 in order to draw attention to the politics of looking queer, thus forcing society to see. Using personal and legal stories, McRuer demonstrates the need to understand democratically the fluidity of critical identities that are neither predictable nor containable within conventional domestic ideologies.

With photographs, quotes, dictionary definitions, legal reports and personal case studies, McRuer theorizes, critiques and resists in a series of imaginative and comprehensible ways. This well-annotated text invites the uninitiated reader to become involved, to reimagine previously held perceptions of what may be considered “otherness,” to welcome disabilities, to access collectively other worlds and future possibilities.