The coda returns to crip time, a theme across many of the previous chapters. Chronically ill and disabled people can experience time in nonlinear, recursive ways, and this book shows how attentiveness to time, care, and intimacy can inform disability history as well as more global approaches to disability. This discussion sets the medieval carols and poems by deaf and blind English monk John Audelay alongside Seeta Chaganti’s scholarship on medieval lyric and dance theory. It draws parallels between Audelay’s works and modern writings by American DeafBlind poet John Lee Clark, who urges audiences to decenter sight and sound to appreciate the artistic dimensions of touch and motion. The coda ends by affirming the importance of dance and crip community in works by intersectional Black feminist Sami Schalk and by Alice Sheppard, a disabled dancer, choreographer, and medieval literary historian. It ends by asking how medieval literature can help modern readers envision a more just and interconnected world.

This chapter builds upon feminist reinterpretations of Darwinian evolutionary theory to reconsider how the processes of variation, heritability, and natural selection do not preclude the possibility of thriving disabled life. Despite the cooptation of Darwinian thinking by later social Darwinists and eugenicists that led to the mass institutionalization and genocide of disabled people, I argue that Darwin’s scientific writings provide the unexpected foundations for a counter-eugenic reading of evolution in their conception of life as perpetually changing and thus open-ended. From the perspective of disability, the value of an organism’s adaptation and form cannot be predetermined by any static notion of fitness that presumes ablebodiedness as a prerequisite for viable life. By reading evolutionary temporality and Darwin’s own disabled lived experience through disability theory’s conception of crip time, I ultimately suggest that Darwinian evolution imagines disability not reductively as an evolutionary dead end but instead as the variable adaptation of human survival.