Abstract
This manifesto explores the intersections of crip feminism, disability activism and queer politics, articulating a collective vision of resistance, solidarity and reimagined futures for people with physical disabilities, particularly disabled women. Our work challenges mechanisms that marginalise non-normative bodies through poetic expression and critical reflection, advocating for self-determination, accessibility and intimate citizenship. Drawing on the lived experiences and sociopolitical activism of Chien-Ju Chou, Chun-Chieh Lin and Ya-Wen Huang, the manifesto highlights the struggles against structural and everyday exclusions compounded by ableism and hetero-patriarchy while emphasising the consciousness of ‘co-dependency’ as both a principle and a praxis within feminist and disability justice movements. By centring these women’s voices and their agency in knowledge production, the manifesto resists the ableist tendency to objectify disability and instead fosters transformative politics rooted in mutual care. Ultimately, it asserts crip feminism as both a theoretical framework and an embodied practice of reclaiming space and authorship for disabled communities.
Keywords
marching on my wheels, attuning to the songs of the exiled, knackering the bodies i own. i don’t throw like a boy, neither like a girl – only as wind commands, gazed at, flesh beyond bloody binaries. creators’ butterfingers rolling fate’s dice upon my birth, indoors – a hush of captive echoes, pending a life without intimacy. femininity discharged, emotional tides unmoored at sea, mourning touch, mourning want, inexorable absences carve my eroticism. ‘not this time’, you insisted – I frown, intersected curved roads braided like veins, stares without words, me to you, this time, bypassing fear. wandering puzzles of sexuality, interrupted, interrupted, tinkering with fractured skies, however lonely, still i rise. animality, defying gravity, nearly a crowd, limbs that reach. glowing magic, spells rewritten, eternal youth – a curse of quiet hands. loudly queer, to save my dignity, simply crip, naming the unwanted. hailing on my wheels, attuning the song written for misfits. neither gentleman nor lady, destiny carving a dream in stone, shoreline retreating – a new humanity.
乘輪而行 調律流亡者之歌 耗損我的身體。 我不像男孩那樣丟球 亦不如女孩——任憑風的彈撥 被凝視著，超越該死二分的血肉。 創造者的拙技 對我擲下命運之骰 室內——被囚禁的回音沉默著 匱乏親密的此生。 陰性流離 情感之潮漂泊於海 哀悼碰觸，哀悼渴望 難以避免的缺席刻畫著我的愛慾。 你堅持，時候未到；我皺眉不語 卷曲的道路，交織著如血脈 無言的注視 此刻是我向著你，不再恐懼。 於情慾拼圖間迷途 受阻、打斷 修補支離破碎的天空 縱使孤獨，我仍挺立 野性不羈，抵抗重力 人潮，成為我的四肢。 魔法閃耀著，重新書寫咒語 永恆的青春，成了沉默雙手的詛咒。 放肆酷異，只為守護尊嚴 純粹殘障，命名被遺棄的人。 乘輪而行 調律為異端而吟。 我不是紳士，也並非淑女 命運鑿夢於石 海岸退去——新人類現身。
Unearthing a goddess from the text
using the poem’s text to generate digital artwork with ChatGPT,
a woman’s figure emerges – resembling Nüwa (女媧),
a goddess in Sinophone mythology who repaired the Pillar of Heaven,
serving as both the creator of humanity and the restorer of cosmic order, often depicted
with a human upper body and a serpent’s lower body,
symbolising a fusion of the divine and the primordial. (see Figure 1)
Digital artwork of Nüwa reimagined through crip feminism, 4 February 2025. For more on how this image was created, see the Appendix.
Postscript
If you have generously read our piece up to this point, you may find that many things still require explanation. We call it a manifesto not in the conventional sense of a list of demands or a declarative political statement, but as something that reflects how we witness and have learnt from each other: through fragments, pauses, hesitations. While remaining rooted in lived experience, the initial draft travelled across assistive technologies, was translated into multiple languages and was amended and tweaked here and there before arriving in the form we share with you now. Echoing Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch’s (2019) ‘Crip technoscience manifesto’, our manifesto (of ambivalence) resists the expectation to justify and rationalise; we intend this not as a conclusion but as a provocation towards friendship and companionship.
Not only are the voices and visions of women and queer persons with disabilities expressed (perhaps only in part) through a crip form that resists the polemic, the argumentative and the angry, but they are also felt flexibly and reflexively, through narrating that is non-linear and seemingly unruly and messy yet acrostic, deliberate and resistant to tidy demands. We turn to storytelling to sketch a map of interdependence, tentative and spontaneous in its unfolding. Our manifesto whispers rather than shouts; it weaves care and access into its very seams, refusing the smooth surfaces of ableist aesthetics, offering instead a proposal to approach connection and representation otherwise, on crip/queer and less legible terms.
We probably also need to explain why we chose to include an AI-generated image, not as an aesthetic endpoint but as part of our ongoing experiment in collaboration. Working with ChatGPT’s image tool allowed us to observe how ‘crip feminism’ might be visually outlined and even humanly figured, shaped by the data fed into its system and the ways that our narratives were read, encoded and decoded: abstract, fluid and yet obviously stereotypical. The limitations and unpredictability of AI coexist with and mirror the disabling environments that one inhabits and navigates, where control isn’t guaranteed. Rather than perfecting its output, we embraced the image’s fractured and incomplete form as a site of refusal.
The manifesto first emerged as a poem composed by Po-Han, inspired by the work and humanity of Ya-Wen Huang (黃雅雯), Chien-Ju Chou (周倩如) and Chun-Chieh Lin (林君潔) – the ‘crip feminist trio’, as they are affectionately known within the disability advocacy community.
Ya-Wen Huang is widely recognised for her role in Hand Angel, a volunteer collective dedicated to promoting the sexual rights of people with disabilities. She became the group’s first female volunteer and later led programmes for women with disabilities. Not only is she vocal against ableist omissions in gender equality policies but her advocacy also positions women’s voices in disability rights movement spaces, such as forums convened by the Taiwan Association for Disability Rights. In October 2024, at the Sexual Rights for Disabled People (障礙者需要性) march, Ya-Wen, speaking in front of the crowd, said: ‘What seems simple to most – a movement, a need, a touch – for disabled people becomes a battle unspoken. A tryst was arranged, yet no step-free hotel was in sight. A date at the cinema, yet wheelchairs and lovers are forced apart. Desire knows no boundaries, but the built world does. So, we must appear and tell people that survival is an unlit path’ (see Figure 2).
From left to right: Chien-Ju, Ya-Wen and Chun-Cheih. Photographs courtesy of the Taiwan Healthcare Reform Foundation (台灣醫療改革基金會) and CivilMedia@TW (公民行動影音紀錄資料庫).
Chien-Ju Chou has made women with disabilities and the institutional challenges they face visible and legible across both policymaking and activist spaces, through initiatives ranging from workshops and conferences on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), to public education and coalition-building. In 2019, Chien-Ju, representing the Taiwan Disabled Women’s Alliance for Equal Rights (障礙女性平權連線), attended a Legislative Yuan public hearing on ‘Promoting accessible and disability-friendly clinics’ (Figure 2). She delivered a powerful critique of systemic barriers in healthcare access for disabled women, critically noting that ‘love and compassion alone cannot solve the problem’. She highlighted that women with disabilities often delay seeking care until conditions become severe; that communication barriers during gynaecological examinations are exacerbated when interpreters are excluded on grounds of privacy; and that the lack of accessible clinics forces many to travel long distances without affordable public transportation, which is an issue particularly acute in rural areas.
Chun-Chieh Lin is the founder of the Taipei New Vitality Independent Living Association (新活力自立生活協會) and the president of Independent Living Taiwan, whose activism aims to reframe care support as a rights matter rather than a private affair (see Chou et al., 2023b). In 2023, at the Black A4 Revolution (黑紙革命) rally organised by disability rights groups, she spoke with anger about the inaccessibility of public spaces and lack of personalised assistance for people with disabilities, and grounded claims for redress as a matter of basic human rights (see Chou et al., 2023a). The initiative drew inspiration from the 2022 A4 Revolution (also known as the White Paper Protests), which opposed the Chinese government’s ‘Zero-COVID’ policies that – in marked contrast to the ‘living with COVID-19’ approach – maximised governmental control, containment and suppression measures (Peng, 2024). ‘In the White Paper Revolution, silence speaks louder than words. But for people with disabilities, words are spoken – yet silence is all that’s heard’, said Chun-Chieh (see Figure 2). Her statement encapsulates the struggle for disability voices and experiences to be taken seriously.
The first impetus for writing ‘making crip feminism with angels’ hands’ came to Po-Han in January 2025, the day after the launch of his book Invisible Discrimination: Eliminating Everyday Gender Inequalities (隱性歧視) (Chen and Lee, 2025), which translates CEDAW into plain language for general readers. He saw a social media post by Ya-Wen featuring a photo of her holding a copy of the book and expressing how she felt empowered by it. Deeply moved by this, Po-Han wrote the first draft of the poem in English and posted it on Facebook.
Over the past five years, Po-Han has worked with and come to know Ya-Wen, Chien-Ju and Chun-Chieh, as they, separately and together, navigate and negotiate the lack of disability awareness and body positivity in mainstream feminism by centring mobility, care, disability pride and interdependence in their work (see Lee, 2023). As he wrote, Po-Han recalled how Ya-Wen concluded her speech at the march for Sexual Rights for Disabled People with her signature hearty laugh, resonating with strength and defiance. He reflected on how, in the time they have known one another, Ya-Wen has transformed from a relatively shy woman into a powerful voice who boldly expresses and fights for the need for intimate relationships and sexual rights for women with disabilities. He recalled attending, as a speaker on health inequalities affecting Indigenous persons with disabilities, the Executive Yuan Committee meeting where Chien-Ju delivered, with a formidable voice, her call for social justice for persons with disabilities.
In writing the poem, Po-Han wished to recognise and honour the sustained activism that each of the trio carries out, stitching disability justice to feminist and queer conversations in Taiwan. He wanted to let Ya-Wen know how moved he was by her speech at the march. He wanted to express how witnessing her transformation had empowered him to be more courageous. He hoped to let Chien-Ju and Chun-Chieh know how their eloquence and unwavering determination at meetings and conferences have profoundly impacted him. This was a way for him to express his appreciation for the three women as leaders, colleagues and friends, and to say thank you.
Not long after posting the poem, Po-Han translated it into Chinese so that Ya-Wen, Chien-Ju and Chun-Chieh could understand better and meaningfully engage with it. In response to their feedback, revisions and edits were collectively made to the Chinese version, which, in turn, were made to the English version. This co-authoring process, which came about organically, entailed back-and-forth conversations and check-ins. Although the poem’s first draft was written by Po-Han, we undertook subsequent rounds of revision, sequencing and framing together to create the final version. 1
Ya-Wen, Chien-Ju and Chun-Chieh’s participation in transforming the poem into this manifesto with Po-Han is not merely a gesture of inclusion but a principle of crip feminism. We believe that crip feminism challenges standardised academic writing, demanding knowledge not to be extracted from disabled lives but to be co-elaborated upon through collective and interrelated experiences. Ensuring that this work’s narratives and visions emerge from collaboration rather than imposed interpretations resists the ableist tendency to objectify and theorise from a distance (Sonkar et al., 2024). By recognising shared vulnerability – each of us situated in different sites of struggle – our mutual dependency affirms lived expertise and crip feminist solidarity. Though we may advocate for different issues or act from distinct social locations, these differences do not divide us; rather, they reveal the interdependence through which the reclaiming and reimagining of reality, both present and future, is produced with, by and for disabled communities (Altermark, 2023).
Footnotes
Appendix: AI image generation details (transparency statement)
Tool: ChatGPT (DALL·E), OpenAI.
Date of generation of the first image: 4 February 2025.
Workflow: Text-to-image with iterative prompt refinement (V1–V4). No external image uploads.
Prompt retrieval: The session-level logs for 4 February 2025 and onwards are no longer accessible to us; however, below is a faithful reconstruction from contemporaneous notes and message excerpts that we saved during the collaboration. Methodologically, multiple similar images, yet visually distinct in composition and line work, were generated over four rounds, allowing us to vote on the order of preference.
We thank the editors of Feminist Review at all stages for their thoughtful suggestions, which encouraged us to revisit the many small and large decisions made throughout this process. We find that their presence, interestingly, has become an integral part of this collective project, even though they remain anonymous to us.
We recognise authorship here as a process rather than a single act of origin. Po-Han Lee drafted the initial poem and the first full narrative of the manifesto; Ya-Wen Huang’s and Chien-Ju Chou’s feedback and discussions reshaped the poem’s imagery, tone and structure to reflect disabled women’s situated experiences and political horizons. The three co-authors jointly directed the conceptual brief for the AI-generated image and agreed on the final selection. All authors approved the final manuscript.
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Not Applicable.