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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the complexity of building a crip gut community across difference through reflections on running a gut peer support group at a mental health recovery college alongside autoethnographic reflections and queer crip theory.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the complexity of making community with others around gut conditions, specifically dynamics of stigma and pride at the intersections of queerness and disability. Beginning with autoethnographic reflections on my experience of being diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and having semi-elective ileostomy (stoma) surgery, I consider how stigmatising discourses around ‘normality’ are used in stoma-related discourses in queerphobic and ableist ways. Using Kafer’s (2013) political/relational model of disability alongside broader feminist work on the gut (Wilson, 2015; Dryden, 2022a, 2022b, 2023), I interrogate the experience of having crip guts – “non-normative digestive processing, nutritional disabilities or other disabilities related to the gut” (Kolářová, Stöckelová and Senft, 2023, p. 1255). In particular, I consider dynamics around ‘coming out’ as having a stoma and being queer, the role of stigma and pride in navigating becoming an ostomate, and similarities between ostomates and many queer and trans people around (un)expected bodies. I argue for queer stoma pride and crip guts community making across difference as a critical response to discourses of normality around crip guts and as a potential site of coalitional politics between differently positioned queer and/or disabled people. From this, I will discuss my ongoing work to create a crip gut community and community-led research through gut-focused peer support groups and workshops at a mental health recovery college in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. This work attempts to create crip kinship across multiple gut experiences and turn individualised private experiences of gut distress into collective coalition building across difference.