Dangerous Binaries: Girard in Conversation with Crip and Queer Theories

Mimetic theory, crip theology, and queer theology all accentuate the inadequacy of grounding identity in rigid categories. Where crip and queer theories critique binaries for their inability to hold the fluidity and instability of identity, mimetic theory identifies their power to fuel the dangerous cycle of blame, victimhood, and ultimately, violence. These insights from queer and crip theories offer a vital contribution. However, a danger remains: that “queer” or “crip” lose their original power and morph into reinscriptions of the exclusive categories they were designed to dismantle. Here, mimetic theory can help. This paper uses mimetic theory to construct new dimensions of the crip and queer critiques of identity categorizations. An identity grounded not in the social other, but in the Other, is capable of holding the expansive complexity of social and embodied fluidity, while also remaining detached from the sway of competitive and exclusionary relationality.