Cryptid Beastiary

CRIPTYD BEASTIARY → a creative workshop on disability and the inhuman

Rotten Crip Collective are a non-hierarchical artist collective and facilitators currently based in London. This is an overview for a workshop titled ‘Criptyd Beastiary’ and aims to be part of making this workshop accessible remotely.

* There are no expectations of outcome to be met, this is anti-academic, non-linear.

Overview :
Becoming Mermaid: Exploring Human and More-Than-Human Relationality
creative exploration of disability and the inhuman

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BECOMING MERMAID: EXPLORING HUMAN AND MORE-THAN-HUMAN RELATIONALITY
By Elizabeth Currans

Full text available is the Rotten Crip Collective google drive and at:
Currans, E. (2024) “Becoming Mermaid: Exploring Human and More-Than-Human Reality”, Disability Studies Quarterly 43(2). Available at: https://dsq-sds.org/article/id/306/ (Accessed: 26/10/25)

The mermaid is discussed in this text as having a duel potential:
uphold/challenge heteropatriarchial and ableist bodied norms
highlight human relationships with more-than-human life → through her refusal of the human/nonhuman binary

A heteropatriarchial, postcolonial reading depicts the mermaid as a young, slim, white, able bodied woman with the tail of a fish. Her hyper-ability (Torre Puckett, Cripping The Creature) means she had in/human abilities in water This trading of one ability—walking—for another—moving like a mermaid in the water—could be read within the framework of transmobility*.

Imaginations of powerful aquatic femininity exist in numerous cultures, mermaids mix with sirens; subsequently linking femininity to dangerous seduction.
However, she (the mermaid) inherently rejects sexualisation, as No matter how alluring, mermaids are forever chaste because they live in the water and their fish tail negates the possibility they could have genitalia" (2017, 68).... A queer reading might emphasize how their tails also moved the mermaids outside of heteronormative role expectations by highlighting their relationships with more-than-human life (Nelson, Shew, and Stevens 2019).

There is an argument that in navigating an ableist world with a disabled body means embracing aspects of animality , (Sunaura Taylor) in claiming parts/ movements as animalised she has self-assertion on her humanity.
The mermaid’s fish tail is embraced in her identity as integral to her hyper/(dis)ability.

In rejecting the heteropatriarchy with her body, the mermaid’s disability means that walking is not a pleasurable experience. She is more-than-human, resisting and disrupting normative time to experience the world in Crip Time.

She is a CRIPBORG.
The mermaid is an assemblage → she is “always becoming” (Muñoz 2020, 78).
She is Nonconformity to an abled bodymind → Bodily differences are neither inherently bad nor good, they simply ARE (just like all other types of human variation) (Torre Puckett, Cripping The Creature, p.14).
Mallory Nelson, Ashley Shew, and Bethany Stevens explain that transmobility emphasizes the ways that "disabled bodies actually have a greater array of options for mobility and movement [than normate bodies], providing an impetus for creativity and imagination" (2019, 2). → engaging with pavements/streets, engaging with water/air, engaging with space/time

Goodley and Runswick-Cole emphasize that while disabled and human are "too often set up as opposites," it is more productive to see them as "frictional: rubbing up against each other in interesting, dare we say, desirable ways" (2016, 5).
Mermaids, monsters, and disability "have the possibility to rethink the human—to contemplate human extension" (2018, 161).

Becoming mermaid can have a million meanings ::
becoming mermaid means intentionally embracing excess and even freakiness
becoming mermaid means acknowledging interdependence
becoming mermaid is an activist more

→ what does becoming mermaid mean to you?

Generating new sources through our beastiary

Using the same process for stone/grave rubbings, we can use different objects to cast shapes and textures that build up into a collaged form. It is a tactile and non linear way to draw as your page bends around its subject and stealing an imprint shaped by your pressure. You feel where you want your marks to be cast, sculpting in 2d. This can be refined or rendered or pushed and abstracted. We will be cripping the beast.
“Cripping is the act of looking back, to analyse, critiquing something through a lens of disabled lived experience and intersectionality, doing the work after the fact because that perspective in academia and media is just now being used. This in a way is a practice that is of crip time, of moving backwards while moving forwards”
Once your creature has been shaped, What questions do you have for it?
What does it do?
How does it work?
How would you describe it?

Prompts to help you start making:

(BEASTS / CRIPTYDS / INHUMAN-POSTHUMAN )

Can you think of any other existing monster/creature types that you could crip in this way
Can you think of/ create a folklore story that processes our experience of bodyminds - reflect: why do humans have the need to quantify the bodymind experience in this way
Draw/shape yourself and then your creature beside you
Can you think of any existing objects (perhaps functional, or not?) that can be cripped into your creature

Beastiary Generation , starting questions!:
What does your beast feel like (eg spikey/ soft/ liquid/ cold/ etc)
Create a list of key functional features of your beast, if they even have any
How would you apply crip theory to a known beast
Explore a feature that interests you → what environment does your beast live in → how can it interact with the environment → can it interact with the environment, what does it sound or smell like, does it impart any wisdom

Visually: ‘Texture Collection’ (taking rubbings of textures to create abstract-ed shapes/ surface; can be worked into to shape into more beastly forms, or not)
Verbally: ‘Text Collection’ (taking words/ phrases to create abstract-ed segments; can be reordered/blocked/redacted to shape your creature, or not)

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Glossary:

Bestiary :
A compendium or collection of real, imagined creatures/animals/beasts who teach moral lessons.

Cryptid:
an animal whose existence or survival is disputed or unsubstantiated, such as the yeti or Bigfoot.

Intersectional:
related to the way in which different types of discrimination (= unfair treatment because of a person's sex, race, etc.) are connected to and affect each other:

(Dis)Ability:
an identity; A bodymind experience; a community
“The overarching social systems of body and mental norms that includes ability and disability” [Sami Schalk] [critical disability studies collec-Tive]

Ableds:
a person or persons without a disability/impairment/neurodivergence

Bodymind:
A term used to challenge the idea that the body and mind are experienced separately (Descartes). Written in various ways, Bodymind or Body-mind, this usage foregrounds the understanding that experiences of the bodymind are integrated [Price 2014]

Transmobility:
(1) the ability to move between various modes of mobility; use of multiple mobility methods; (2) the ability to move beyond traditional forms of movement and mobility; (3) the existence of free and disabled bodies in motion. Word derived from the prefix “trans-”, meaning beyond, across, through, surpassing, transition, transport, or transcending + “mobility,” meaning the ability to move or be moved freely.

Cripborg:
A crippled cyborg; a disabled person who selects/combines what is natural or organic with what is artificial or technological; crips who will not be resisted: you too will be assimilated. (Mallory Kay Nelson, Ashley Shew, Bethany Stevens)