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“Performing Determinism” discusses the performance of disability through poetry: the instability of language, the ability of words to clasp both generic and specific meaning, and the gaps that surround the performances of self. Disability culture acts as a frame for the inquiry, as the essay discusses crip aesthetics, crip critical practice, and the embodiment of language. In the reading of poems by Jim Ferris and Stephen Kuusisto, disability culture emerges as an impossible horizon of desire, and as the ground for contemporary performances of criticism and writing. Citation becomes performative, and creates repetition in difference.

This essay looks for myths in disability culture poetry, and uses this lens, searching for different and welcoming spaces, countries, bodies and songs, to look at two questions: what does poetry do for crip culture? And what does crip culture do for poetry? Through close readings of poems by Jim Ferris and Philip Dowd, new lands emerge, and Neil Marcus's Disabled Country comes into view. The essay frames this discussion through a poetry banquet, held as part of a disability culture course at the Institute for Medical Humanities, UTMB, Galveston, Texas.