https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i4.063
Staying with Vulnerability: Crip Ecologies, Care, and Climate Agency in The Ones Who Stay and Fight and Delhi
MS. SUHANA SATHAR A
Research Scholar under Prof (Dr.) Suja Mathew
Sri Achutha Menon Govt. College, Kuttanellur, Thrissur
Affiliated to University of Calicut
Abstract: Climate fiction has increasingly shifted attention from spectacular environmental disasters to the quieter, everyday experiences of ecological deterioration. This paper examines how N. K. Jemisin’s The Ones Who Stay and Fight and Vandana Singh’s Delhi imagine climate agency through bodily vulnerability rather than heroic resilience. Drawing on crip theory, affect theory, and new materialism, the article argues that both stories challenge the ableist assumption that agency depends upon physical autonomy, mastery, or control over nature. Instead, vulnerability becomes an epistemological resource through which ecological crisis is perceived and negotiated. In Delhi, bodily exhaustion, illness, and environmental decay reveal the reciprocal relationship between human bodies and the material city, while The Ones Who Stay and Fight imagines collective care as an alternative form of political and ecological action. Together, these texts reposition disability not as absence but as an ethical mode of inhabiting damaged environments. Climate agency emerges through interdependence, attentiveness, and shared exposure rather than through conquest or technological domination. By bringing disability studies into dialogue with contemporary climate fiction, this article proposes crip ecology as a productive framework for understanding environmental justice in the Anthropocene.
Keywords: Climate Fiction, Crip Theory, Disability Studies, Affect Theory, Care Ethics, New Materialism
Read Full Manuscript PDF