In their collection of essays, longtime disability justice activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice.

Product Code: 9121
ISBN: 9781551527383
Format: Paperback / softback
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Pages: 266
Published Date: 10/30/2018
Availability:In stock
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Price: $19.95

Finalist, Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

In their new, long-awaited collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime disability justice activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centres the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all.

Leah writes passionately and personally about creating spaces by and for sick and disabled queer people of color, and creative "collective access" -- access not as a chore but as a collective responsibility and pleasure -- in our communities and political movements. Bringing their survival skills and knowledge from years of cultural and activist work, Piepzna-Samarasinha explores everything from the economics of queer femme emotional labor, to suicide in queer and trans communities, to the nitty-gritty of touring as a sick and disabled queer artist of color.

Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of colour are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a toolkit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind. Powerful and passionate, Care Workis a crucial and necessary call to arms.


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Contents

Thanks and Acknowledgements
Preface: Writing (with) a Movement from Bed

I
1. Care Webs: Experiments in Creating Collective Access
2. Crip Emotional Intelligence
3. Making Space Accessible Is an Act of Love for Our Communities
4. Toronto Crip City: A Not-So-Brief, Incomplete Personal History of Some Moments in Time, 1997-2015
5. Sick and Crazy Healer: A Not-So-Brief Personal History of the Healing Justice Movement
6. Crip Sex Moments and the Lust of Recognition: A Conversation with E.T. Russian

II
7. Cripping the Apocalypse: Some of My Wild Disability Justice Dreams
8. A Modest Proposal for a Fair Trade Emotional Labor Economy (Centered by Disabled, Femme of Color, Working-Class/Poor Genius)
9. Prefigurative Politics and Radically Accessible Performance Spaces: Making the World to Come
10. Chronically Ill Touring Artist Pro Tips

III
11. Fuck the “Triumph of the Human Spirit”: On Writing Dirty River as a Queer, Disabled, and Femme-of-Color Memoir, and the Joys of Saying Fuck You to Traditional Abuse Survivor Narratives
12. Suicidal Ideation 2.0: Queer Community Leadership and Staying Alive Anyway
13. So Much Time Spent in Bed: A Letter to Gloria Anzaldúa on Chronic Illness, Coatlicue, and Creativity
14. Prince, Chronic Pain, and Living to Get Old
15. Two or Three Things I Know For Sure about Femmes and Suicide: A Love Letter

IV
16. For Badass Disability Justice, Working-Class and Poor-Led Models of Sustainable Hustling for Liberation
17. Protect Your Heart: Femme Leadership and Hyper Accountability
18. Not Over It, Not Fixed, and Living a Life Worth Living: Towards an Anti-Ableist Vision of Survivorhood
19. Crip Lineages, Crip Futures: A Conversation with Stacey Milbern

Further Reading and Resources

Leah knows that the world we deserve is a world shaped by the honest, messy, skillful genius of disabled queer femmes of color. Reading this book allows you to live inside the gorgeous, uncomfortable, emergent, compassionate world that disabled femmes of color have been making all along. Leah cares for us all with this work, but not in the apologetic, default, mommy mode you may be trained to expect. This care is the survivor-sourced, survivor-accountable, saltysweet truthtelling we need to (guess what?) SURVIVE. -Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of M Archive and Spill, co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha has written a brave and brilliant book that captures the messy gestation and wildly liberating vision of disability justice. With passionate integrity, she tells the collective story of a movement that transforms the idea of care into a force capable of unraveling all the braided injustices of our lives. -Aurora Levins Morales, author of Medicine Stories and Kindling: Writings On the Body

Page after page, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha documents the necessity, power, and sheer brilliance of disability justice. Be prepared for her words, stories, and political thinking to shake up what you know about care and access, revolutionary dreaming, and present-day resilience. -Eli Clare, author of Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure and Exile

We have mad crip dreams. In those dreams there exists a decolonized, liberated future in which none of our bodies and lives are disposable. With Care Work, Leah LakshmiPiepzna-Samarasinha reminds us that turning these dreams into radical practices have already been done, are happening right now within disability justice movements, and will continue to build a future where we are all free. This book is a touchstone for our journey. -Qwo-Li Driskill, author of Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory

An instant classic, Care Work is equal parts on-the-ground dispatch from the disability justice movement and practical field guide to liberatory access. Rather than something to be begrudgingly tacked on, accessibility, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha shows us, might be joyous and collective. -Smithsonian Magazine

As a Black disabled activist, cultural worker, and collector of art, books and music by people of color with disabilities for more than twenty years, I'm excited and thirsty for Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Care Work. As one of the original thinkers of Disability Justice, I'm overjoyed that artists and activists like Leah are writing books like this one that helps water the roots of Disability Justice. This book is coming from the bed, the streets and on stages that Leah has spoke, taught, performed and struggled on -- thats why it's so accessible and brings lived knowledge into our outdated, stiff institutions and activist movements. In this era of hyper capitalism, toxic hypermasculinity, and White supremacy, we desperately need Care Work. -Leroy F Moore Jr. , co-founder of Sins Invalid, co-founder of National Black Disability Coalition

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice is a collection profoundly necessary at this moment . .. the essays share a fundamental hypothesis: to achieve social justice, ableism must be destroyed. Personal narratives and accounts of organizing are voiced from Black and brown and queer disabled people, radically reimagining the ways our society is structured, uplifting visions and models for care webs that create collective access. -Broadly (Best Books of the Year)

Leah writes brilliantly about sick/disabled/mad/neurodivergent genius, collective care work, and all-too-familiar patterns of abuse and trauma that happen even/especially in radical spaces/marginalized people's communities. Care Work is a necessary intervention for those in queer/trans people-of-color spaces and white disability spaces alike, but more importantly, it's an offering of love to all of us living at multiple margins, between spaces of recognition and erasure, who desperately need what Leah has to say. This book is an invitation to dream and to build and to love, as slowly and imperfectly and unevenly as we need to. -Lydia X. Z. Brown, co-editor of All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism

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