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[“It’s not like anyone came right out and said they hated disabled people. But disability was depressing or embarrassing to write about, or just something that “most people wouldn’t be able to relate to as a subject.” There was a huge echoing silence in POC and/or queer activist communities. I had a few friends who whispered to each other about our chronic illnesses—but the most we could say was “It sucks, right?” We had no idea we could be part of a community, a history, a movement.
But in the past decade, disability justice culture has bloomed, through the hard work of disabled people who are also queer feminists of color, and it’s not like that anymore—at least, not all of the time. It’s not that ableist disregard for crip lives, both in the mainstream and inside our movements and communities, doesn’t still exist. But I no longer worry that every single person I encounter at an event will be awkward or pity me or just not get it. I do not feel like I am the only person I know who is talking about disability justice. I no longer feel like one of a tiny handful of people talking about access or worry that if I produce a crip show of course no one will come to it. I think more people know that not all disabled people are white. When I first started offering sick and disabled writing workshops for queer and trans people of color around 2010, sometimes no one would come out, or just a few people, or the idea would be shot down because the organizers were sure no one would come. But when I went on tour with Bodymap in 2015 and read explicitly disability-focused work, almost all of my gigs were standing and sitting room only. When I did a writing workshop by and for sick and disabled people of color at the 2015 Queer Students of Color Conference, the room was spilling over with queer people of color who wanted to talk and write about everything from pesticide exposures they had received doing farm work to intergenerational trauma. Disabled Black and brown queer voices are no longer uncommon on popular feminist and queer blogs like The Body Is Not an Apology, Everyday Feminism, GUTS, andAutostraddle, and I see articles including and thinking about ableism instead of forgetting about it. The Disability Visibility Project, Wear Your Voice, the Spoonie Collective, the Deaf Poets Society, Autistic Hoya, Krip-Hop Nation, and many other sites by and for intersectional disabled people are live. Everywhere people are talking about care work, emotional labor, femme emotional labor, access, and crip skills and science.
None of this happened because the able-bodied people decided to be nice to the cripples.”]
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
