2020 is an important year for disability rights in America, as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) turned 30 years old this July. This landmark piece of legislation was the result of the hard work of activists in the disability justice movement, which is still in progress today. Here are some SPL resources from disabled artists and activists that can provide a great introduction to the theory, expression, and ongoing work that represents the history and practice of disability justice movement.
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Care Work is an essay collection published in 2018 by prolific poet, essayist, activist, and educator Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. It is an intersectional look at the ways that people who experience multiple systems of oppression (disabled people who also identify as Black, Indigenous, People of Color, queer, trans, or who are otherwise marginalized) work together to build community mutual aid networks through what Lakshmi calls care work, or the work of caring for one another as an act of resistance. These are beautiful essays that speak to Lakshmi’s individual experience as a disabled queer femme person of color, while examining the ways that other activists, artists, and other community members have worked together to build care networks as a means of enacting disability justice.
Sins Invalid: An Unshamed Claim to Beauty
This film, available to stream on Kanopy, documents a performance project put together by Sins Invalid, an ongoing production series comprised of disabled performers and centering artists of color or artists who identify as queer and gender-variant. The performances explore themes of sexuality as experienced by bodies that are normally “othered” in conversations about sex and joy in mainstream media and culture. As such, the performances themselves, and the community that works together to make them a reality, represent a form of disability justice activism. The documentary provides a wonderful opportunity to experience these live performances from home.
Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation by Eli Clare
Originally published in 1999, this book is still considered by many to be an essential text in the disability justice canon,and is a must-read for anyone who would like to learn a little bit about the movement. Author Eli Clare is a white, trans, disabled writer best known as an essayist and poet. This collection explores what it means to exist at the intersection of queerness and disability, how both of those identities manifest in expressions of physicality and understandings of what it means to exist within a politicized body, and how they are connected to communities that need to work together if they would like to achieve collective liberation.
~ Posted by Hannah P.
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