Writer, poet, performer, and author Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s published work—including the memoir Dirty River and poetry collections Bodymap, Love Cake, and Consensual Genocide—has frequently explored her experiences as a multiply disabled, queer woman of color. Her new book, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, out now from Arsenal Pulp Press, is an essay collection on disability justice, collective access, and the value of disability inclusion from a first-person perspective. Piepzna-Samarasinha’s many strengths as an organizer and writer shine through, and her voice is an important one in the disability advocacy world.
The radical experiments in disability justice and access that Piepzna-Samarasinha elucidates in this book are—crucially—based in her real-life experiences of advocacy, performance, and progressive work that centers disabled queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and people of color (which she terms QTBIPOC) and their access needs.
She writes honestly and compellingly about being part of a disability justice collective that strove to create cross-disability access and care; coordinating, writing, and performing theater pieces for and about disabled people; and convening, along with fellow femmes of color, online “feminar” spaces for femmes to discuss suicidality and mental illness. In other essays, Piepzna-Samarasinha takes on activists who dismiss self-care as indulgent, and people on the left who tend to demand endless emotional labor from femmes without giving much in return. The essay “A Modest Proposal For a Fair Trade Emotional Labor Economy,” originally published by Bitch Magazine in 2017, is a rousing essay that contains some excellent practical steps on how to fairly compensate emotional labor.
Piepzna-Samarasinha’s writing about her experiences with chronic pain and fatigue–and how her fibromyalgia diagnosis impacts her disability justice and activist work–is especially poignant. For those of us who have chronic health conditions that impact the amount of (usually unpaid) activism that we can participate in, her suggestions for dealing with freelance work and pain at the same time are helpful. Her work on dealing with chronic pain as a part of disability justice and activism is a much-needed reminder that people with chronic illness, fatigue, and/or pain are necessary to the success of disability justice and collective access.
Care Work is an engagingly written work about disability justice and how to put it into practice—in one essay, Piepzna-Samarasinha comments that she does not have an academic Disability Studies background. However, this is not a bad thing; Piepzna-Samarasinha’s gifted writing style renders her more “theoretical” points both easy to understand and lightbulb-moment-inducing. This is a book that should be read by progressive activists who are new to disability justice and disabled people who have been in activist communities where “ableism” seems like a new concept. As a person who’s read a large amount of academic disability theory and been in progressive circles where ableism is not talked about, I can say that this collection is accessible, beautifully written, and deserves to be widely read.
Photo: Vassilis