Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

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

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

About the Author

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of the non-fiction books Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home and Consensual Genocide, and the poetry books Bodymap and Love Cake, and is the co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home. A lead artist with disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid and co-founder of queer and trans people of color performance troupe Mangos With Chili, she performs and teaches across North America.

Reviews

"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Leah has spoke, taught, performed and struggled on -- that's why it's so accessible and brings lived knowledge into our outdated, stiff institutions and activist movements.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

"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, author of All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism

Details:

Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018, paperback, 256 pages, ISBN 9781551527383