Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice [Paperback]

In this collection of essays, Lambda Literary Awardwinning 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 Workis 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 Workis a crucial and necessary call to arms.CANew York, Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland, SeattlePreface: Writing (with) a movement from bed

When I moved to Oakland in 2007, I started writing from bed. I wrote in old sleep pants, lying on a heating pad, from the hours I spent in my big sick-and-disabled femme of color bed cave. I wasn't alone in this. I did so alongside many other sick and disabled writers making culture. Writing from bed is a time-honored crip way of being an activist and cultural worker, not often acknowledged by the mainstream but whose lineage stretches from Frida Kahlo painting in bed to Grace Lee Boggs writing in her wheelchair at age ninety-eight.
And disability justice was giving birth to itself as a movement; I got to be part of it, from bed, and so did the pieces I wrote. I wrote pieces that were tools we used to help create the first Creating Collective Access network, an experiment in access crip made by and for QTPOC disabled people. As my experience working with the disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid and its exquisitely high level of access for disabled artists refused to stay in one little corner of my life, it allowed me for the first time to write about my life as a disabled QTPOC artist wilһ