In their new, long-awaited collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime disability justice activist and performance artist Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centres the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with implications and gifts for all. Leah writes passionately and personally about creating spaces by and for sick and disabled queer people of colour, and creative collective access – access not as a chore but as a collective responsibility and pleasure – in our communities and political movements. Bringing their survival skills and knowledge from years of cultural and activist work, Piepzna-Samarasinha explores everything from the economics of queer femme emotional labor, to suicide in queer and trans communities, to the nitty gritty of touring as a sick and disabled queer artist of color.
Care Work is essentially 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 toolkit 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 for all.
‘Page after page, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha documents the necessity, power, and sheer brilliance of disability justice. Be prepared for her words, stories, and political thinking to shake up what you know about care and access, revolutionary dreaming, and present-day resilience.’
Eli Clare, author of Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure and Exile
‘Leah knows that the world we deserve is a world shaped by the honest, messy, skillful genius of disabled queer femmes of color. Reading this book allows you to live inside the gorgeous, uncomfortable, emergent, compassionate world that disabled femmes of color have been making all along.’
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of M Archive and Spill, co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering
