Reviews tagging 'Injury/Injury detail'

The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

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novella42's review

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emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

This book has changed my life. 
 
It’s harder than I thought to write a proper review, because this book is so rich and complex and has given me altogether SO MANY thoughts and perspective shifts. “What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled—and that’s not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it’s possible to survive and bring about liberation?”

I think it helped to have read Care Work first, but I don't think it's necessary. I read The Future is Disabled over several months in a hardcopy I underlined with enthusiasm and also listened to the excellent author-read audiobook on my library’s free Hoopla app. I’m grateful to have been able to process it slowly with a zoom book club with other queer disabled folks. It’s one of those books that makes you rethink so many things, it helps to have someone to talk to about it. And yet, I’m still processing. I still don’t know how to encapsulate it in a review.

So, here’s a sampler of concepts and quotes in no particular order. I don’t expect anyone to read all of it, but everything on this list is important to me. Maybe if you scan past it, you’ll find something important to you, too. Or to someone you know. Or to your future self, who may someday be disabled, too. 
 
(CW for use of a reclaimed word, “crip” which is derived from the slur “cripple”)

  • The Free Library of Beautiful Adaptive Things
  • How to crip a book tour without burning out (plus an Access Rider for contracts!)
  • Cripping the Resistance - a chapter with six glorious pages packed with ideas and role models for how to join a revolution while disabled
  • “I Wanna Be With You Everywhere” - documenting the most enthusiastically accessible event I have ever heard of in my life (yes, beyond what I experienced at two Paralympic Games) and how they made it happen in 2019
  • Disabled secrets
  • Home is a Holy Place: The Sacred Organizing Spaces of Disabled Homes
  • Pod Mapping for Mutual Aid - a comprehensive breakdown of seven ways that disabled people do mutual aid differently, AKA how to avoid “abled panic” and manage your expectations and endurance 
  •  Disabled pleasure activism - “There’s something about claiming a body you’ve been taught to despise, told it’s a broken toy that should be hidden from public space, that makes it a courageous and radical act to have a good goddamn time unapologetically taking up as much space as possible… It is freedom work, insisting that we deserve our roses, lilies, peoples, jasmine, orgasms, fresh water when we are still here–and that joy and pleasure are key parts of what both helps us make the disabled world-to-come we are dreaming of now, in this moment, and what helps us keep going when the work is hard and heartbreaking.” 
  • Disability justice futurism
  • Crip doulas - “a term created by disability justice organizer Stacey Park Milbern to describe the ways disabled people support/mentor newly disabled people in learning disabled skills (how to live on very low spoons, drive a wheelchair, have sex/redefine sexuality, etc.). A doula supports someone doing the work of childbirth; a crip doula is a disabled person supporting another disabled person as they do the work of becoming disabled, or differently disabled, of dreaming a new disabled life/world into being.”
  • Interdependence vs independence vs codependence 
  • Disabled grief technologies
  • The erotics of unmasking
  • Autistic Long-Form, Short-Form, No-Form, Echotextia: Autistic poetry
  • Disabled writing, “The Stories That Keep Us Alive” – a chapter packed full with disabled writers throughout history, “even if they did not use that word because of any number of factors including the whiteness of the disability rights movement at the time,” writers like Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Marsha P. Johnson, and Sylvia Rivera. “In mainstream literature, disabled people are inspirations, tragedies, monsters, hermits, cautionary tales, plagues, warnings. We are Beth from Little Women. We are Bertha, Rochester’s mad Jamaican first wife locked up in his attic in Wuthering Heights. We are symbols, and we are an absence. Rarely do we get to write our stories for ourselves, be disabled writers writing disabled characters. Our literary traditions are erased, our poets and writers dismissed with a ‘Oh, did she actually identify that way?’ But the reality is crip writing is everywhere and crip bodies are overflowing rivers full of stories we are burning to tell.”
    “If you don’t see your crip life in writing, you can’t imagine a crip life to be.” 
  • And this: “Crip writing is the piece of driftwood I grabbed and hung on to that stopped me from going under… Every line I write is a nocked arrow, the string pulled back, the exhale of release, the deep **** feeling of yes as it hits the mark, as it goes farther than we have before, to the place we knew we needed named. Alexis Pauline Gumbs once wrote, ‘Our future deserves a present where our truths were written,’ and we are writing down our crip everyday, and out of that, writing our future.”
  • Access intimacy and unconditional disabled love: “Part of our process of learning to love ourselves and each other means doing the incredibly risky work of tapping back into the disabled body/mind we have been taught to suppress and abandon, to learn what our boundaries are, what we want, need, and desire.”
  • A disabled and trauma-infused re-imagining of failing systems - “the disability justice solution is not to abandon those projects when people are exhausted, but to continue to figure out how to resource the work. Our crip skills and working, living, and organizing with low spoons are going to be crucial. They already are… We have knowledge the world needs.”
  • “A remembrance: nothing has to be the way it is. Access is created, it gets taken away/destroyed, but it can be created again.”
  • “It’s never just Hard, Activist Work. It’s disabled pleasure. It’s wild disabled joy. It’s us on the dance floor, throwing our heads back laughing. It’s the permission, the utter permission to be as we are. It’s the ways we create pleasure to both make the work sweeter and more accessible–pleasure as a form of access. It’s a lot easier to get people to sign up for the long struggle of changing the world if we have fun and disabled joy while we do it.”
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