Reviews with content warning for Medical content - The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs

Reviews tagging 'Medical content'

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

8 reviews

culpeppper's review against another edition

emotional funny hopeful reflective slow-paced

5.0

This was a beautiful series of essays. Truly changed how I view care work, myself, those around me, and recontextualized how I view the world. I cried, I grieved, I laughed, I felt held by these essays while listening to the author read her own book in her own voice. I'm very excited to read Care Work, when I have proper time to process it. For now, I am recommending this to others who want to grow their care, empathy, desire for change, and introduce them to disability justice, specifically because Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha seems to have shared a piece of her soul with the greater world, and it would be a shame if it's beauty wasn't shared.

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mitchell_1's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

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abbysnofun's review against another edition

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challenging hopeful informative reflective

4.5

soooo soooo important

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whiteflowerose's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

5.0

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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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caseythereader's review against another edition

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challenging emotional funny reflective medium-paced

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careinthelibrary's review against another edition

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emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

Holy shit, this is OUTSTANDING. Every essay gave me a new perspective, new impression, new things to ponder and grow from. Can't recommend enough, I loved this even more than the author's previous Care Work which I also loved. I can't wait to revisit this and glean even more wisdom from it.

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hilaryreadsbooks's review

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5.0

[Thank you Arsenal Pulp for a gifted copy]

Leah begins: “I believe in the disabled future.” I remember dreams of something like this, where disabled bodyminds are celebrated and respected and, to use language that Leah themself chooses, allowed to come home.

This book. It’s a mourning (because how many disabled people have we lost to the pandemic and medical violence and lack of access to the care they need?); it’s a catalog (because the contributions of disabled people are so often ignored, even as abled people learned crip ways that have always existed as a way of survival); it’s an act of love (because how else to describe how Leah always manages to write words that make me go yes, yes, yes). Leah herself also titles it as prophecies, because even under the weight of grief, this is first and foremost about crip dreaming, about creation, about fashioning better worlds where all bodyminds are made to feel safe, welcome, and dignified—and keep dreaming, Leah tells us, please keep dreaming—they dare us, guide us lovingly, to imagine our answer to the question: “What future would you create if you leaned into the wild crip imaginings you maybe have not let yourself imagine?”

If you are disabled, read this to be held in your grief, pain, and dreaming. If you are not disabled, this book is here to hold you too, and to remind you to be humbled by the glorious ways that crip bodyminds traverse this earth, and that the ferocity of our beings is something that cannot be ignored.

Arsenal Pulp—please keep publishing disabled voices! We love you for it.

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