In their new collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and disability justice activist 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 toolkit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient communities of liberation where no one is left behind. Powerful and passionate, Care Work is a crucial and necessary call to arms.
Buy now from Arsenal Pulp Press
ISBN: 1551527383
Media inquires: brownstargirlnew@gmail.com
Care Work in the Apocalypse Tour
Oct 3-Nov 15, 2018
Praise for Care Work:
Broadly’s Best 10 Books of 2018: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Sanarasinha’s Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice is a collection profoundly necessary at this moment…The essays share a fundamental hypothesis: to achieve social justice, ableism must be destroyed.Reading these accounts, you may be deeply troubled when finally confronted with how fractured communities truly have become; Dreaming Disability Justice, however, will give you hope for ways that we can restructure and reorient ourselves to truly provide care and support for all people.
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice doesn’t strike me as a collection of essays, a 101 workbook for aspiring allies, and definitely not a memoir — but a dream. In the movements where writer and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha incubated these dreams, the QTBIPOC femme-led sick, Deaf, and disabled justice work, doing and dreaming are not separate things. Especially for QTBIPOC disabled folks who are constantly coming up with revolutionary hacks to living in a wholly ableist, saneist, and determinedly inaccessible society, and who don’t really have the luxury of expecting anyone to show up for us, that some skills we’ve garnered along the way are both emergent and imagined shouldn’t come as a surprise. But I’d never seen that history, that science, archived and shared as a gift like this.- Bani Amor, Autostraddle
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
“A brave and brilliant book that captures the messy gestation and wildly liberating vision of disability justice. With passionate integrity, Leah tells the collective story of a movement that transforms the idea of care into a force capable of unraveling all the braided injustices of our lives.”
―Aurora Levins Morales, author of Medicine Stories and Kindling: Writings on the Body
“Reading this book allows you to live inside the gorgeous, uncomfortable, emergent, compassionate world that disabled femmes of color have been making all along. Leah cares for us all with this work, but not in the apologetic, default, mommy mode you may be trained to expect. This care is the survivor-sourced, survivor-accountable, saltysweet truthtelling we need to (guess what?) SURVIVE.”
―Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of M Archive and Spill, co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering
“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 where 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
“We have mad crip dreams. In those dreams there exists a decolonized, liberated future in which none of our bodies and lives are disposable. Leah reminds us that turning these dreams into radical practices has already been done, is happening right now within disability justice movements, and will continue to build a future where we are all free. This book is a touchstone for our journey.”
―Qwo-Li Driskill, author of Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory
“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, co-editor, All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism