Care Work

Piepzna-Samarasinha wrote much of this book from bed — on a heating pad, in old sleep pants, alongside other sick and disabled writers making culture from the same position. The preface makes clear that this is not incidental but the point: writing from bed is a time-honored crip way of being an activist, and the book is itself an enactment of the access politics it describes. The essays move through the history and practice of disability justice — a movement that centers sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people — through care webs, collective access, crip emotional intelligence, the specific labor of femmes in movement work, suicidal ideation, and what radically accessible performance spaces actually look like in practice. Piepzna-Samarasinha's argument is that access is not a checklist or an accommodation tacked on afterward but a form of love — that building communities where no one is left behind is both the means and the end of liberation work. The most important disability justice book on the P&P shelf and the one that most directly extends the Mutual Aid and Hood Feminism arguments into the specific experience of sick and disabled people of color. Lambda Literary Award winner.