LINEAGE
I am inspired by the words of American civil rights activist John Lewis. I am committed to making; making art, making room, making change, making good trouble.
Resmaa Menakem’s research in racialized embodiment and Somatic Abolition inspires me to value and respect the brilliance of my own body instead of prioritizing the theory of others.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha teaches me again and again that my journey through cripness deserves to be cataloged and shared; we all need the wisdom of crip body-minds to prepare us for apocalypse, because the future is in fact disabled.
Alice Sheppard’s rejection of an able, white, straight body as the norm teaches me about what is possible when our perceived limitations lead us down routes of experimentation we never could have dreamed of without them.
Dr. Shena Young’s magic in holding space for Black survivors to find their way back to themselves has brought me home to my own body again and again.
Judith Halberstam teaches me that all the ways that I continue to feel like a failure are actually lessons in finding alternatives, and playful alternatives are what we need to survive apocalypse.
As a self identified artist-agitator, I also draw on the legacies of agitators past and present including adrienne maree brown, Audre Lourde, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Like adrienne maree brown, I believe in the slow pace that deep, embodied, ethnographic research requires; moving at “ the speed of trust” as adrienne maree brown puts it. The way Audre Lourde lived so beautifully as disabled, an intellectual, a rebel, and as an artist, inspires me to live my own intersecting identities out loud. Alexis Pauline Gumbs models how to learn from the wisdom of our more than human kin, and that perhaps inside of their difference from us, lies the way to learn how to build a new world.
Reading is fundamental
The Future is Disabled: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
“You can do a lot more and be more efficient when you slow down because it means everyone can show up. When you walk slowly, elders, kids and me with my cane don’t get left behind. Plenty of people don’t join or stay active because the pace is breakneck. Disability justice is a movement where people show up as they can, even if they have five minutes a week.”
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"In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled―and what if 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 fascism, climate change, and pandemics and to bring about liberation?
Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about disability justice at the end of the world, documenting the many ways disabled people kept and are keeping each other―and the rest of the world―alive during Trump, fascism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Other subjects include crip interdependence, care and mutual aid in real life, disabled community building, and disabled art practice as survival and joy.
Written over the course of two years of disabled isolation during the pandemic, this is a book of love letters to other disabled QTBIPOC (and those concerned about disability justice, the care crisis, and surviving the apocalypse)."
Pleasure Activism: Adrienne Maree Brown
“How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Editor adrienne maree brown finds the answer in something she calls "Pleasure Activism," a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, including Audre Lourde's invitation to use the erotic as power and Toni Cade Bambara's exhortation that we make the revolution irresistible, the contributors to this volume take up the challenge to rethink the ground rules of activism.”
My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies: Resmaa Menakem
“In this groundbreaking book, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology. My Grandmother's Hands is a call to action for all of us to recognize that racism is not about the head, but about the body, and introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide.”
Queer Art of Failure: Judith Halberstam
“The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.”