Care Work

In their new, long-awaited collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime disability justice activist and performance artist Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centres the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with implications and gifts for all. Leah writes passionately and personally about creating spaces by and for sick and disabled queer people of colour, and creative "collective access" -- access not as a chore but as a collective responsibility and pleasure -- in our communities and political movements. Bringing their survival skills and knowledge from years of cultural and activist work, Piepzna-Samarasinha explores everything from the economics of queer femme emotional labor, to suicide in queer and trans communities, to the nitty gritty of touring as a sick and disabled queer artist of color.

Care Work is essentially a mapping ofaccess as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabledqueer/people of color are doing to find each other and to build power andcommunity, and a toolkit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainablecommunities of liberation where no one is left behind. Powerful and passionate,Care Work is a crucial and necessarycall to arms for all.

'Page afterpage, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha documents the necessity, power, andsheer brilliance of disability justice. Be prepared for her words, stories, andpolitical thinking to shake up what you know about care and access, revolutionarydreaming, and present-day resilience.' Eli Clare, author of BrilliantImperfection: Grappling with Cure and Exile

'Leah knows that the world we deserve is a world shaped by thehonest, messy, skillful genius of disabled queer femmes of color. Reading thisbook allows you to live inside the gorgeous, uncomfortable, emergent,compassionate world that disabled femmes of color have been making all along.' Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of M Archive and Spill, co-editorof Revolutionary Mothering