Care Work - by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Paperback)

About the Book

An empowering collection of essays on the author's experiences in the disability justice movement.

Book Synopsis

In this collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime activist and performance artist 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 tool kit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind. Powerful and passionate, Care Work is a crucial and necessary call to arms.

Review Quotes

"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. Personal narratives and accounts of organizing are voiced from Black and brown and queer disabled people, radically reimagining the ways our society is structured, uplifting visions and models for care webs that create collective access." --Broadly (Best Books of the Year)

"An instant classic, Care Work is equal parts on-the-ground dispatch from the disability justice movement and practical field guide to liberatory access. Rather than something to be begrudgingly tacked on, accessibility, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha shows us, might be joyous and collective." --Smithsonian Magazine

"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

"As a Black disabled activist, cultural worker, and collector of art, books and music by people of color with disabilities for more than twenty years, I'm excited and thirsty for Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Care Work. As one of the original thinkers of Disability Justice, 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 that 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

"Leah knows that the world we deserve is a world shaped by the honest, messy, skillful genius of disabled queer femmes of color. 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

"Leah writes brilliantly about sick/disabled/mad/neurodivergent genius, collective care work, and all-too-familiar patterns of abuse and trauma that happen even/especially in radical spaces/marginalized people's communities. 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, author of All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism

About the Author

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of the non-fiction books Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home and Consensual Genocide, and the poetry books Bodymap and Love Cake, and is the co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home. A lead artist with disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid and co-founder of queer and trans people of color performance troupe Mangos With Chili, she performs and teaches across North America.