"When there's no space to talk about disability in art - when people at the poetry slam respond to your crip poem with "How touching" and give you a sad face, or just look confused - disabled artists of color won't make disabled art."
"None of this happened because the able-bodied people decided to be nice to the cripples."
"A disability justice framework understands that all bodies are unique and essential, that all bodies have strengths and needs that must be met... Disability Justice centers sick and disabled people of color, queer and trans disabled folks of color, and everyone who is marginalized in mainstream disability organizing.... It insists that we organize from our sick, disabled, "brokenbeautiful" (as Alex Pauline Gumbs puts it) bodies' wisdom, need, and desire... It means we are not left behind; we are beloved, kindred, needed."
"Our focus is less on civil rights legislation as the only solution to ableism and more on a vision of liberation that understands that the state was built on racist, colonialist ableism and ill not save us, because it was created to kill us."
"We have found each other and offered healing and access to each other before and we will again."
"This is for all of us evading that capture and control, that being disposed of - who still have need."
"This is for everyone who has had to run away from accepting care because care meant control - by family memvers or partners or workers or strangers."
"Sick, disabled, Mad, Deaf, and neurodivergent people's care and treatment varied according to our race, class, gender, and location, but for the most part, at best we were able to evade capture and find ways of caring for ourselves or being cared for by our families, nations, or communities - from our Black and brown communities to disabled communities. At worst, a combination of legal and societal ableism plus racism and colonialism meant that we were locked up in institutions or hospitals "for our own good"."
"People's fear of accessing care didn't come out of nowhere. It came out of generations and centuries where needed care meant being locked up, losing your human and civil rights, and being subject to abuse. The spectre of "the home" and lockup still haunts everyone when we consider asking for or needing care."
"Mutual aid, as opposed to charity, does not connote moral superiority of the giver over the receiver."
"I'm glad Loree's model works for her, but if someone drops me, if someone doesn't show up for a shift, I can die. I don't ever want to depend on being liked or loved by the community for the right to shit in my toilet when I want to."
"This is a very common disability experience: getting ready to go travel to a conference and having your freak-out about how badly the whole thing will fuck up your body... We're used to feeling that our disability experiences are private, embarrassing, and not to be spoken about - especially crips who may be working mostly in non-disabled social justice communities - and conference and travel bring those feelings ono even more so."
"Instead of the classic able-bodied conference experience most of us were used to, where able-bodied people walked at their able-bodied rate and didn't notice we were two blocks behind, or nowhere, we walked as slow as the slowest person and refused to abandon each other."
"I'm talking about the gift we give each other of seeing what the able-bodied imagination refuses to see: that sick, disabled, Mad, Deaf, and neurodivergent lives, and the stress we hold from places where ableism rubs up against them 'til they chafe, is normal."
"It's always asking: if you can touch, what you call your body, or your sick, what you need, if you even want suggestions for your issues or if you just want listening. It's understanding that each disabled person is the expert on their own body/mind."
"is understanding that beds are worlds. Houses are worlds. Cars are worlds."
"I agree that our access and the world should not be predicated on desireability or popularity or approval of the able-bodied masses - or anyone. And I hold a deep place of respect for the ways so many of us have been denied access to love. But when I say the word "love", I mean something more cripped-out and weird than the traditional desireability politics many of us are forced to survive and live within."
"I mean things like the radical notion that everyone deserves basic income, care and access. Everyone. Including people you don't like. Including people who are not that likable.... Because nobody deserves to die or suffer from lack of access, even if they've been an asshole."
"Organizing Pysch Survivor Pride Day happened crip styles - slow, starting late, with breaks when someone lost their shit or needed to throw up or cried. We yelled at each other, got triggered, and disagreed. We were "visibly crazy". And we ran thing."
"Mainstream ideas of "healing" deeply believe in ableist ideas that you're either sick or well, fixed or broken, and that nobody would want to be in a disabled or sick or mad bodymind."
"One thing that we're trying to do with this project of writing Crip Sex Moments* is like... I don't know, I kind of think of it as like: the good, the bad, and the real. you know? Because I feel like there's the good stuff, that's like the secrets of like, wow, the ways that we find to have really amazing hot sex in our bodies is incredible and the kind of like cross-crip solidarity through fucking. Maybe you're fucking someone who has your exact disability; maybe they have a different one. But you're giving each other love and appreciation, and you're like "Wow, you're really fucking hot and I'm gonna figure out how to make you feel pleasure in your body and I'm gonna respect your body and you're gonna do the same thing, awesome.""
"You wanna know how you'll know if you're doing disability justice? You'll know you're doing it because people will show up late, someone will vomit, someone will have a panic attack, and nothing will happen on time because the ramp is broken on the supposedly "accessible" building. You won't meet your benchmarks on time, or ever. We won't be grateful to be included; we will want to set the agenda. And what our leadership looks like may include long sick or crazy leaves, being nuts in public, or needing to empty an ostomy bag and being on vicodin at work. It is slow. It's people even the most social justice-minded abled folks stare at or get freaked out by. It looks like what many mainstream abled people have been taught to think of as failure."
"But I am dreaming of the biggest disabled dream of my life - dreaming not just of a revolutionary movement in which we are not abandoned but of a movement in which we lead the way. With all of our crazy, adaptive-deviced, loving kinship and commitment to each other, we will leave no one behind as we roll, limp, stim, sign, and move in a million ways towards cocreating the decolonial living future. I am dreaming like my life depends on it. Because it does."
"Ableism mandates that disabled and sick people are always "patients", broken people waiting to be fixed by medicine or G-d, and that we're supposed to be grateful for anything anyone offers at any time. It is a radical disability justice stance that turns the ableist world on its ear, to instead work from a place where disabled folks are the experts on our own bodies and lives, and we get to consent, or not."
"Because the other thing I know about survivor narratives - the dynamic of "Prove it". ... People insist on knowing "what happened", and to them, "what happened" is the most graphic moment of violence possible."
"Like any smart crazy, I don't want anything I can prevent on my permanent record, and I definitely don't want Danger to Self or Others."
"I think about the deep and complicated stigma of crazy - [...] I think about how the crazy take care of the crazy when no one else will, and when we're not in crisis ourselves, sometimes we want a break."
"It is so difficult to write both what sucks about disability - the pain, the oppression, the impairment - and the joy of this body at the same time. The joy of this body comes from crip community and interdependence, but most of all, of the hard beauty of this life, built around all the time I must spend resting. The bed is the nepantla place of opening."
"(as a crip, you get used to the blank look nondisabled activists give you when you try to talk about ableism, access, that disabled people aren't just tragic or heroic, etc.)"
"to say that we can just be "more deeply committed to the struggle" and leave our disabilities behind is an incredibly dangerous, ableist stance to take - that also just plain ignores the reality that some people are just disabled and can't think or organize our way to able-bodiness."
"I want movements to embody a disabled, working-class, brown sustainability that celebrates femme organizer genius. We deserve nothing less. And we - disabled, working-class femmes of color - have been creating these kinds of movements for a long time. Listen up. (Or read the captioning.)
"If we believe that some survivors are just too annoying, or bitchy, too out of control, we can feel better about ourselves by promising we're not like that and distancing ourselves from those bitches."
"It's damn near impossible for many abled people to think of disability as anything other than an individual tragedy and a state no one would choose to inhabit."
"And even more dangerous, I want to venture: What if some things aren't fixable? What if some things really will never be the same - and that might not be greaet, but it might be okay?"
"I do not want to be fixed. I want to change the world. I want to be alive, awake, grieving, and full of joy. And I am."
"The transition itself, of becoming disabled or moving along the ability spectrum, is frequently invisibilized, to the point that these changes do not even have a name. We do not have a way to talk about becoming disabled or more impaired."
"I feel like I have spent lifetimes doing excavation work to find myself and my people, whether it is actively or passively, and most days I don't actually have a lot materially to show for it, except for the poetry of disability justice and relationships with crip queer beloveds."
"History frequently has not found our lives valuable enough to record-keep or tell our stories, and if it does, the narratives do not look like us, and if they by some miracle chance do, they are riddled with so much ableism that it is hard to separate out how the person with the impairment felt about their life and what is the story keeper's ableist projections onto them."
"I also think a lot about crip futurity. It is radical to articulate that we have a past and lineages and cultures, in a world that says we are individual medical defects to be eliminated."
"Too often, people in social justice spaces pedestalize ancestors as saints, and I think it's important to resist that. Disabled ancestor's crip ideas of ancestry, because concepts of perfection are ableist and we sure aren't "perfect". And we're still valuable."
"I want to argue for access intimacy as a process and a learnable skill. I think it's dangerous when we believe that as disabled people we always "just know" each other's needs - I want us to acknowledge the way that crips do have ways of knowing each other's "stuff" and how we also need to not assume and ask each other what our needs are. I also think it's very important to state that abled people can and do commit to learning access intimacy, through asking and respecting our knowledge - because otherwise we'll be stuck in this place where we're the only ones who can do for us. I want everyone to have crip knowledge."
"I want my legacy to be loving disabled people. It has been my life story and work. Through loving disabled people, I get to love myself."