by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Arsenal Pulp Press
10/04/2022, paperback
SKU: 9781551528915
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
Building on the work of her game changing book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, 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); honor songs for kin who are gone; recipes for survival; questions and real talk about care, organizing, disabled families, and kin networks and communities; and wild brown disabled femme joy in the face of death. With passion and power, The Future Is Disabled remembers our dead and insists on our future.
Reviews:
"The Future is Disabled moves us past disability as an identity category, or awareness of disability justice as an anti-oppression check mark. By addressing her beloved community on her own terms, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha teaches us that disability justice is a possible world that already exists, full of the love we deserve and the complexity we already embody." -- Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals
"Piepzna-Samarasinha is one of the strongest contemporary voices in the fields of disability and transformative justice... Unflinching and confrontational, The Future is Disabled doesn't pull any punches. It is both an instructional guide and a critical, eyeopening manifesto that will help nondisabled readers engage with the subject matter." -- Booklist
About the Author:
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a Lambda Literary Award-winning queer disabled femme writer and performer of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent. Their previous books include Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice and Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, and they are co-editor of Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement.