User Profile

Inclusion without power or leadership is tokenism.

— Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

During a brunch hangout the day after the show, some of us started talking about feedback Black, queer wheelchair dancer Alice Sheppard had written on her blog after seeing the show—that while she appreciated the hotness of the performance, she wanted more than positive portrayals of disabled sexuality. She wanted someone to do a piece about what it was like when your catheter falls out during sex and you spray your partner in the face with urine. E.T. and I became friends and artistic collaborators, and began to write and dream some of those real-life, complicated crip sexuality stories that hover between joy, shame, and just being.

— Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Our movements themselves have to be healing, or there’s no point to them. —Cara Page, Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective

PRO TIPS/POP QUIZ:

Those words: “Sick.” “Disabled.” “Healer.” Do you think of them in the same sentence?

Do you think a sick, mad, Deaf, neurodivergent, and/or disabled person can heal?

What do you think “healing” is? Do you think that it means becoming as close to able-bodied as possible?

Do you think it is always sad or terrible to be sick or disabled? Do you think everybody wants to be able-bodied and neurotypical, and would choose it if they could?

Does healing justice mean to you that someday no one will be disabled or sick because there will be no toxic waste and health care for all?

— Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (36%)

What does it mean to make disabled art space that is richly Black and brown, poor, cross-abled, with childcare, cheap, and moving at the slow, sick, canceling, Access-A-Ride-broke-down pace of our bodies? Often, it means not producing at the “hot shot,” “ambitious” able-bodied pace of abled arts practice, even abled QTBIPOC practice. Are we seen as less serious because of that? How can we keep insisting on our slow-moving, strong, and vulnerable SDQTBIPOC arts practice? This chapter is still being written.

— Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (35%)

•  It’s not assuming. Anything. 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 issue or if you just want listening. It’s understanding that each disabled person is the expert on their own body/mind.

•  Crip emotional intelligence is understanding isolation. Deeply. We know what it’s like to be really, really alone. To be forgotten about, in that way where people just don’t remember you’ve ever been out, at meetings and parties, in the social life of the world. How being isolated, being shunned, being cut off from the social world of community is terrifying because you know that it can literally kill you. And that being alone also does not always have to be killing; it can also be an oasis of calm, quiet, low stimulation, and rest.

•  Crip emotional intelligence is not taking it personally when someone cancels and continuing to invite them to things. To not forget them.

— Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Black queer femme writer Kim Katrin Milan created the phrase “femme science”19 to mean femme skills, technologies, and intelligences. For me, it was revolutionary to hear someone state that femmes had actual, particular skills, talents, sciences, and cultures. I’m not sure when I started hearing and using the terms “crip skills” or “crip science”—probably roughly around the same time. But it meant something. It meant something to name and talk about all the crip skills I was seeing and learning that I and other disabled folks had. It meant something because, well, the deficiency model by which most people view disability only sees disabled people as a lack, a defect, damaged good, in need of cure. The idea that we have cultures, skills, science, and technology runs counter to all of that. In a big way.

Naming that also means having to field some able-bodied blank stares. Able-bodied people are shameless about really not getting it that disabled people could know things that the abled don’t. That we have our own cultures and histories and skills. That there might be something that they could learn from us.

But we do, and we are. So here are some things I’ve noticed as hallmarks of crip emotional intelligence, skills we use within our cultures and with each other.

— Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha