Dialogue Description:

From Aurora Levins Morales’ book Kindling: Writings on the Body

“There is no neutral body from which our bodies deviate. Society has written deep into each strand of tissue of every living person on earth. What it writes into the heart muscles of five star generals is distinct from what it writes in the pancreatic tissue and intestinal tracts of Black single mothers in Detroit, of Mexicana migrants in Fresno, but no body stands outside the consequences of injustice and inequality…What our bodies require in order to thrive, is what the world requires. If there is a map to get there, it can be found in the atlas of our skin and bone and blood, in the tracks of neurotransmitters and antibodies.”

Our September dialogue explores concepts and practices of disability justice in our lives and movements. The term disability justice was coined out of conversations between disabled queer women of color activists in 2005, including Patty Berne of Sins Invalid, seeking to challenge radical and progressive movements to more fully address ableism (see ‘Principles of Disability Justice’ in the resources section below for more info). Disability justice recognizes the intersecting legacies of white supremacy, colonial capitalism, gendered oppression and ableism in understanding how peoples’ bodies and minds are labelled ‘deviant’, ‘unproductive’, ‘disposable’ and/or ‘invalid’. In our dialogue, we will explore ways to challenge the interlocking systems of ableism, white supremacy and gendered oppression.
Some guiding questions:
How do we challenge the racialized and gendered nature of ‘productivism’, in which a person or community’s worth is based on their perceived productivity? How are gendered expectations of productivity and desirability used to uphold white supremacy and colonialism? How do we create and build spaces and communities centering disability justice? How are gendered norms about bodies, including body size, used to maintain white supremacy and what legacies of resistance do we draw from? How do we connect radical mental health and histories of gendered and racialized violence? How do we connect to our bodies and minds as sites of trauma and resistance across place and time? How do we practice and embody self-care and community-care towards disability justice, resisting cultural appropriation?
Some suggested resources for this dialogue:
Audio / Video resources:
– Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha Sins Invalid Performance* trigger warning sexual violence
– Notes on Cure, Disability and Natural Worlds, Eli Clare * check out the first video, and for his first poem starting at minute 10:05, trigger warning sexual violence
Dialogue Notes:
These are rough, uncut, unfiltered, and anonymous notes taken at the dialogue. We get that these may not be very readable to those who were not in attendance at the dialogue, and, honestly, sometimes even to those of us who were. We still feel it is important to keep them available as part of our accountability process and for archiving and reference purposes.  Some of these notes have been digested/transformed into blogs.
  • concern with productivism and toxic activist spaces
  • worked with disability rights, justice is a learning curve
  • wonder how it would be if had these frameworks as a young person with chronicillness
  • consciousness of language, stereotypes
  • how to move from individualistic self-care to community care interdependence
  • how to unlearn ableism in different contexts, in organizing contextso how can political work feel nourishing
  • new to this, grateful for the opportunity to learn
  • desirability
  • disposability
  • challenging notions of what/who is a worthwhile person
  • inhumanity of work for many – physically, psychologically extractive
  • difficulty of negotiating burnout
  • capitalist individual resources and ownership, how to disrupt cycles
  • we all have different capacities, what we can give
  • different cultural notions of care and family networks
  • podcast of host families with neurodivergent children, non-pathlogoizing
  • what are examples of ways that disability justice is well integrated intoorganizing?

o Dearth of good models
o How to expand to welcome everyone’s contributions, or be more narrowly

focused on single-minded goal – what are impacts?

  • Go into monthly menstrual depression – didn’t have models of how to engage,now embrace this time as a gift to access deeper emotions, time when it is so clear

    that my body is not made to be in capitalist machine all the time

  • May be possible to create conditions to live in another way
  • Stigmas around particular mental illnesses, ways this is gendered – ways traumais gendered
  • People who have to take a break and feel like they can’t
  • Health defined as ability to work
  • Transactional
  • Learning about
  • Developing coping mechanisms – binaries not working, developing otheridentities, labeled multiple identity disorder
  • What it would be like if could fully honor rhythms of body/mind and not show upto work, be on another non-linear pace
  • What are we doing to create the world we want to live in now – shifting activism,expand ways to show up, participate in community
  • Being, being together is a radical act
  • Self-expression has to be fundamental to our lives
  • Ways that race and class shape criminalization of disability
  • Inspiring artist, multiply disabled, trans, whose self-healing is part of art, andactivist art, contribution to spaces in ways that can’t always be in physically
  • Goal of organizing to achieve goals, and to politicize resistance
  • The body is political
  • Ways disability is viewed in media, protest against the film “Me Before You”,with hashtag #liveboldly – narrative that life is not worth living
  • Holding the complexity of how we need each other
  • The paternalism of pity tone/language, inspiration porn
  • Spaces beyond an access-framework
  • Drag king community, where half the people were deaf, was one of the mostinclusive spaces I’ve been a part of
  • Dance troupe who sets agenda depending on who is there and how they’re doing
  • Elementary school that was excellent at integrating different physicalities
  • Wishing I had grown up with such radically inclusive community in school, andsee all kind of people doing all kinds of things
  • Special needs/ed has to be legitimized by the state and medical diagnosis
  • Federal and medical definitions, labels, gatekeeping, labels
  • As a female, knowing who what is “crazy” shifts with capitalist patriarchy
  • Disabling structures of society
  • Race pathologized
  • Disability shifts simplistic understandings of privilege
  • Ability in flux, how it may challenge identity politics
  • The fear of becoming disabled and disposable
  • As a white woman, can’t really feel the “be as you are, that is radical” – haveheard the narrative and feel inspired, yet feel it doesn’t apply to me – activist

    voices internalized saying that’s not for you

  • Ways these forms of social control and categories shift
  • Checking out with sharing ways we challenge productivism
  • Wendell Berry quote, fox making more tracks than necessary
  • Saying yes to non-work relationship, holistic life
  • Appreciating the process of grappling itself – the process as the work
  • Notice and revel in beauty, gardening
  • Question of sacrifice, though that’s not my imagination around disability, there’ssome chafing there
  • Making art
  • As a teacher, giving kids time to doodle or do other expression