The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs

by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Overview

In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Lakshmi 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.

This updated edition includes a new chapter and afterword by the author.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781551528915
Publisher:	Arsenal Pulp Press, Limited
Publication date:	10/04/2022
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	236,380
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

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. 

Table of Contents

Thinks and Acknowledgements 13

Introduction 17

Writing a Disabled Future, in Progress

Part I Disability Justice in the End Times

Chapter 1 "We Were Maybe Not Going to Save the World, but We Were Going to Save Each Other": How Disabled Mutual Aid Is Different than Abled Mutual Aid 51

Tiny Disabled Moment #1 Small Moments of Disabled Knowing 71

Chapter 2 Interdependence Is Not Some Giant Living in the Hillside Coming Down to Visit the Townspeople: The Church of Show the Fuck Up, in Real Life 75

Tiny Disabled Moment #2 "There Is No Disabled Community Here" 106

Interlude

Pod Mapping for Mutual Aid, by Rebel Sidney Fayola Black Burnett 109

Chapter 3 Disabled Grief Technologies: Disability Justice Future-Building in a Time of Mass Grief 112

Recipe 126

Rosewater for Crying Eyes

Chapter 4 Nobody Left Behind and Wanting to Run Like Hell: Disabled Survival in Climate Crisis 128

Chapter 5 Dipping the Resistance: No Revolution without Us 140

Recipe 152

Stacey Soup

Chapter 6 Still Dreaming Wild Disability Justice Dreams at the End of the World 154

Tiny Disabled Moment #3 The Free Library of Beautiful Adaptive Things 165

Chapter 7 The Future Is Disabled (with Karine Myrgianie Jean-François, Nelly Bassily, Sage Lovell, Sarah Jama, and Syrus Marus Ware) 168

Part II The Stories that Keep Us Alive: Disability Justice Arts in the Interregnum

Chapter 8 Twenty Questions for Disability Justice Art Dreaming: A Winter Solstice Present 177

Chapter 9 I Wanna Be with You Everywhere (And I Am): Disability Justice Art as Freedom Portal 183

Chapter 10 Disability Justice Writing, the Beauty and the Difficulty 197

Chapter 11 Autistic Long-Form, Short-Form, No-Form, Echotextia: Autistic Poetic Forms 212

Chapter 12 Cripping the Book Tour 220

Sample Access Rider 236

Part III The Disabled Future

Tiny Disabled Moment #4 ADA 30/DJ 15 243

Chapter 13 Disabled Secrets 249

Chapter 14 What Really Happens in DJ Groups 258

Chapter 15 Home Is a Holy Place: The Sacred Organizing Spaces of Disabled Homes 263

Tiny Disabled Moment #5 LL Comes to Me 276

Chapter 16 Loving Stacey: An Honor Song 280

Tiny Disabled Moment #6 Adaptive Trike 301

Chapter 17 Wild Disabled Joy: Disabled Pleasure Activism 305

Chapter 18 Wild Disabled Futures: The Future Is Now 325

Editorial Reviews

"After reading The Future is Disabled, I feel more hopeful, and I think you will, too. I want to shout through a megaphone that everyone needs to read this book, because this text is one of the tools we can use to make it through the next several decades."
—Autostraddle

"This collection of disability justice essays focuses on how the pandemic has affected disabled people, especially QTBIPOC disabled people. Piepzna-Samarasinha argues that we're on track for disabled people to become the majority in the future and asks, 'Have we ever imagined this not just as a cautionary tale or scary story, but as a dream?' They show how disabled ways of thinking and working are crucial in addressing the problems we face right now. This book faces the deadly ableism of the world head-on while imagining a hopeful future. This is such a thought-provoking collection, and I can't wait to reread it."
—Book Riot ("Best Books of the Year")

"Unflinching and confrontational, The Future Is Disabled doesn't pull any punches. It is both an instructional guide and a critical, eye-opening manifesto ... Piepzna-Samarasinha is one of the strongest contemporary voices in the fields of disability and transformative justice."
—Booklist

"The Future Is Disabled is full of passion, compassion and fire. Its 18 chapters blur the lines between memoir, political essay, rant and eulogy, all of them united by the conviction that every body, mind, race and gender matter."
—Ms. Magazine

"In this searing essay collection, Piepzna-Samarasinha presents a hopeful glimpse into the future through examining the present from a disability justice lens ... It's a thought-provoking read."
—Buzzfeed

From the Publisher