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Care Work
Dreaming Disability Justice
304 pages
A fierce, tender manifesto that reimagines accessibility not as a logistical chore, but as an act of profound collective love.
What it feels like
Reading this collection feels like being invited into a sacred, radical community space where your whole self is finally allowed to rest and be seen. The essays move at a steady, deliberate pace, weaving together raw personal narrative with visionary political theory. It is deeply intimate and fiercely compassionate, wrapping the reader in a mood of resilient hope and tender solidarity. The prose is conversational yet poetic, refusing to sanitize the messy realities of chronic illness, queer femme emotional labor, or systemic burnout. Instead, it transforms these struggles into a blueprint for collective survival. This is a book for activists, dreamers, and anyone exhausted by the margins who wants to learn how to build a world rooted in radical, joyful care.
- Mood
- visionary
- communal
- tender
- resilient
- Tone
- fierce
- compassionate
- intimate
- radical
- earnest
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- radical care · collective access · queer femme emotional labor · disability justice · community survival
- The writing
- Conversational and poetic, blending raw personal narrative with sharp, unapologetic political analysis.
- The arc
- Moves from the exhaustion of navigating systemic ableism to a fierce, joyful celebration of disabled brilliance and collective survival.
- Who it's for
- Readers seeking a transformative, community-centered approach to activism, especially queer, trans, and disabled folks looking for a mirror and a manifesto.
Content notes
- ableism
- suicide
- chronic illness
- medical trauma
- systemic oppression
About the book
In their new, long-awaited collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime disability justice activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centres the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all.
Leah writes passionately and personally about creating spaces by and for sick and disabled queer people of colour, and creative "collective access" -- access not as a chore but as a collective responsibility and pleasure -- in our communities and political movements. Bringing their survival skills and knowledge from years of cultural and activist work, Piepzna-Samarasinha explores everything from the economics of queer femme emotional labour, to suicide in queer and trans communities, to the nitty-gritty of touring as a sick and disabled queer artist of colour.
Description from Open Library.
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