BioMed
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s essays explore disabled queer communities’ care practices, from food at meetings to the fragile networks that meet daily needs.
Telling exhausted people to look after themselves leaves each person to cope alone. Collective care changes the organization itself, so getting sick, crying, arriving late because the bus broke down, moving slower, or working from home are normal and need no apology. Food at meetings is part of this too.
Help with intimate tasks like toileting, showering, and dressing need not be grim or hidden. A long-running care collective can become a place of laughter, gossip, and hanging out. Couples can build rest and care into romance instead of walling it off from date night.
The people who live daily with ableism and other overlapping oppressions, and who have spent years fighting systems built against them, are the real experts. Movements should be led by them. Single-issue groups led by the more privileged leave these people out.
Judging bodies as fit or unfit is bound up with colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. These are all ways bodies get policed and ranked. Fighting one alone misses how they reinforce each other.
Making a space usable for disabled people can be a responsibility the whole group holds and even enjoys. It does not have to be a checklist one person grudgingly completes. Treated this way, access becomes an act of love and a way of building community.
People resist accepting help for a reason. For generations, needing care meant being locked up, losing your rights, and being abused. Any new care system has to earn trust against that memory.
Relying on friends rather than formal services can be warmer and freer. But it makes basic needs depend on staying well-liked: you shouldn't have to be popular to get help using the toilet. Webs of friends are valuable and also fragile and hard to keep going.
Prefigurative politics means building the world you want in the present, such as fully accessible events, rather than only demanding it later. It means spending more time building than attacking. It means focusing on the power people have rather than their powerlessness.
People newly sick or disabled are often left alone to navigate unfamiliar systems. Experienced disabled people can act like birth helpers for them. They welcome newcomers into the community and pass on resources and practical tips for dealing with bureaucracy.
Calling non-disabled people "not(yet)-disabled" treats disability as a likely future for anyone, not a fixed category of others. Mind and body are one integrated bodymind. Access therefore serves everyone over a lifetime, not a special few.