suggested reading

our writing on this theme

sins invalid

Exploring Disability Justice

Disability Justice, Monthly Dialogues

Exploring Disability Justice

Check out the upcoming Sins Invalid show, happening October 14-16 in San Francisco!! In our recent September dialogue, we set out to explore concepts and practices of disability justice in our lives and movements. Below are the resources we compiled for the dialogue, some background, and the questions we explored. Notes from the dialogue can be found here. 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 […]
Contractions-During-Labor-alt-722×406

Emotional Labor vs. Labor That Evokes Emotions; or the hard work of being human

Disability Justice, Hate Groups, Labor and Work, Reflection, Therapy, Healing, and Whiteness

Emotional Labor vs. Labor That Evokes Emotions; or the hard work of being human

This blog post is written in response to comments and discussion generated at the February 2018 White Noise Collective dialogue, which examined the themes of “Emotional Labor and Difficult Conversations about Race and Gender”.  I am grateful to the participants for their frank, vulnerable, and honest conversation. See our website for the guiding questions and suggested readings for the dialogue. I recently had a friend (a late 20s straight cis-man) divulge to me a dating encounter that he was frustrated about.  To his credit, he asked my permission first before telling me the story (which […]

dialogue notes on this topic

Though many of the themes from the monthly dialogues are represented in our blog posts, those posts rarely include all of what was discussed.  Find the notes here from each dialogue raw and uncut. We share them (with names omitted) in an effort to be  accountable and transparent to our larger community, accessible for those who are not able to attend, and saved as archive to return to and draw from.

February 2020: Disrupting and Transforming the Medical Industrial Complex

This dialogue will include a presentation on the historic roots of the MIC which has given rise to the racialized medical ableism we currently face. We’ll also discuss the HJC’s current work, including its launch of the US’s 1st national Medical Abuse Hotline and Know Your Medical Rights campaign. The presentation will be followed by open discussion and resource sharing to connect people with ways to support the revolutionary work for health justice, especially at the intersections of disability and climate justice. Questions we will explore together: How do we define medical abuse, medical injustice […]

July 2018: Desirability Politics, Worthiness and Belonging

Dialogue Description: What does it mean to be attracted to someone or to find someone desirable? How do we know a person is beautiful? How are our attractions, both sexual and otherwise, shaped and influenced? What messages have white supremacy and patriarchy, alongside cisheterosexism, femme-phobia, fat-phobia, ageism and ableism directed at us about worth and belonging in our relationships? How does desirability influence your own sense of worth, your relationship to your body and relationship to others? How are desirability politics playing out for us in this moment of increased violence directed at multiply marginalized communities, especially trans women of color and immigrants? Join us in dialogue as we explore these questions, and others, in an exploration of how race, gender, and desirability impact and complicate our lives.

September 2016: Towards Disability Justice

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. […]
attend a future dialogue