A review by garbutch
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
3.0
I feel a lot of different ways about this. Each essay hit me differently and I feel like this wasn't the most gender binary variant inclusive text for being written by someone who is part of the queer community. This is a piece I relate to in a lot of ways but I find really hard to read whenever the gender stuff comes up, because Leah reassigned a gender binary of "femmes" and "masculine people" without room for those of us who are different. At the same time, this disability activist community is all I have, and the care gone into this means a lot.
I have notes I made with it, and a lot of it is admittedly critical. But I don't want my words to actually stop someone from reading something that may remind them there are people out there like them. The stuff on suicide especially hit home for me. And that last essay/conversation. The writing of a eulogy in your own head to figure out how you want to be remembered. That's something I do too.
I will say, to those reading this, it's written in a series of essays that weren't written at the same time. So if you're worried that you'll lose the thread because your attention span isn't there for you, this is an accessible thing for that. I think it's mostly chronological, but over the course of years written.
I have notes I made with it, and a lot of it is admittedly critical. But I don't want my words to actually stop someone from reading something that may remind them there are people out there like them. The stuff on suicide especially hit home for me. And that last essay/conversation. The writing of a eulogy in your own head to figure out how you want to be remembered. That's something I do too.
I will say, to those reading this, it's written in a series of essays that weren't written at the same time. So if you're worried that you'll lose the thread because your attention span isn't there for you, this is an accessible thing for that. I think it's mostly chronological, but over the course of years written.