A review by courtneyfalling
Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice & Art Activism of Sins Invalid by Shayda Kafai

hopeful informative fast-paced

4.0

Amazing history of Sins Invalid and disability justice for activist or artist folks who want to learn more! And a great example of how documenting our movements in real time is itself an act of radical optimism and love!

The main reason I'm rating this 4 stars instead of higher has to do with the chapters on sex and erotic pleasure. There's a footnote about respecting ace folks (which is great) but I really cannot imagine having been an ace reader with how much unique weight is placed on sex and desirability and desiring.
Also a lot of my own crip journey with sex has involved really fraught emotions around infertility and medicalized reproductive "dysfunction" under eugenicist capitalism (and this involves so many things, like why I might actually want to be a disabled parent to a disabled child, and how my inability to get pregnant and/or the lack of access to IVF and reproductive support for disabled parents who may be more likely to have disabled children is significantly different than a lot of my nondisabled leftist friends' arguments about how it's unethical to birth children in late-stage capitalism, which yes has ecofascist ties and it makes me really mad as such a common argument because it's missing a lot of nuance, and how the ongoing legacy and practice of eugenics super affects all of this) and so I think how this handled crip sex just kinda... hurt by omission. Like there's so much more we need to be talking about with sex/sexuality, disability justice, and reproductive justice and I think we can appreciate what Sins Invalid has done and is doing around empowering crip sexiness because hell yeah we are without like, setting that up as the end-all be-all. Like I really struggle with a lot of this and tbh Sins Invalid's approach often feels like the floor and nowhere close to the ceiling for the complexity I really want DJ folks to tackle this with.
 
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