damn solidarity project
[disability, autistic, mad & neuroqueer]
“If collective access is revolutionary love without charity, how do we learn to love each other?
How do we learn to do this love work of collective care that lifts us instead of abandons us, that grapples with all the deep ways in which care is complicated?”
Leah Lakshmi
Piepzna-Samarasinha
theorizing access
Mia Mingus on access
Access Intimacy: The Missing Link
Mia Mingus, Leaving Evidence
"Access intimacy is that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else “gets” your access needs. Sometimes it can happen with complete strangers, disabled or not, or sometimes it can be built over years...
It is not dependent on someone having a political understanding of disability, ableism or access...
Access intimacy is also the intimacy I feel with many other disabled and sick people who have an automatic understanding of access needs out of our shared similar lived experience of the many different ways ableism manifests in our lives."
Access Intimacy, Interdependence and Disability Justice
Mia Mingus, Leaving Evidence
"For me, I understand Access Intimacy as something that can transform ordinary access into a tool for liberation...
I am done with disability simply being “included” in able bodied people’s agendas and lives only when it’s convenient...
Access intimacy at once recognizes and understands the relational and human quality of access, while simultaneously deepening the relationships involved.
It moves the work of access out of the realm of only logistics and into the realm of relationships and understanding disabled people as humans, not burdens."
Forced Intimacy: An Ableist Norm
Mia Mingus, Leaving Evidence
"Forced intimacy is a cornerstone of how ableism functions in an able bodied supremacist world.
Disabled people are expected to “strip down” and “show all our cards” metaphorically in order to get the basic access we need in order to survive... Forced intimacy is the opposite of access intimacy...
I am also working for a world where disabled people get to be human and have consent over our bodies, minds and intimacy."
access reads
Building Access
Universal Design and the Politics of Disability, Aimi Hamraie
"Building Access investigates twentieth-century strategies for designing the world with disability in mind. Illustrated with a wealth of rare archival materials, this book brings together scientific, social, and political histories in what is not only the pioneering critical account of Universal Design but also a deep engagement with the politics of knowing, making, and belonging in twentieth-century United States."
Restricted Access
Media, Disability, and the Politics of Participation, Elizabeth Ellcessor
"Restricted Access investigates digital media accessibility—the processes by which media is made usable by people with particular needs—and argues for the necessity of conceptualizing access in a way that will enable greater participation in all forms of mediated culture."
Care Work
Dreaming Disability Justice, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
"Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of colour are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a toolkit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind.
Powerful and passionate, Care Work is a crucial and necessary call to arms."
access multimedia
irresistible podcast
an example of access