The remarkable story of Sins Invalid, a performance project that centres queer disability justice.
In recent years, disability activism has come into its own as a vital and necessary means to acknowledge the power and resilience of the disabled community, and to call out ableist culture wherever it appears.
Crip Kinship explores the art activism of Sins Invalid, a San Francisco Bay Area-based performance project, and its radical imaginings of what disabled, queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming bodyminds of colour can do: how they can rewrite oppression, and how they can gift us with transformational lessons for our collective survival.
Grounded in the disability justice framework, Crip Kinship investigates the revolutionary survival teachings that disabled, queer of colour community offers to all our bodyminds. From their focus on crip beauty and sexuality to manifesting digital kinship networks and crip-centric liberated zones, Sins Invalid empowers and moves us toward generating our collective liberation from our bodyminds outward.
Includes a foreword by Patty Berne, co-founder, and executive and artistic director of Sins Invalid.
What People Are Saying
"As a long-time admirer of Sins Invalid, I am grateful for Dr. Shayda Kafai's Crip Kinship. Crip wisdom and disability justice are what we need right now. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand the origins of disability justice." Alice Wong, editor of Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century
"As a scholar of belonging, it has taken me so long to let my own disabled bodymind belong - to feel the holy connective power in my pain, the ways I need help, my healing story - and to let myself belong in community as I truly am. Sins Invalid opened a portal that so many of the people who have taught me to live fully into the wholeness of my present have both held wide and come thru. This book invites a new generation through that portal of disability justice, to feel the powerful nature of us in our miraculous biodiversity and symbiosis, the love ethic in practice, the creative reclamation of our dignity, and the future that will unfold from our orgasmic yes. Shayda Kafai, in weaving this story, takes a place in the lineage of crip doulas who help us understand we are whole, and different, and perfect." adrienne maree brown, author of Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good