Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

Care Work is a central movement text in disability justice. Rather than beginning with abstract definition, it starts from the survival knowledge of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown communities living across medical abandonment, poverty, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and ableism.

Its value for FemRes is that it rescues care from the frame of private duty or feminized sacrifice and treats it as collective infrastructure. Access is not a checklist added at the end of an event; it is a political question about how communities arrange time, space, money, transport, food, rest, conflict, and leadership. In that sense, the book pairs well with Alison Kafer’s work: Kafer offers a theory of crip futures, while Piepzna-Samarasinha shows how such futures are practiced unevenly and collectively.

The book’s strongest contribution is its insistence on collective access. It refuses to cast disabled people as passive recipients of services, and it refuses to let care fall only on individual women, mothers, partners, or already marginalized people. Instead, it asks movements and intimate communities to recognize dependency as ordinary and politically generative.

For feminist readers, this matters because many discussions of care labor still imagine the caregiver as able-bodied and endlessly available. Many activist cultures also reward speed, sacrifice, and constant participation as signs of political commitment. Care Work challenges those norms by centering pain, fatigue, madness, chronic illness, and different rhythms as conditions that movements must be built around, not exceptions to be managed.

Its limits are also part of its usefulness: the book is deeply rooted in North American QTBIPOC disability justice organizing, so its practices cannot simply be transplanted everywhere. But because it is concrete and embodied, it gives feminist resource work a high ethical bar: do not only ask who can enter a space; ask who can stay, rest, make mistakes, receive care, and lead.