Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice is not a policy manual that prescribes solutions from outside disabled communities. It is a collection in which personal essays, conversations, organizing knowledge, and manifestos show disability justice being imagined, tested, and revised in everyday relationships and movement practice. Piepzna-Samarasinha writes from knowledge formed among sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and other people-of-color communities. Here, disability justice is not only a demand for individual access to existing institutions; it asks who has resources, whose knowledge is trusted, and who gets to shape shared life.

The opening essay, “Care Webs: Experiments in Creating Collective Access,” treats care webs as experiments in mutual aid and collective access. Reviewer Christina Lee notes that the book discusses how institutional care can screen applicants through eligibility rules and medical proof, and describes the Sick and Disabled Queers community sharing practical care advice and assistive equipment. FemRes reads this as more than a call to replace public services with friends’ goodwill: its political force lies in letting people define needs and refusing to reserve knowledge for professionals. Mutual aid can create support and belonging, but it does not absolve public systems of responsibility for inadequate care. Lee’s review supplies these chapter details; it is a reviewer’s account, not a quotation from the book.

“A Modest Proposal for a Fair Trade Emotional Labor Economy” brings emotional labor into the politics of care. Who is repeatedly expected to explain oppression, soothe others, or support a community, while receiving little compensation, reciprocity, or room to set boundaries? “Fair trade” need not turn intimacy into an itemized transaction. It challenges the assumption that disabled, queer, and racialized women’s knowledge and emotional support are free, unlimited resources. The question expands the care economy beyond visible household tasks to how organizations distribute attention, responsibility, and time to recover.

Essays on prefigurative politics and radically accessible performance spaces bring a desired future into the present. The issue is not only whether audiences can enter a venue, but whether disabled artists can get on stage, make work, tour, and help organize. A conversation with E. T. Russian also places disabled desire, intimacy, and sexuality within feminist thought, resisting the stereotype that disabled people are inherently asexual. Collective access is therefore not a synonym for building codes: it concerns who is recognized as a full artist, lover, thinker, and movement leader.

The book does not present mutual aid as a cost-free utopia. Reviewers also note the sustainability problem: people in care webs may themselves be disabled, ill, or resource-poor, making long-term support difficult to maintain. This tension matters. If public services retreat and responsibility once again falls on people already doing large amounts of unpaid labor, “community care” can repeat gendered and racialized divisions of care. Readers should ask together: how do networks expand agency and interdependence? How are labor, compensation, and boundaries handled? Which needs remain public responsibilities? The author’s North American QTBIPOC organizing context is also not a universal template that can simply be transferred elsewhere.

For feminist readers, the book offers a practical complement. Start with FemRes’s Ten Principles of Disability Justice for a movement framework, then read it alongside Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip, bringing the theoretical idea of crip futures into conversation with organizing and care practices. Further references include the publisher’s page, the Wellcome Collection catalogue, and reviews by Lee and Whiddington-Sadlowski (Lee; Whiddington-Sadlowski).