The Future Is Disabled

Written through two years of pandemic isolation, The Future Is Disabled gathers prophecies, love notes, mourning songs, organizing reflections, and survival practices addressed especially to disabled queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and people-of-color communities. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha records mass death and medical abandonment without making disabled people symbols of despair. The book asks what changes when disability is understood not as a minority exception but as an expanding condition of collective life under pandemics, fascism, climate crisis, and austerity. Its answer begins with the knowledge disabled people already use to keep one another alive.

Mutual aid, access intimacy, crip time, online community, care webs, grief rituals, and disabled family-making appear as political technologies. Piepzna-Samarasinha refuses the romantic claim that marginalized communities can endlessly compensate for a state that abandons them: mutual aid can be lifesaving and still exhausting, uneven, and under-resourced. The feminist importance of this account lies in its rejection of care as naturally feminine, private, or limitless. Care is infrastructure, skill, conflict, and collective design. Disabled joy and pleasure are equally important because a movement organized only around emergency can reproduce the belief that disabled life is valuable solely when it demonstrates resilience.

The book’s prophetic, intimate form does not offer a universal policy program, and readers seeking a systematic history of disability law will need other texts. Its “future” is deliberately plural and unfinished, rooted in QTBIPOC experience rather than a generic disabled subject. For FemRes, this situated voice is the point. The book challenges feminist movements to stop treating access as a late accommodation and instead design organizing, technology, kinship, and public life around fluctuating capacity from the beginning. A disabled future is not a catastrophe to prevent; it is a demand to build worlds where dependence, grief, survival, and pleasure are shared without disposability.