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.

The book is organized in three movements. “Disability Justice in the End Times” moves from disabled mutual aid and ordinary interdependence to grief, climate crisis, resistance, and collective dreaming. An interlude on “pod mapping,” contributed by Rebel Sidney Fayola Black Burnett, makes the network of people one can call on a subject in its own right. The author does not frame disabled people as superhuman survivors: mutual aid can be lifesaving and still exhausting, uneven, or under-resourced. It cannot substitute indefinitely for public services, and survival skills should not become another demand placed on people already navigating illness, access barriers, and precarity. In an interview, Piepzna-Samarasinha frames disabled wisdom as a resource for collective survival and shared leadership—not as a promise that disabled people will rescue everyone else.

The second movement turns to disability-justice arts: making art as a way to preserve stories, imagine freedom, and organize access rather than as a cultural extra. Its contents include questions for disability-justice art practice, an essay on autistic poetic forms, a sample access rider, and a chapter that asks what access requires of a book tour’s organizers. A reviewer’s account of the author’s discussion of a Sins Invalid performance gives one concrete illustration: flexible pacing, sensory space, captions, ASL interpretation, audio description, varied seating, and room for disabled pleasure are treated as part of the event’s design. This is the reviewer’s account of an example in the book, not independent reporting on the performance; nor is it a universal checklist. It shows how access changes participation and who can be recognized as artist, audience, and co-maker.

The final movement brings the future to the intimate scale of trust, conflict, home, memory, and pleasure. Its chapter titles move from “Disabled Secrets” and the realities of disability-justice groups to disabled homes as organizing spaces, an honor song for Stacey Park Milbern, and “Wild Disabled Joy.” This sequence resists two familiar reductions: disabled life as private tragedy, and disability justice as an emergency service that matters only in crisis. Pleasure, art, rest, grief, and interdependence belong to political life too. At the same time, a community is not automatically safe; attention to secrets and group dynamics is not proof that informal networks are free of ableism, abuse, or unequal labor. Nor should disabled organizers be expected to provide unpaid, endlessly available care because their work is politically valuable.

The book’s essayistic, intimate form is a strength and a limit. It offers situated knowledge and experiments rather than a universal policy program or systematic history of disability law. The publisher’s description and the Wellcome Collection contents record support this broad reading route; an author interview clarifies the book’s public framing, and chapter-level detail about the performance example is attributed to a Wordgathering review. Readers seeking legal history or comparative policy analysis will need other sources, and the North American QTBIPOC movement context should not be detached from its local histories. For a complementary account centered on care webs and collective access, continue with Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Read together, the books ask not only how to survive abandonment, but how to distribute access, labor, and pleasure without making care another hidden obligation imposed on marginalized people. See the publisher’s description.