A LIBRARIAN’S ORIENTATION
What this book explores
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha gathers essays, practical experiments, and movement knowledge from queer and trans disabled communities of color. The book develops ideas including care webs, access intimacy, collective access, mutual aid, disability justice, and sustainable organizing while naming scarcity, burnout, abuse, and unequal care labor.
EDITORIAL NOTE
Why it’s in the Library
It shifts care from private virtue or professional service toward collective survival and political practice shaped by disabled people. Travelers can encounter community knowledge that institutions often overlook and ask who receives care, who performs it, and what access changes. Its Library role is movement-grounded learning, never extraction of strategies while leaving redistribution and relationship untouched.
Good starting place if…
You want first-person disability-justice thinking about care webs, access intimacy, mutual aid, organizing, burnout, and collective survival.
Know before you begin…
The essays include illness, trauma, abuse, poverty, medical neglect, racism, ableism, and movement conflict. They arise from particular queer, trans, disabled, and racialized communities rather than a universal care model. Nondisabled readers should not appropriate community practices as productivity techniques or expect disabled people to provide unpaid interpretation and implementation.