Disabled Joy Quotes

“There’s something about claiming a body you’ve been taught to despise, told it’s a broken toy that should be hidden from public space, that makes it a courageous and radical act to have a good goddamn time unapologetically taking up as much space as possible… It is freedom work, insisting that we deserve our roses, lilies, peoples, jasmine, orgasms, fresh water when we are still here—and that joy and pleasure are key parts of what both helps us make the disabled world-to-come we are dreaming of now, in this moment, and what helps us keep going when the work is hard and heartbreaking.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs

“It’s never just Hard, Activist Work. It’s disabled pleasure. It’s wild disabled joy. It’s us on the dance floor, throwing our heads back laughing. It’s the permission, the utter permission to be as we are. It’s the ways we create pleasure to both make the work sweeter and more accessible—pleasure as a form of access. It’s a lot easier to get people to sign up for the long struggle of changing the world if we have fun and disabled joy while we do it.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs

“Crip writing is a piece of driftwood I grabbed and hung on to that stopped me from going under, this pandemic two years when everyone died, my best, most-needed beloveds, the ones the world needed the most. By crip writing I mean the crip poetry and writing I read, from PDF online zines and Twitter and blogs and Instagram and more and more and more books every year we made with all our world-changing crip-lit labor. I mean writing it to make meaning out of the rage and empty, the crip bitter and fried of our friends being stolen from us. I mean writing that saves our lives and makes new ones.

Every line I write is a nocked arrow, the string pulled back, the exhale of release, the deep c*nt feeling of yes as it hits the mark, as it goes farther than we have before, to the place we knew we needed named. Alexis Pauline Gumbs once wrote, "Our future deserves a present where our truths were written," and we are writing down our crip everyday, and out of that, writing our future.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs