Care at the End of the World: Health/Care Infrastructure and Disability Justice Life-Writing

This chapter considers disability life-writing and poetry that navigates the health/care infrastructural landscape of the 2010s, anchored by the passage in 2010 of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Looking to Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s 2019 poetry and performance text collection Tonguebreaker and Aurora Levins Morales’s 2013 essay and poetry collection Kindling: Writings on the Body, this chapter examines how radical crip-of-color writers negotiate disabled survival within and despite paltry health/care options while simultaneously dreaming of other configurations of care. It argues that Kindling and Tonguebreaker offer disability justice blueprints for health and care in an era of deprivation, in which care suggests not restoration and movement back toward the status quo but rather the cultivation of a lifeworld that centers disabled queers of color, makes room for sickness and grief, and generates real moments of joy.