The introduction to the 1981 anthology This Bridge Called My Back, coauthored by Chicana lesbian feminists Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (2015: xlvii), concludes with an act of inception: “The revolution begins at home.” Home, for Moraga and Anzaldúa, not only names a physical structure or a place of attachment, but also a practice of collaborative survival, of bridge-building, and of “not settling for less than freedom even in the most private aspect of our lives” (Moraga 2015: xli). And as I chewed on this roundtable's prompt, placing it alongside my own work on disability politics and US welfare reform, I began to further situate this dream of home within the material crises of housing and state care intensified by the Reagan administration, which had begun its deadly reorganization of state infrastructure at the time of Moraga and Anzaldúa's writing. Ten years after Ronald Reagan's first presidential election, sociologist Loïc Wacquant (2009: 159) notes that the respective budgets for public housing and prisons “had nearly reversed,” citing a $19 billion increase for penal maintenance and a $17 billion subtraction for housing. Such a reversal, Wacquant (2009: 160) writes, rendered “the construction of prisons . . . the country's main public housing program.” What does it mean, then, for these queer Chicana feminists to imagine home as the genesis of revolution during a time of accelerating resource deprivation, when stable, decent, and affordable housing was becoming less and less accessible?
Disabled writers and activists in both the rights and justice movements have taken up the paradox of home as both revolutionary promise and locus of material contradiction. Deinstitutionalization, which began in the 1950s and gained prominence in the 1970s, sought to move people with developmental and mental disabilities out of institutions, such as long-term psychiatric facilities or state-run hospitals.1 Dominant narratives of disability rights highlight the foundational role of the Independent Living Movement in the empowerment of people with disabilities, which includes the right to live in our communities with the necessary supports.2 Further, as the Disability Justice Culture Club put it in 2019, “disabled wisdom knows home is a holy place” (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2022: 263), and as disability justice writer-activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2022: 266) explained, “the right to have a place of your own where you can be as messy and uncombed and sad and weird-bodied as you want . . . is partly why so many of our disabled struggles have centered on home.”
Still: home, when placed in the context of disability, often invokes disabled misery and isolation; in the able-bodied imagination, we are homebound, bed-bound, wheelchair-bound. If queer people have been long positioned as “home's outsiders,” as Stephen Vider (2021: 11) so aptly put it, then disabled people have inversely been positioned as home's insiders—but to a pathological degree. Yet, despite being bound to home, home has become less and less bound to disabled people, who have been especially hard hit by the escalating US housing crisis (CHRT 2002). The Faircloth Amendment of 1998, which ended the use of federal funds toward the construction of new public housing, contributed to “a nationwide shortage of accessible and affordable housing for those who were eligible—affecting affordable independent living options for those with disabilities” (Rogers, Impink, and Ziegler 2023). Further, prolonged housing insecurity, as Craig Willse (2015: 2) has argued, is a profoundly disabling condition. After all, a house, Willse writes, is not only a material structure, but also a “technology for the organization and distribution of health, illness, and death.”
In my own research, I examine how disabled, feminist, and/or queer of color writers navigate these disabling infrastructural crises—such as the dismantling of affordable and accessible housing—while simultaneously dreaming of more and better arrangements of support. Home, for writers like Piepzna-Samarasinha, becomes the impetus to reimagine movement organizing altogether, as well as the imaginative parameters of what disabled living spaces entail. Rather than going the typical nonprofit route, Piepzna-Samarasinha (2022: 269) asks, what if we arranged movement-building around “creating more disabled homes” and “continuing to dream on and experiment with what disabled homes could be?” Like Anzaldúa and Moraga, Piepzna-Samarasinha believes that the (crip) revolution begins at home. And while the home and the bed have long been imagined as symbols of disabled immobility, my work demonstrates how these literary practices of infrastructural dreaming work to reframe the notion of freedom itself—as contingent upon, rather than distinct from, systems of collective support.
I register the shape and force of these literary interventions through an analytic I call a crip of color critique, which demonstrates how disability politics and aesthetics can interrupt dominant narratives about who deserves care (and what that care looks like). And it is through the crip of color framework that I will now briefly examine the possibilities afforded by queering (and cripping) domesticity. Broadly speaking, cripping domesticity continues the very queer work of defamiliarizing dominant scripts for intimacy, care, and kinship. It also demonstrates the very crip practice of understanding care labor as not only socially reproductive, but also creative and transformative—the work central to building the world we want to inhabit.
Cripping domesticity, then, both registers and denaturalizes the repressive calculus of support, dependency, and care upheld by the single-family home. This dominant structure and ideology dictate which needs are acceptable and who is expected to tend to them. That is, when organized around the wifely labor of caring for a (white, middle-class) husband and children, the home becomes an object of sentimental attachment. However, when inhabited by personal care attendants supporting disabled people, the home is refashioned as a place of pity and immiseration. Disabled culture workers and activists, such as Alice Wong, Stacey Park Milbern, and Kennedy Healy, have refused this set of associations through their narrative and community-building projects that center crip homemaking. In pieces such as “Care during COVID: A Photo Essay on Interdependence” (Molkentin and Healy 2022) and Alice Wong's (2022) recent autobiography Year of the Tiger: An Activist's Life, these culture workers frame often-stigmatized relations of care (e.g., with a personal care assistant, a member of your care web, or a parent after the point of reaching adulthood) as pleasurable and life-giving rather than inherently sad, sterile, or even shameful.
Cripping domesticity would further involve reimagining the form and function of the home's built environment, outfitting it with couches, access equipment, and all the things that make one's crip life enjoyable. It would highlight housing access as a key disability issue, and it would interrupt pro-austerity belief systems around who deserves a home (Berne et al. 2018). Finally, it would mean understanding home work as change-making work, expanding our movement imagination beyond the public sphere of protests and marches to the “bed activism” theorized and practiced by crip luminaries like Johanna Hedva (2016), Akemi Nishida (2022), and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018). As these culture workers show us, the (crip) revolution does not only begin at home; it lives there too.
Notes
For more on the history and reasoning behind deinstitutionalization, see Goffman (1961) and Ben-Moshe (2020).
For more on the Independent Living Movement, see Shapiro (1994), Heumann (2021), and Hayman (2019).
