Crip News v.84

Happy Pride, new works, calls, and events.

Jun 05, 2023

Happy LGBTQ+ Pride

A drag queen walks the runway on RuPaul’s Drag Race dressed as an ethereal magic mushroom. She looks at her hands like she’s tripping. — Queercrip legend **Willow Pill**.

Pride 2023 is another beautiful conundrum. Corporations continue to co-opt the rage that activated the Stonewall uprisings amid a wave of anti-queer and anti-trans legislation across the U.S. But inside queer communities, it’s a time to recognize the life-saving work of our chosen families. It’s also a time to remember that disabled queers started the deep work of throwing off stigma and shame. Through the weirdness and complexity, happy pride!

New Works

London Ontario Media Arts Association (LOMAA) is closing out its spring 2023 online performance series “Virtual Encounters” with a new work by Jerron Herman called Lax.vid, “a digital musing on the athletic and dissembling conditions of rest. Cast in a dream-like schism between reality and hyperreality, a figure navigates an embodied and digital memory of comfort, using his screen as a portal, asking us what it takes to catch some zzzz’s.”

The video from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s 2023 Fordham Distinguished Lecture on Disability is out.
Kickstart’s ACCESSFest 2023 concluded yesterday in Vancouver, featuring an array of collaborations and events.

Touretteshero’s Burnt Out in Biscuit Land, “blending film, live performance and conversation,” comes to Turner Contemporary in Margate, U.K. this week.
ASL artist Brandon Kazen-Maddox was recently featured in ABC 7 New York’s Storytellers Spotlight for Pride month.
The Australian premiere of Jellyfish by Ben Weatherill, “a contemporary love story and a tender exploration of what living with disability really entails,” will take place this week at New Theater in Newtown.
The New Yorker recently published “The Case that Being Poor and Black is Bad for Your Health” by Lauren Michele Jackson, a review of Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society by Arline T. Geronimus.
Another fabulous issue of Disability Debrief is out: “A just transition for disabled people” by Áine Kelly-Costello.

CALLS

The People’s CDC is organizing a campaign to overwhelm the U.S. Federal Register with comments encouraging Medicare & Medicaid to include COVID in its Hospital-Acquired Condition (HAC) Reduction Program and/or its Value-Based Purchasing Program. More here.
The American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) is hiring an Events and Logistics Coordinator, Programs Coordinator, Fall Internship Program Assistant, and Chief Operating Officer. More here.

EVENTS

In large black letters, Cultivating Access Ecologies. (2023 is sideways, hiding underneath.) The image has a lot of vibrant neon colors, including blocks of bright green. There are 4 features that represent 4 sacred elements: a liquid surface mid-splash right after a droplet lands (water), a chunk of a concrete curb displaced by activists with sledgehammers in Denver 1978 (earth), a glitchy power on/off symbol (fire), and, in the background of the image, HEPA filters (air). The water and the concrete images became brushes, creating streaking patterns that paint the canvas.

Access Worlding: An Inventory Workshop

Friday, June 16, 5:30 - 7pm ET, in-person at Lincoln Center, on Zoom, and in a virtual world

Access ecologies invite us to discover and expand. They involve intentional strategies for being with each other and our surroundings. At this kickoff event for the Cultivating Access Ecologies series, we will convene with artists and organizers—remotely and in-person—for a participatory workshop to document and imagine how we build worlds with accessibility. What magic will emerge when we start with access, when we dance at the boundaries between us? Join us to make an inventory of the tools we have and the tools we need.

Kinetic Light LAB Hangout

Thursday, June 8, 2 - 3pm ET, on Zoom

LAB hangouts are specifically for folks who identity with or who have personal experience with disability, including but not limited to those who identify as chronically ill, neurodiverse, with learning or intellectual disabilities, MAD, Deaf/deaf/HOH, Blind, low vision and on. This cross-disability space welcomes all who are unsure or who might not yet identify with disability identity and culture.

A dark purple banner on bright yellow background reads “Do No Harm: Criminalization through Medical Care.” Criminalization of reproductive autonomy (purple cloud): Due to colonization, racism, eugenics, ableism, heterosexual-patriarchy and capitalism. Participation in criminalization (dark purple rectangle): (1) Criminalizing non-compliance (2) Collaborating with the state: punishment under guise of care or research (3) Increasing risk of criminalization. Criminalization through accessing medical care (purple cloud): pregnant people, disabled folks, drug users, parents, migrants, people in sex trades, LGBTQ people. Principles (light purple rectangle): (1) Learn from most impacted (2) End medically unnecessary drug testing (3) End mandatory reporting (4) End practice of supporting prosecution in HIV criminalization cases (5) End practice of calling police for fraudulent IDs (6) End police and ICE presences (7) Stop calling law enforcement on folks with unmet mental health needs (8) Stop providing substandard and or violative care in jails, prisons, detention facilities (9 and 10) Stop supporting prosecution (11) Stop punishing other providers (12) Form relationships, defend self-care, protect, welcome, advocate. Light purple flag reads “APHA Resolultion Passed” with [SITE] endingpolice.com written over it. Underneath it reads “Policing and incarceration are public health issues. Abolition is evidence-based.” Beyond do no harm (large dark purple square): Medical providers and public health professionals recommit to caring for people by refusing to participate in criminalization.

13 Ways to Resist the Medical-Industrial Complex

Thursday, June 8, 8 - 10am ET, on Zoom

Please join Rise, Mordecai and the Health Justice Commons community to welcome Maria and Fabián from Interrupting Criminalization’s Beyond Do No Harm Project. Maria and Fabián will share information on Beyond Do No Harm’s 13 Principles for supporting peoples’ agency and disrupting the criminalization of our communities and our healthcare workers accomplices. With the MIC being increasingly used by the far right to target trans youth, and criminalize our communities and healthcare workers for providing gender-affirming and reproductive justice centered care, there’s no better time than now to come together to strategize our resistance and dreamstorm our next actions. This is a gathering for and by rad healers and healthcare workers, Disability Justice activists, organizers, and community members who are engaged in the work of transforming healthcare systems and creating alternatives. We include the daily work of survival as a form of rebellion for us as chronically ill, neurodivergent, Mad, and disabled people. Our survival is a source of deep wisdom!

Graphic with bright blue background with text: ""Care Writes: Exploring the Labor of Love - A Black disabled-led virtual writing workshop by Octavia's Chariot. No experience required! - Monday June 19 10am-12pm PST Google Meet - Register at tinyurl.com/carewrites - ASL + auto captioning". The title, "Care Writes" is at the top in large lowercase yellow text with a thin squiggly line cutting through the two words. There are little yellow stars and a few more dark green squiggly lines. There's a white box in the lower third of the image with dark green text.

Care Writes: Exploring the Labor of Love - A Black disabled-led virtual writing workshop by Octavia's Chariot

Monday, June 19, 1 - 3pm ET, on Google Meet

Octavia’s Chariot offers a nurturing space for participants to delve into the art of writing, regardless of their previous experience, while focusing on the topic of care, love, labor, and capacity as disabled people. Participants will also be given the opportunity to receive feedback on their work/ideas and engage in conversation in whichever ways are comfortable for them (i.e. chat, Padlet, audio, or on camera).