Queer of Color/Trans of Color Conversations: Jina B. Kim

How can disability justice politics and aesthetics provide imaginative blueprints for navigating contemporary crises of care? This talk addresses this question by turning to disability justice life-writing that navigates the U.S. health/ care infrastructural landscape of the 2010s, with a particular focus on the recent work of disability justice writer-activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha. Looking at Tonguebreaker (2019) and Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (2018), I demonstrate how Piepzna-Samarasinha draws upon the radical queer disability imagination to envision a future that is "cripped the fuck out," proposing alternate care infrastructures and theories as starting points for a world where everyone gets enough.

Jina B. Kim is Assistant Professor of English and the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. Her research and teaching interests emerge from the intersection of critical disability studies, feminist-of-color/ queer-of-color critique, and contemporary ethnic U.S. literature. Her manuscript-in-progress is titled Dreaming of Infrastructure: Crip of Color Writing after the US Welfare State, and it examines women and queer of color writing in the afterlife of 1996 US welfare reform. Her work has appeared in Signs, Social Text, American Quarterly, Disability Studies Quarterly, The Asian American Literary Review, and Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association.