Eeeeh-reader

This digital reader was compiled for you by curator and writer Iarlaith Ní Fheorais. She is the author of the free online resource Access Toolkit for Artworkers and will present during the preliminary programme on February 5. Staff and team will further feed this reader with new content every Wednesday afternoon.

Content warning: medical violence, medical racism, state violence, ableism, colonialism and genocide.

Introduction by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais
Access work can be considered a tradition in many ways; an iterative process of collective legacy building, referencing and building upon knowledge over time, honouring the work that has come before. Sara Ahmed states in "The Cultural Politics of Emotion" that 'To name one’s archive is a perilous matter; it can suggest that these texts ‘belong’ together and that the belonging is a mark of one’s presence.' (Ahmed, 2014, 14) With that in mind, through the "Radical Accessibility" e-reader, I will trace one of those many lineages. An archive that maps out the route that has guided me towards a politics of access, disability justice and abolition.

This reader begins with the definition of ableism, formulated by Talila ‘TL’ Lewis in community with Black disabled people identifying how ableism is constructed through anti-Blackness, racism, colonialism, and imperialism and how ableism shows up in the world. From this position, the reader includes key texts by members of the queer disabled people of colour performance project from the Bay Area Sins Invalid such as Mia Mingus who were key in establishing the Disability Justice movement.

This continues into several access toolkits that provide the practical knowledge of how to address ableism materially, including the foundational Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice; Carolyn Lazard.

Informed by how ableism acts as a white supremacist, imperial agent of capital, Black Disability Politics by Sami Schalk shares accounts for how ableism is instrumental in committing violence against disabled and non-disabled racialized people and crucially chronicles the role of the Black Panther Party in resisting medical violence and psychiatric abuse by carceral institutions, and grassroots initiatives working in areas of Black women's health and HIV/AIDS.

Complimentary to Schalk’s writing is Jasbir K. Puar’s "The Right to Maim", which accounts for the debilitating violence of capitalism and the state, with the urgent essay “Will Not Let Die” Debilitation and Inhuman Biopolitics in Palestine" outlining how Israel uses violences to produce and manage disabled populations in Palestine as a regime of biopolitical control. Both of these texts clearly position disability justice as a movement inseparable from anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, abolition and racial restitution.

The reader concludes with two artworks, including Carolyn Lazard "Pre-Existing Condition" (2019) and "In My Own Language" (2007) by Mel Braggs which documents Braggs 'native language', reflecting on personhood, intelligence, language and what gets considered communication which are crucial questions when working through access.

Please click the links below!