Virtual Reading: CRIP KINSHIP by Shayda Kafai
@ Women & Children First Bookstore
Online
Opening Monday, November 15th, at 7PM
In collaboration with the Arts and Culture Project at Access Living and the Disability Culture Activistm Lab (DCAL), join us for a virtual reading and conversation with Dr. Shayda Kafai in celebration of the release of Crip Kinship. For this event, Kafai will be in conversation with seeley quest.
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS EVENT
This event will be held on Zoom. It will be recorded and uploaded to Women & Children First’s YouTube Channel for future viewings. Closed captioning and ASL interpretation will be provided throughout the event.
In recent years, disability activism has come into its own as a vital and necessary means to acknowledge the power and resilience of the disabled community, and to call out ableist culture wherever it appears.
Crip Kinship explores the art-activism of Sins Invalid, a San Francisco Bay Area-based performance project, and its radical imaginings of what disabled, queer, trans, and gender nonconforming bodyminds of color can do: how they can rewrite oppression, and how they can gift us with transformational lessons for our collective survival.
Grounded in their Disability Justice framework, Crip Kinship investigates the revolutionary survival teachings that disabled, queer of color community offers to all our bodyminds. From their focus on crip beauty and sexuality to manifesting digital kinship networks and crip-centric liberated zones, Sins Invalid empowers and moves us toward generating our collective liberation from our bodyminds outward.
Shayda Kafai (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Ethnic and Women’s Studies department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. As a queer, disabled, Mad femme of colour, she commits to practising the many ways we can reclaim our bodyminds from systems of oppression. To support this work as an educator-scholar, Shayda applies disability justice and collective care practices in the spaces she cultivates.
Shayda’s writing and speaking presentations focus on intersectional body politics, particularly on how bodies are constructed and how they hold the capacity for rebellion. From discussions of madness and disability to femme politics and crip art, Shayda works to reframe our most disempowered bodyminds as vehicles of change-making.
In honour of self-care and her communities, Shayda is also an artmaker and co-founder of CripFemmeCrafts with her wife, Amy. They make art that empowers all our bodyminds, particularly centring the magic and joy-making that comes from the wisdom and beauty of disabled, Fat bodyminds of colour.
seeley quest is a trans disabled performer, writer, facilitator, and environmentalist. Working in literary and body-based composition and curation, hir playscript “Crooked” is in At the Intersection of Disability and Drama, and work featured in Buddies in Bad Times’ Rhubarb Festival 2021. Not on social media, sie is at https://questletters.
Access Living is an independent living center for people with disabilities. Disability Culture Activism Lab (DCAL) is housed under the department of art therapy and counseling at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. DCAL is a platform for creative advocacy projects and disability allyship training. In partnership with Access Living’s Arts and Culture Project, DCAL provides teaching and hands-on learning guided by disability justice–a framework that examines disability in connection to other forms of oppressions and identities. Using a peer support and collective care model, disability community members and art therapy graduate students collaborate as disability culture makers for social change.
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Tags: Access Living, Chicago, CRIP KINSHIP, Disability Culture Activism Lab, Dr. Shayda Kafai, Edgewater, seeley quest, Virtual Reading: CRIP KINSHIP by Shayda Kafai, Women & Children First Bookstore
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