It's hard for me to sum up how life-changing it's been to be a part of Sins Invalid http://www.sinsinvalid.org over the past two years. What can I say- there's very few shows by and about crips/disabled folks talking about sex, that centers queer and trans people of color working for social justice, that goes deep about our bodies, racism, desire, trauma, colonialism, resistance and love. Like almost none. I wish this wasn't true. And it won't always be true. We'll grow and make more.
But I'm not just celebrating Sins Invalid because in a world with a scarcity model for queer of color centered disabled storytelling. I'm celebrating it because three shows ago, in 2008, I took myself to the show and cried through the whole thing.And I've had many friends and comrades do the same thing. Cried not out of sentiment, or because the whole show is so fucking sad, but out of recognition and relief and having ones mind blown and healed.
Sins was one of the first places where I saw performance by and for QTPOC with disabilities that hit me on a really deep level. When Patty's voiceover asked, as Maori wheelchair dancer Rodney Bell was pulled in his wheelchair thirty feet above stage, if we frightened you, and said that we were coming home, I shook.
Sins Invalid is one place where disability justice is being born. We are queer and trans POC crips who believe in social justice making art about embodiment as a means of building the community we need. One thing we came up with, in the Creating Collective Access (http://creatingcollectiveaccess.wordpress.com/) pod this summer in Detroit, was that DJ is to the mainstream disability rights movement as the environmental justice movement is to the mainstream environmental movement. DJ is about looking at disability as everywhere- as about the toxins in our neighborhoods, reservations and colonized lands, the work accidents and RSI and immune deficiency diseases, the disability so normalized in POC communities we don't even name it- and about knowing that it is both impossible in our queer/brown/crip lives to not look at race, class, gender and sex while we look at ablism, and that our lives are full of deep brilliance and insight about organizing models, sustainability, desire and movement building strategies.
Whether you're disabled or not, whether you are knee-deep in disability justice or just starting to think about how ablism, sustainability and crip brilliance affect your politics and your life, please come.
This year our show dives deep into questions about whose bodies get to fuck, love and survive- diving into stories of eugenics, forced sterilizations, the Tuskegee syphilis 'experiments' and other ways our bodies have been policed and controlled, and also the resistance of queer/of color disabled freedom fighters like Harriet Tubman and our bodies as we strip, transform trauma and fly towards freedom and memory.
We also dive into questions about what love, sex and desire really look like in our lives as disabled folks. I'm proud to be presenting three interconnected pieces as part of my and Ellery Russian's "Crip Sex Moments" and how we really do it as disabled folks. I've been working on them since last year and am really proud to be sharing this work. PS: It's also gonna be a hot show, as in sexy.
Please come out to one of the best shows I know. Please also know that we really mean it when we say "no one turned away for lack of funds." The show is expensive because we do a three-day run and pay for ASL, visual describers and a whole ton of access for performers and attendees, but we all are united in wanting folks to get there no matter how much you have in your pocket. No one will be hassled at the door if you don't have funds to pay. There are also copious volunteer opportunities.
And in the meantime, as a teaser, I give you part 3 of my performance from last year's Sins, Dirty River, that includes the famous "masturbating for pain control while on Facebook" bit.
Except Mercury in Retrograde has made it so that I have not been able to successfully embed the Youtube clip in the last twenty minutes of trying on this, so here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/CripJustice#p/a/u/0/tj9EeQsh4Lk
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