Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing
A feminist disabled re-imagining of care in a time of apocalypse, Jina B. Kim’s new book Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing (Duke University Press, 2025) examines the literary legacies of queer-of-color writer activists dreaming another way forward. In so doing, she demonstrates the necessity of disability politics in navigating contemporary U.S. crises of care. In this book talk, Kim will examine disability life-writing and poetry that navigates the turbulent healthcare landscape of the 2010s, from the debates preceding the passage of the Affordable Care Act to the Trump administration’s many chaotic attempts to diminish public healthcare. Looking to recent works by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Aurora Levins Morales, both queer-of-color activists in the Disability Justice movement, she demonstrates how these radical writers navigate the oppressive bureaucracies of the medical-industrial complex while simultaneously dreaming of other configurations of care.
What does care look like in the context of abandonment, apocalypse, and social isolation, when the state wants people to subsist on less and less? How do we reclaim, define, and practice care outside existing models offered by the state and medicine, in which care all too often exists on a continuum with control and abuse? She argues that Levins Morales and Piepzna-Samarasinha offer wild disability justice blueprints for health and care in an ongoing era of state deprivation, in which care does not suggest restoration of the status quo—the re-acquisition of a mythical norm—but the serious and sustained tending of a life-world that centers disabled queers-of-color, makes room for sickness and grief, and prioritizes joy.