Expression & Experience

This next selection contains six books, diverging from the academia texts of critical thought, this collection looks at artistic expression through poetry, artwork, song, fiction, personal essays and narratives. 

These books are rich in multitudes of artistic intent and storytelling. There is a diverse cast of authors and contributors, all coming together to share a common goal: creating. Creation is fundamental to so many identities, but especially those who live in the margins. This experience of being marginalized forces a position to constantly explain yourself and affirm your own existence in spite of a majority society telling you otherwise. These six pieces of literature do exactly that as they connect an identity and experience into creative expression.

These feature a wide range of subject matter, including imagined features, reflections of discrimination, navigation through discriminatory societies, queer and disabled joy, and art taking various forms in response and conjunction with a variety of disabilities. 

• QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology (2015) edited by Raymond Luczak features 48 writers creating fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and comics. QDA works with the community to feature intersectionality as a championing principle in the works included. This collection pulls no punches in its rawness and vulnerability in its centering of the body - with varying ways of delivering these experiences. 
• Pushing the Limits: Disabled Dykes Produce Culture (1996) edited by Shelley Tremain features 33 contributors with a collection of multi-media fictional works, personal narratives and essays, poems and songs, and artwork made by disabled dykes. It is reflective and intense in its delivery of experiences surrounding womanhood and the entanglement of ability, sexuality, family, race, class, ethnicity, and more. 
• Marvellous Grounds: Queer of Colour Formations in Toronto (2018) edited by Jin Haritaworn, Ghaida Moussa and Syrus Marcus Ware features the first of its kind collection of queer histories of Black, Indigenous, and racialized people mapped through queer urban maps and archives. This focuses on histories featuring art, activism, and personal accounts that have shaped Toronto. Chapter twelve of this collection, titled “Toronto Crip City: A Not So Brief, Incomplete Personal History of Some Disabled QTPOC Cultural Activism in Toronto, 1997-2015” narrows in on disability histories.
• Being Ace: An Anthology of Queer, Trans, Femme, and Disabled Stories of Asexual Love and Connection (2013) edited and illustrated by Madeline Dryer is a fictional anthology surrounding stories from a diverse range of authors identifying with asexuality. A few of the stories explicitly mention and explore disabled stories, such as Jas Brown’s “No Cure for Doubt” and Lara Ameen’s “The Hazards of Pressing Play”.
• Stairs and Whispers: D/Deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (2017) edited by Sandra Alland, Knairani Barokka, Daniel Sluman brings together an anthology of UK disabled and D/deaf poetics. This collection has poetry, essays, photos, and a unique collection of links that lead to accessible online videos and recordings. 

Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home (2015) by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a memoir follows her story of running away from America and ending up in Canada in 1996. In Canada, she discovered queer anarchopunk love and revolution while still dealing with the reasons that caused her to leave home in the first place. This memoir navigates the experience of a queer South Asian disabled woman and abuse survivor and how she dreams her way home. 

Fiction, art, and personal narratives anchor into something different than theory and study. Theory and study have a beautiful place in the world that allows for critical examination of a world built on systemic discrimination, and the arts complement that critique with responses of lived experiences. These lived experiences inform, inspire, and give the reasons to be critical and create theory - while also evoking empathy and seeking community.