The Disability Book Archive

[ID: A book cover. The background is light blue, with colourful pictures of butterflies, flowers and a house setting featured in the centre. Lower right centre of the image, a black figure in a long sleeved, billowing dress, holding a curved black walking stick in their right hand. Behind them, a drawing of a room with a table, chair, pink wall with a window, and a blank wall with an orange picture. Text on the book cover, from top to bottom, reads:
The title “Crip Kinship” in large black font at the top of the image,
The subtitle “The Disability Justice & Art Activism of Sins Invalid” in smaller black capitals, in the upper right corner of the image,
The authors name “Shayda Kafai” in medium black capitals in the lower right of the image, partially overlapping the figure in the dress. /end]

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Content Warning:

• Ableism
• Medical Trauma
• Racism
• Terminal Illness
• Transphobia
• Sexual Assault

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Summary:

The remarkable story of Sins Invalid, a performance project that centres queer disability justice.

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 colour can do: how they can rewrite oppression, and how they can gift us with transformational lessons for our collective survival.

Grounded in the disability justice framework, Crip Kinship investigates the revolutionary survival teachings that disabled, queer of colour 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.

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Notes:

Sins Invalid, founded 2005, is a nationally touring US based disability arts project, centralising disabled artists of colour and disabled artists on the LGBTQ+ spectrum.

“Sins Invalid is committed to social and economic justice for all people with disabilities…”- sinsinvalid.org, Homepage

You can find more information and a link to the Sins Invalid website here.

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Archivist Comments:

I’d never actually heard of Sins Invalid before thise book, so I had fun researching it for the entry. I’ve seen the book described as “part history, part manifesto” (of and relating to the Sins Invalid movement).

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