 Okay, welcome everyone. Welcome, welcome, welcome to all the people that are still joining us. Thank you. And I think we are about ready somehow I've lost my clock but I think it is time to get started. Okay, cool. Thank you. Thanks for your patience everyone. And thank you so much for joining us this afternoon for our very special program featuring Shadek if I and Zena Sharman discussing their new books. Crip kinship and the care we dream of. I'm Kevin darling, my pronouns are he him. And I'm the LGBTQIA center librarian from the San Francisco public library. And before I introduce our guests, I will start us off with a land acknowledgement and a few brief announcements. And please check the chat box for any and all links you might want from today's program. And I read the land acknowledgement. The San Francisco public library acknowledges that we occupy the unseated ancestral homeland of the raw mutish alone peoples, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco peninsula. We recognize that the raw mutish alone understand the interconnected connectedness of all things, and have maintained harmony with nature for millennia. We honor the raw mutish alone peoples for their enduring commitment to war rep mother earth, as the indigenous protectors of this land and in accordance with their traditions, the raw mutish alone, I've never seated, lost, nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place, as well as for all peoples who reside in their traditional territory. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples, and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the raw mutish community. We recognize that to respectfully honor raw mutish peoples, we must embrace and collaborate, meaningfully to record indigenous knowledge in how we care for San Francisco, and all its people. And just briefly, I want to let you know about the James C. Hormel, LGBTQIA Center, which is the gateway to the library's broader collections documenting LGBTQIA history and culture with a special emphasis on the San Francisco Bay Area. Our reading room is located on the third floor of the main library, and our archival collections are held on the sixth floor in the San Francisco History Center. We have approximately 10,000 books and 200 archival collections, and much more. We also host public programs such as this one. Please sign up for our e-newsletter to stay up to date on all that we are doing. And we have a link for that in the chat. And just to let you know about our next public program on Tuesday, March 15th at 6pm in the main library's Greta Auditorium. We will host a panel discussion. Author Robin Lowey moderates a conversation with Olga Talamante, Crystal Jang, and Carla Trujillo. Three women featured among the 30 lesbian game changers from the book by the same name. And that program will be streamed online as well. And also on March 12th, our new exhibition on the Cockettes, Acid Drag and Sexual Anarchy opens in the Hormel Center. It's a celebration of the avant-garde psychedelic hippie theater troops 50th anniversary. In conjunction with original member, they had Houser's newly published pictorial history by the same title. And I would like to thank the Green Arcade Bookstore for cosponsoring today's program. They are a bookstore in San Francisco specializing in San Francisco and California history, the built in natural environment, politics and social justice and much more. They are located at 1680 Market Street. You can buy the books through their online store and we have the link for that as well. If you still have an audience Q&A towards the end of the program, please use the Q&A feature, or I'm sorry please use the chat box to ask your question or signal us however you can to let us know that you have a question. Okay, on with the show, I will now introduce our guests. Today 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 film of color, she commits to practicing the many ways we can reclaim our body minds from systems of oppression. As an educator scholar, Shada applies disability justice and collective care practices in the spaces she cultivates. Crip kinship is her first book. Crip kinship explores the art activism of sins invalid. In San Francisco Bay Area based performance project, and its radical imaginings of what disabled queer trans and gender non conforming body minds of color can do. How they can rewrite oppression and how they can gift us with transformational lessons for our collective survival. In the disability justice framework, Crip kinship investigates the revolutionary survival teachings that disabled queer of color community offers to all our body minds. This woman is a writer speaker strategist and LGBTQ plus health advocate. She's the author of three books, including the care we dream of liberatory and transformative approaches to LGBTQ plus health. Xena edited the Lambda literary award winning anthology the remedy queer and trans voices on health and health care. Her passion for LGBTQ plus health to audiences of health care providers, students, and community members at universities and conferences across North America. The care we dream of is not quite an essay collection and not quite an anthology. It's a it's a hybrid kind of book that we've together the authors essays on topics like querying health and healing, transforming the health system kinship aging and death alongside stories poetry and non fiction pieces by a diverse group of LGBTQ plus writers. Both of these empowering and transformative books are right on time, and I can't wait for us to get into this conversation. So I will now turn it over to Shada and Xena. Thank you. This is the part we didn't rehearse. I know we figured out in the chat that I'm going to read first Shada was there anything you wanted to say by way of welcome introduction. Just I am so overjoyed my anxiety is like slowly lessening because it's begun and I'm just so grateful to be in this space. Kevin thank you for that introduction. Xena would you like to start with just image description. Land acknowledgement. Yeah, I'm happy to offer that. And I'm going to say this out loud Shada so we can not if this works for you all that would it work with you if I do my image description and my land acknowledgement and then read and then hand over to you. And then you'll do the same or do you want to do our image descriptions and land acknowledgments first and then read. So let's do that. Let's do the second option. That'll be, that'll be easier for me to track to. I am so glad to be here. Hi everyone, my name is Xena, and I am coming to you from unseated quits and people's territories here in a land colonially known as Duncan British Columbia. My family just recently moved to and I'm feeling really grateful to be in this space with all of you and experiencing my first spring in the abundance and generosity of these lands that I'm just getting to come into relationship with and parent on and preparing to welcome new babies into my family as well. So, grateful to be in this space in this moment, virtually with all of you connecting in community to offer a visual image description. I am a white person of Scottish and Irish ancestry with pale peachy kind of skin. I am wearing a hot pink lipstick and a leopard print onesie very much in honor of being in fem space with Shada. I have curly silver hair that goes to my chin, and a pair of gold wire brimmed kind of cat eye shaped glasses, and the space behind me you can see a bookshelf full of books, including many books on disability justice, and an art print that says keep growing, keep learning. Beautiful. I love that shout out to them this. So yes, we're going to definitely come back there. Hello, lovely people. My name is Shada. I am coming to you from the unceded lands of the Keech Gabberlino people. Colonely known as the Los Angeles Basin San Gabriel valleys. I am sitting outdoors today, which I feel very fortunate to be able to do. It's sunny here, you might hear birds in the background. I am a Middle Eastern fem with olive skin. My uncle is adjusting chairs. So I'm also living in a shared space. I have short black hair with bangs that go to the side. I'm wearing like a bright moth pink lipstick. I have these earrings that are blue. It looks like a butterfly wing but it's not a real butterfly wing. And they catch the light. I'm wearing a black tank top and a white long sleeve shirt. And for my background, I'm in an indoor patio space. There is a beige shelf behind me and a robust happy plant baby in the back. Shall we shift to the joy of excerpts from each of our lovely books? Yeah, that sounds great. We've had very deep exchanges about the shared themes in our book. And what we haven't done is actually figured out a plan for this. And that feels exactly right. So thank you for being with us as we figure it out in real time. And I also want to say I was so excited about Kripkinship from the moment I heard that this book was going to be published. So I waited for it with such anticipation and I'm really lucky just by coincidence. I mean, in the sense that that that is kind of not exactly what brought us into relationship. Jada and I share a publisher. We work with Arsenal called Press, which is a peer run independent press here in Canada. And so from the moment I saw Kripkinship in the forthcoming books in their catalog, I was just thrilled that the book was going to be was being written and was going to come out. And this was such a joy to read and engage with and just such strong resonance between our work. So really looking forward to being in conversation and to set the scene, we'll just read briefly from both of our books. So I'm going to read to you an introduction, part of the introduction from the Care Read Dream of just one thing to know about this book is every plant on the cover here. So this is a report by Thierry Jung. They're all plants that are among the first in this bio region to grow back after a forest fire. So this idea of what do we regrow in the ruins of old things and systems that need to be destroyed in order to be transformed. So, maybe bring that spirit, that spirit of regeneration of transformation. This book began from a question. What if queer and trans people loved going to the doctor? Questions can be a portal into possibilities we hadn't yet imagined this deceptively simple question. What if queer and trans people loved going to the doctor was a kind of portal for me, because of how it gestured toward an audaciously different set of conditions from the ones we're in now. If you ask other queer and trans people this question, they usually laugh, roll their eyes, or make a face that tells me just how unfathomable the idea of loving going to the doctor is to them. But then something changes. As they contemplate what it would mean to feel this way, their facial expression shift. Their eyes light up, and their bodies relax a little. Because mind does too. There's something potent about this moment of shared imagine. Even if we are picturing the same thing. Think about it. What if you loved going to the doctor? I'm curious. What's the first thing that comes to mind when you contemplate this question? How does it feel in your body? Maybe you're already rolling your eyes at me, or you instinctively put up a shield to protect yourself from potential harm. Sit with this question for a moment longer, if you can. What kinds of possibilities begin to unfold for you as you let yourself imagine what it would take to be able to answer yes. When I asked myself this question, it led me to other questions. What if queer and trans people had the resources we needed to create and sustain our own community-led forms of care and healing in ways that are expansively available to everyone who wants them? What if we could always trust in getting healthcare that felt good, accessible, and even pleasurable, wherever and whenever we needed it? What if it felt safe enough to bring our whole selves into the process? What if healthcare felt healing and helped us flourish? What if all healthcare providers and healers genuinely honored and valued queer and trans people, worked collaboratively with us and trusted in our expert knowledge of our own bodies? What if health and healing were widely understood not as individual responsibilities, but as processes that happen collectively in communities? What if all healthcare and healing was built on a foundation of anti-racism and disability justice? What if the care we received was rooted in a commitment to our liberation and the liberation of all people? What if? This book is about finding our way toward being able to answer yes to these questions while reckoning with how and why the health system is in serving us and our communities. It's an invitation to practice dreaming beyond this system by imagining more liberatory and transformative approaches to LGBTQ plus health. When I say health, I don't mean the limiting ableist and judgment laden way this word often gets used. This isn't a book that asks you to quote unquote, make healthy choices or conform to a normative ideal of health. Rather, I'm interested in reaching back to the roots of the word health, which invoke wholeness, healing, happiness, safety, and sacredness. Sociologist Bobby Harrow defines liberation as the practice of love, a love big enough to encompass all society and active enough to transform it. To me, liberatory health care means conspiring to change a fundamentally harmful system in ways that center the leadership needs and priorities of the people in our communities who bear the brunt of systemic oppression. It sometimes means divesting from the health system altogether and creating something different. This isn't about quick fixes or easily measurable outcomes. It's an everyday commitment sustained over time. As Dean Spade reminds us, this kind of work is about practice and process, rather than arrival at a singular point of liberation. To transform is to change. It is to bring creativity, imagination and the full force of our dreams to these changes. It is a reminder we can dream differently and expect more. At its heart, the care we dream of is a spell of transformation. This book is a calling out, a calling in and a call to action. It is a refusal and antidote and a holding to account. It is a perversion and a space of infinite possibilities. It's an offering to my queer and trans ancestors and the descendants will come after us. The care we dream of is both a loving invitation and an urgent demand to leave no one behind as we dream a more liberated future. Thank you so much for reading that portion. I know one of the things we're going to do later is share the abundance of like post-its that we marked each other's texts up with. But I just want to share how much I appreciate and loved the poetry of your book and I read so much of it out loud. So I'm really grateful that you're starting. You started us off with that. This excerpt is also from the introduction. And I wanted to just share the artist. The artist who did the cover art is Ka Yong-ni. I put a link to their website in the chat as well. So if you all aren't familiar with their amazing art and mural work, you can follow them. So the introduction starts with a quote with an offering from Access Centered Movement. You are not too sick, too disabled, too sad, too crazy, too ugly, too fat or too weird. We live in a white supremacist, patriarchal, ableist culture that values oppressive standards for the sake of centralizing power and making profit. Our ostracism is a result of this system that demonizes difference and not a reflection of your worth, value, ability to be loved, etc. You are not the problem. You are perfect. This book is a love letter, an abundant offering written out of need. Need communicates, says disabled communities have wisdom, says we survive true when we declare and co-create a world that honors us, a world where we are never too much. Need says persistence, says Crip magic, says now. I lean into this exploration of need for all of us, but especially for the disabled, Crip, chronically ill, mad community who are also also queer and gender nonconforming or transgender. Also people of color. Also the incarcerated many, the immigrant many, all of us also. I'm in this book because my own disabled mad queer fem of color body mind needs to remember that ours is a legacy of resistance and revolution. Even as we live in systemic oppression. We gather and manifest liberatory practices. We always have enabled queer of color body minds confront erasure and alienation. We actively revise the reductive narrative that we are inherently too damaged or too broken that we are undeserving of celebration joy and beauty. For those of us who have been told otherwise, or who might never have had access to our queer Crip stories sins invalid exists as a tether, rooting us back to ourselves. In their creation in 2006, the San Francisco Bay Area based performance project provides the community disability justice informed evenings of multidisciplinary art workshops and educational trainings that center the community of disabled queer gender nonconforming and trans artists activists of color. Crip kinship explores their work and demonstrates how all our body minds communities and movements can benefit from their resilient disabled queer of color future As I sit at my desk thinking about community. I pull a card from Christie Rhodes next world tarot. Christie is a Cuban American queer fem punk singer and artist activist. The card I pull to guide the writing of this introduction is the king of cups, although it is not depicted as a white man on a throne. For Christie, the king of cups is a brown fem with long flowing hair. She sits on a wheelchair wearing comfortable loose fitting purple pants and olive t shirt and a peacock feather tucked behind her ear. She brings with her quote, awareness of logic, while maintaining a soft open heart. With her call for balance. She invites sister harness collected rage and unconditional love and quote. Crip kinship manifests a present moment of collected rage and unconditional love for all our body minds. Led by the generational communal knowledges of disabled queer of color communities. In this present moment, all our collective needs are met. Regardless of how frequently ableism, racism, cis heteropatriarchy and all the systems of oppression tell us to wait, tell us later, or tell us never. Dear reader. This moment is not solely aspirational. Since invalid reminds us that it is happening in our communities in slow, messy, poignant and nuanced ways. It is happening because the most marginalized of us have together willed it, given time to it and fed it with collected rage and unconditional love. It is called disability justice, and it is the liberatory framework. Since invalid uses to move us toward our collective future. I offer since invalid and their strategies for living and thriving in this world. This is medicine for a contemporary moment that is precarious and that has left us exhausted and experiencing an unrivaled instability. Oh, Anissa, thank you for putting the link to next world tarot. We actually pulled a card and did a reading for for the room before y'all came and joined us. I have to say, you know, just in the in the rereading of these intros, I'm so excited and honored about the communal connections that are being made between these two texts, and I'm wondering if in many ways with that opening question that you offered us. I wonder if we can maybe start by talking about how both of these works are offering dreaming as a way toward arriving at a at a liberatory framework or liberatory movement. Yeah, I know that was like one of the themes that was really connecting for both of us as something that revealed itself in both in both books. Absolutely. And I'm thinking about when I was first reading krypton ship and lying in my bed with my little rainbow sticky tabs beside me and just marking page after page, and really feeling that that resonance. And I'm looking down because I know Shada you and I exchanged some some notes on these shares and I'm thinking about how you talked about the idea of dreams as a survival tool as portals where we can enter to create change. And as you write in this idea of imagination as movement toward liberation and that felt really resonant with certainly the work that I know I was trying to do with the carry dream of which was a book that I started working on before the pandemic, which did most of my work on during the pandemic and it was a time that really forced me to reckon I think with a lot of the mental models I had been given about what is possible for for health care for health for healing. I'm so excited with with a number of years of purposeful really studying disability justice and thinking about how much that actually really transformed my understanding of what's possible. And that was work I was doing and learning I was doing just in my own time, you know, not not for my job I mean I have a day job it's it's writing is something I do as a passion and as an active service for our communities but it was about sort of thinking with disability justice and thinking with abolition as well and how that actually enables me and us and others to change the frame and go beyond the notion of a reformist kind of reform where we get to just tinker around the edges of horrifically violent systems and make them just a little bit less terrible, but that's really kind of all it can be sometimes. And to actually do the radical dreaming work that that I think can really move us towards change. And I think send invalid is such an incredible example of that kind of praxis. So, really excited to be in the dreaming with you. And I think that place where dreaming needs action to because it's, it's about what we're able to conceptualize and imagine and co and also in the work of actually co creation and making it happen and micro and macro levels in our lives. Yeah, I mean I think I was thinking a lot about in going through your text I was thinking a lot about how the idea of futures is very, it's a very privileged idea. And the idea that queer folks trans folks and disabled folks have futures is also something that is very distanced from us. And in very aggressive ways. And so I definitely saw dreaming as one of those things that we can do toward arriving to or manifesting our futures and I was also writing the bulk of this during the pandemic I started in. And to be clear that this was like written very slowly encrypt time I started the book project in 2016. So I wrote very, very slowly. And I was coming across the work of Tricia her see. I'll go ahead and put her website in the chat. Tricia her see has an Instagram page called the nap ministry for folks that might be familiar and if you're not definitely something lovely to follow. A lot of her work looks at the racialized sleep gap, and how napping is a form of anti racist rebellion activism. And how napping and rest is where we cultivate our futures and we dream possibilities of arriving to our futures. And so I was reading that and learning about nap ministry. At the same time, I was rereading care work by Leah Lakshma pipsna summer a singha and you know there was this portion where Leah was writing about like the femme bed cave. So many disabled chronically ill femmes, or just folks like we, we make multiple uses of our beds it's not just where we sleep it's where we organize it's where we write and so I was thinking a lot about these like bed caves these femme bed caves as places where we can do disability justice dreaming to to arrive toward what we know we are deserving of and what we require for our collective access collective liberation and so I was so grateful that when you're in your writing of dreaming. I got called to this quote that you have on page 44 if I can bring it in. You were writing about resilience. And then you offered this quote from Hill Malatino. And this is how the quote reads resilience is thus not about bouncing back, nor about moving forward, but rather a communal alchemical mutation of pain and into possibility. I really appreciated that as this framing that you offer for how we can move forward and what this resilience means so I just I like I really appreciated how dreaming was such a concept that was woven through both of our pieces. Yeah, and I, I love that quote from from Hill, and I'm such a huge fan of Hill's work, including Hills trans care and forthcoming books side to side effects as well. Although if I'm remembering right, I think that quote is from an academic paper and I read so much of Hill's work I can't remember which one, but I can figure it out and put it in the chat leader. And what I love about that quote is, it's one of the only definitions of resilience I read that didn't make me mad. I say that, you know as a queer person as someone that has been doing ldbtq plus health work for many years. And I feel like so often resilience gets positioned in this kind of this extractive sort of way, in the sense that it is about. The resilience that that's certainly that our communities possess absolutely that I know have been integral to the survival of so many people, but often without engaging with the conditions that demand such resilience that extract such resilience from us. And I think we see these interventions I see these interventions sometimes that sort of focus on like the notion of just creating more resilience without actually shifting the conditions. So as to require us to be less resilient. I think about all of the ways that I have had to become resilient by virtue of different traumas I've experienced and that those are gifts. And also, I am so glad that my kid who is for returning for in a few weeks has to be less resilient than me. That's a privilege. And that I had to be less resilient than my mother, you know, and she died at 66 in 2014. She was she was and is a really important ancestor that I learned from her name was Lynn Moss Sherman, and I say her name as well because I don't know what identity she would claim necessarily but I would call her a mad activist, I would call her disabled person. She was a survivor of complex trauma. She was an artist and activist and organizer. And my first teacher about all of these kinds of things in ways that I am still coming to understand really deeply in my 40s and will continue to so honoring that that lineage as well. Generations of resilience, yet simultaneously dreaming into and working to co create conditions that ultimately, I mean, could be pleasurable, more easeful, you know, more joyful, not to only highlight those kinds of emotions or sensations but I would like for things to be less hard for so many people, you know, in ways that are deeply interconnected with white supremacy settler colonialism, ableism sanism, you know, all of the things that that cut short people's lives and limit their life chances, including I'm, I'm so glad that you mentioned mad and I think just because it was just because it was a term that I didn't come to until recently, I felt like this could be a good like a good moment to pause and define it just for clarity because I know. I know it's familiar to some but maybe not all and my understanding of mad and then please Zina. Let me know if if I'm missing something or if there's an offering you have but I identify as mad as opposed to mentally ill or as having a psychiatric disability. Because it's offering me language that's rooted in a pride movement and community milk movement that actually started in Canada around like mad mad pride parades and and you know, psychiatric survivor work and so it's really language that is outside of the medical complex. That offers an opportunity for reclaiming an experience similar to I think queer and grip. But yeah just to just to offer that like rooting of what that term means. I'm going to invite you into a segue and because I feel a connection between what I just heard from you and something we also talked about and you know this is a phrase from friendship. And I know this is this is language I've used in different places to so felt that resonance, this idea of storytelling as strategy. I know you know you write about this in your book, you talk about embodied stories about becoming our own storytellers as a form of resistance against the stories that the medical industrial complex tells or tries to tell about our body minds. And so we talked as well about the experience of writing yourself in. And I noticed that the in was italicized. We wrote that in your book and so I'd love to hear more about that, that emphasis and that experience, because I know we also are both recovering academics and shows up in our writing to you. And that's a very yummy question that gets me excited because for anybody, anybody who's taken a class about writing, I feel like there's so many rules that get placed on us. And you know, like the first rule that I was taught around writing in academia and that I was taught to teach when I was teaching freshman composition courses was you know first person like oh like you don't you don't write about yourself and use I, I think you. It's always third person it's like he she they. And so I very much followed this until I read incredible queer of color scholars like I'm thinking specifically of Gloria and so do I. I'm thinking about Audrey Lord and then amazing ancestor new ancestor bell hooks and all of these like folks that were reinserting themselves in their writing. As like a very political move. And so writing in that way just seemed very necessary for for this project in particular. And so as just a way to remember that our body minds carry knowledge and wisdom. And I find that is really important for for for folks that are disabled or chronically ill or mad in particular. I'm curious to hear like your connectivity to that and you know queer folks lgbtq plus folks because I feel like our body minds in particular have been distanced from our own we've been distanced from our own stories and really regressive ways. So for me to write myself in was a way to push against that. To tell my own story as opposed to my doctor telling the story of my body mind or my psychiatrist telling me the story of my body mind. And there were so many lovely places where you also talked about you write that we can witness and listen and learn through our bodies and so I wonder if you found. Story telling is also providing like a generative opening to step through or limp slash roll through for for queer folks also because I definitely saw it as doing that for disabled chronically ill Crip folks. And one of the things that I was reflecting on is this this experience of simultaneously like writing against expertise and reclaiming expertise. And so, I mean, part of what I'm getting at there is, I think for both of us as people who've gone through academia, you know, gotten PhDs. And all of the sort of formal construction of expertise that gets socialized into you know through those kinds of learning and professionalization experiences. I remember being taught a hierarchy and I'm seeing this implication marks a hierarchy of evidence with the randomized control trial, you know, being at the top. And this is you know I was a qualitative researcher and studying healthcare so I already felt a bit weird, which was really not that weird and regular context. So I say that because you know I finished my PhD, gosh it would have been 2010 I chose I chose not to pursue a career in academia. But I've done all of this work that's really been about creating and co creating anthologies, you know and that was a very conscious choice of wanting to create books that that are a space to share queer and trans stories, and that it was about really honoring the expertise, the deep knowledge that we have the carry dream of so much for me was about really recognizing that the most complex and sophisticated things I know about queer and trans health come from my community. They are things I've learned through my body through interdependence and interrelationship. And just through through observing the community around me. And so that's that reclamation of expertise that I think is so important, particularly in contexts like the medical industrial complex where, you know, people may be positioned as you know, quote unquote sort of non compliant, you know, or you're not seen as a reliable narrator of your own experience. They're not seen as the expert on your own body mind. So, I'm really interested in, in the kind of work that is about pushing back at that construction of expertise that's so connected with hierarchy and ableism and white supremacy and so many other forces that seek to contain and constrain who can be an expert. And I think with this book specifically you know my previous two books were both anthologies and this book is much more of a hybrid where it's got interviews and pieces by others but also a number of long form essays that are that are by me. And I was really, really lucky to work with Leah Lakshmi Pepsna Samarasinha my writing coach through the whole process of creating the carry dream of and Leah is so so beloved to me and that was such an immensely powerful experience for me as a writer, and finding a voice in a different way and writing myself in writing my own story in in ways that I've never done before as a writer so it felt like a powerful experience of revealing parts of myself that I hadn't shared before. And I'm not really, really grateful for that that gift as well. And that felt like yet another. I mean partly for me a shedding of respectability politics as well I think that had like, worked their way into some of the ways that that I was engaging with around LGBT health of feeling like I had to present myself to claim a certain kind of expertise, which of course I know from your interconnected with whiteness and other facets of my identity so lots more to say there but I know we're short on time so I'll pause there and invite any thoughts and then maybe some last dialogue around them, them care practice, if we have time, I don't know. I wasn't prepared for the time. Because I was just going to say oh my god that just opened up what you said around reclamation of expertise and that just opened so much up. But I also want to be like super gracious with the time and if folks that are joining us would like to ask any questions in the chat. You, you are very much invited. I could very easily y'all like we typed up a lot of connectivity points that we have not addressed. Oh yeah we this is like, Nerdtastic joy right now. But yeah maybe as folks get a chance to like type or feel free to unmute yourself if that feels more comfortable. I think one of the elements that connects to this conversation of the reclamation of expertise and also are like shared fem praxis that enters into so much of what we do, which also I think, takes me back to disability justice because disability justice really came from a place of community, much like the lessons that you talk about in your book it's coming from community. And yes I love this the word reclamation I also think of a recovering of expertise also. And so much of the wisdom that I was lucky enough to gather in this encrypt kinship because of interviews and just shared space conversations did come from the sick queer disabled fems of color in my life. And so I think one of the things that I want to acknowledge and then invite, invite us to chat about to a lot of the work in this was informed by fem care work, and what that looks like and so I very much wrote this with other community members, kind of like this we would all get together on zoom and we would write together. So this book was written in community. When I was stuck, I would let my community know and like fems would send letters, they would send cute gifts, or they would send like gifts of glitter because glitter makes me so like stimmy joyful happy. And so there was a lot of carrying that happened in the process of writing which is, I think important to mention that these things don't happen in isolation they very much at least I think for both of us happened with our extended fem care networks. One of the things I'm thinking about are, you know, all of the, like, famous white guy writers, you know, says white guy straight says white guy writers that were like secretly having all of their care work done by often you know women. Yes, often like thinking. So, so yes I mean, like I think, I feel like it is through my experience and I, and I in seeing this I don't need to romanticize or offer like a singular perspective on some identity or from community what I'm thinking of in this moment is a very specific, you know, experience of the fem community that I've had with particular fans, you know, that I've been friends with for now 20 years. And I feel like it's through that fem community that I really first learned interdependence and collective care. These are beloved friends who we've shown up for each other through divorces, death, you know, mental health crises, you know, actively organizing to keep people out of the formal, the formal psychiatric system, you know, very deliberately as an act of support and helping people stay alive, feeding each other, you know, housing each other, it's been through that experience of them that I've learned so much about care and interdependence and, and it was, it was actually a desire to learn more deeply about interdependence that that was part of what brought me to learning about disability justice a number of years ago as I realized, I didn't feel like I knew enough about interdependence and so I wanted to learn more about that through disability justice specifically. And the other thing I would say just because this feels very real for me like I'm co-parenting a four year old with three other people, you know I have a my partner and our two co-parents we all live together, we're expecting babies my co-parent is pregnant with twins you know, and I mentioned that because that also is a very specific site of interdependence in my life, and, and my book, and certainly me in this form wouldn't exist in the same ways that I'm able to without that interdependence and direct care that we offer each other in our home space and hope to resonate out through our communities so I really feel like, yeah it feels like one of the many places I'm able to enact them care practice. I haven't felt that immediate connection and kinship with you, like through kind of coming into connection that sense of like them recognition and them alignment that just a particular kind of sparkle so yeah sending that them love to you and any of the other fems out here in the in the zoom space as well, just so so grateful to be part of this community and this lineage to you. I'm, I'm so glad that you mentioned interdependence because I think. And I included a link to since invalid disability justice primer it's like the first collected text of not just like what is disability justice so what are the lineages that inform it, and then how can you use it and apply it to your every day. I mean I think for me, one of the biggest gifts of disability justice was interdependence but also this idea that our needs do not need to be held in shame. And I remember that because of Michelle thank you for the comment that you posted here. There's yes a huge community. A huge community that supports that very simple fact even though it's very, I think stigmatized, our needs don't need to be held in shame. We can be bold and requesting our access needs be met. And yeah I mean I think. I think Femme community is such a good reminder of that, and I did see a few people kind of turn on their cameras and then turn back off so I don't know if you all had any questions so I can. We can kind of pause for a moment in case folks wanted to ask something when you were saying our needs don't need to be held in shame that just was so so beautiful, and it made me think of something. I've been at the probably 2011 Femme conference in Oakland, so long ago the only one I was ever able to go to. It was from Fran Varian and I will this line has stayed with me for more than 10 years it was scarce is not your inheritance. And I think about that right like that abundance the pleasure. Yeah, just just the richness that I think I feel like disability justice offers so powerfully. And I feel like Femme is part of that offering to so maybe that's that place where like, for me anyways, the Venn diagram sort of gets created there somehow. Not that they're separate of course either but just in terms of how that comes together for me. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I mean I don't know if you ever had this experience. But just realizing the lack of intersectionality in the books around queerness or in my books around disability just really made me so excited when I learned about sins and valid and disability justice work. And I'm mindful of time I know, especially for Rick SL interpreter, and also for our captioner probably we should, we should wind up soon, which I'm seeing partly for self accountability because I know I would love to talk for like another hour and keep going very easily yes. So grateful for the beautiful comments as well in the chat. It's such a joy to be in this virtual space, and also for everyone to hopefully be in in a safe and accessible and comfortable space. I'm really glad to be gathering virtually right now for sure. And I thank you too for. I believe I saw Anissa posted your Twitter and my Instagram so you all can you know reach out and follow us there. So we can continue conversations in that way. You can also find me on Instagram I just keep it private to keep the trolls out but you can it's just at Zena Sherman. I'll add you and you can see my book reviews and occasional outfits. If you've collected other book events recordings on your website. Let me know and I can put that in the chat I'll share mine. Thank you Shayna and Zena so much. Thanks for the fabulous conversation and all the dreaming. I'm so glad we could have this event with y'all. And yeah we're at three o'clock. So I want to thank the audience as well for participating with all your great comments thank you so much. Any final words. Just so grateful for everybody that joined us today. Thank you all for sharing your love and tenderness we felt it, even though we're in digital space it was just lovely. Zena thank you so much Kevin thank you for organizing. Rick, thank you for interpreting. Thank you and thank you to the captioner. Thank you all for coming and have a lovely afternoon. Thank you everyone so much. Can we take a quick selfie before we end. Oh yeah. Do you know how to take this selfie. I do and I can share it with you and if anybody sticking around wants to turn your camera on feel free you don't have to. But here we go. 123.