In many of today’s social movements, a common framework is taken up with regard to “self care.” In many ways, it seems as though self care is commonly understood as taking some form of “time-out” from the stresses of daily life within capitalism and organizing, especially from spaces that cannot or will not offer care. It can refer to time taken or an activity done intentionally for one’s own personal well-being. Beyond the things we actively do to care for ourselves, self care can also mean not doing certain things: not attending a meeting or action or stepping back from organizing altogether for a period of time. We may need self care to cope with the draining effects of crisis-mode organizing, increasingly precarious work lives, or patterns of discrimination in certain organizing spaces. Self care might also be the activities one needs to simply survive – physically, mentally, emotionally – in a world that brutalizes certain bodies, races, and genders more than others. In any case, it is clear that self care has become a central concept and practice in organizing circles today – a ubiquitous prescription for the tired activist.

Our editorial takes issue with this individualized, compartmentalized characterization of self care. This does not mean, however, that we advocate an “end to self care,” as others have in the past.1 Instead, our critique is aimed first and foremost at the individualization of the responsibility to provide care. While the practice of self care is often individual, we must reflexively consider the ways our organizing spaces and processes fail to take an active interest in our individual and collective well-being. How do our organizing spaces replicate capitalist value judgements about the “productive” activist? Furthermore, understanding self care as a periodic activity or “time-out” is a disabling construction; it does not account for the fact that for many folks, self care is an ongoing and necessary practice that is rooted in community, family, and interdependence. This does not mean our communities, organizing spaces, or other groups are solely responsible for the needs and care of each individual. It does mean, however, that we need to take a greater degree of collective responsibility for each other’s well-being, beginning with an understanding of our collective interdependence, as well as the differential needs that must be addressed through this interdependence. The contemporary rhetoric of self care withdraws collective responsibility and disavows interdependence, and therefore puts our movements at risk of replicating or exacerbating patterns of neglect and harm that many folks experience in a profoundly hierarchical and exploitative world.

In addition to this, the increasingly commodified nature of self care warrants a critical analysis. How have common understandings of self care in radical political spaces mirrored neoliberalism, and how can we resist this? All too often the responsibility of care is the individual’s alone, and it is stratified across dimensions of race, class, gender, and disability. Clearly, then, the current paradigm of self care “leaves us in danger of being isolated in our struggle and our healing,” and all too often results in the “isolation of yet another person, another injustice.”2 In short, if we organize together in the name of collective liberation, why are we expected to care for ourselves individually?

Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved lends an illustrative, powerful example of the dynamics of self, community, and care in a context of a Black family living and resisting slavery.3 As we discussed narratives of care, the imagery of healing and community in Beloved provided strong political and moving examples that spoke to this issue.

In the novel, the character Sethe manages to escape enslavement with her children, only to be caught by her slave owner when she reaches her family in Ohio. Rather than return her children to slavery, she attempts to kill them and commit suicide as an act of defiance and refusal. Only one child, Beloved, is killed. A ghostly Beloved then returns to haunt the family as a chilling presence that overwhelms Sethe with guilt. Sethe cannot properly care for herself as her sons run away, leaving only her timid youngest daughter, Denver. Sethe remains obsessed with atoning for her past actions by trying to please the ghost of Beloved.

Through the development of complex characters and magical realism, Morrison shows how the historical trauma and memory of enslavement can impact and, at times, consume the self. This consuming power denies Sethe the ability both to care for herself and to love another as she starts (and drives away) a new lovership with the character Paul D. Over the course of the novel, Sethe completely disconnects from herself. In this state, Sethe reflects on how the structures of slavery and white supremacy affect her sense of self:
“That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up.” (251)

After realizing Beloved’s destructive presence on her family, Denver choses to leave her home to care for herself, her mother, and eventually reach out to her community to help fight the haunting presence in their home. Thirty Black women in the community mobilize to exorcise Sethe’s family home. It is the sound of these women collectively singing and praying that makes Sethe emerge from her home and see the presence of community. It is the presence and care of her community that frees Sethe from Beloved’s presence:

“For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices sound that broke the back of words. Building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash.” (261)

Alone, Sethe only suffered as she tried to appease the guilt of her actions, but the collective response of community helped her confront her past. It also connects her back to her self, no longer dirty but bathed in and cleansed by community. She gained a sense of worth and humanity not based on her actions with her children, but on her self. It is this role of community care that offers both a necessary critique and an important intervention to current understandings of care in activist circles, which is often called “self care.”

While this is a simple summary of a complex novel, our reading of Beloved analyzes the connections between care and the role of community in not only intervening with trauma and oppression, but also as a necessary component for the characters to realize their selves – their humanity. It is this process that shifts the discussion of care from critiquing individualistic, “self-indulgent” acts to unearthing the political processes of survival and community. How do we mobilize people to care for each other in the face of a world built on the myth of individual independence? We need to better understand the trauma of oppression in our movements and understand how its manifests in ways that lead to burnout or that push people out of organizing spaces. If we can begin to understand how care used in liberal, individualistic ways that reinforce relationships of privilege and consumerism, we can begin to conceive of and practice care in ways that contribute to or mitigate these dynamics? To do so is to work toward ensuring that our social movements begin to be meaningfully accountable to each other and embed care into how and what we organize.

Owing much to the work of Black feminists and scholars, our discussion of self care explores the need to shift our understanding of care away from solely the responsibility of the individual (self care) towards understanding what a shared framework of responsibility might look like – a framework that values collective accountability for each other’s well-being. This concept of community care, at its core, is about taking collective accountability for the spaces we create together to ensure that how we organize is just as important as what we organize. It demands a focus on process as well as results. And so, this editorial explores how to balance the responsibility of individualized self care with a framework of community care.

Self Care: Three Preliminary Tensions

We briefly outline here three tensions concerning a discussion of self care. First is the separation of “organizing” from “self care.” This tension reminds us of the separations between paid and unpaid work, private and public spheres, or productive and so-called unproductive activities. We have encountered arguments that cast self care as apolitical, as time taken away from more “productive” organizing efforts, and as an indulgence. However, self care can often be a matter of survival. Although self care is not sufficient on its own to achieve the larger political victories we seek, it is a necessary practice that allows us to continue organizing and keeps us from being crushed under the weight of an alienating capitalist society.

The second tension is the dichotomization between self care and community care. Combating alienation in political organizing and building sustainable, nourishing movements is not a total shift away from self care to community care. Instead, we must strive to enhance self care by developing cultures of community care. This move does not place the onus on those who are pushed out of our movements or excluded in the first place. Instead, a community care framework is critical of individualizing the responsibility of care and strives to provide collective solutions to our particular needs – by providing childcare organizationally, for instance. Only through such a framework will it be possible to transform our movements into nourishing, inclusive spaces where people will want and be able to continue organizing. Our successes ought to be defined as much by our strategies, tactics, and ability to disrupt the status quo as by our collective well-being in the process. This level of belonging and support is in many cases offered through religious congregation, which is one of the key reasons these organizations are so popular with some of the most oppressed.

The third tension surrounds the definition and understanding of self care itself, and how different conceptions influence our movements. Manifestations of self care can range from consumerism to survival. The broadest definition of self care is any intentional action taken to care for one’s physical, emotional, and/or spiritual well-being. Do we need to differentiate between a person in need of healthy food from a person spending hundreds of dollars on a spa get-away? Analytically, we desire a more precise term. How do we define self care in relation to self-indulgence or temporary coping strategies? How does the meaning of self care change across dimensions of class, race, gender, sexuality, and ability?

We live in a world of that is designed to provide care for some people and withdraw it from others. In relation to institutional arrangements of care that are supposedly ‘neutral,’ Black bodies are subjected to police violence, immigrant bodies are rendered less deserving of the care that comes with citizenship, and Indigenous bodies are in many cases denied care altogether.4 Self care in these cases is a radical act of survival, and perhaps warrants a distinction from more privileged acts of care. In any organization or revolutionary group, and depending on the variety of resources people have, some activists use consumerism to access care, which is not available to everyone. If some folks in your group can re-energize by paying for massages while your other comrades can’t afford healthy food, how people utilize self care no longer becomes individual but a moment of struggle within our organizing. Figuring out ways where we can all utilize care demands a conversation of what that looks like so that it can be shared with everyone.

A lot of work must be done to tease out the tensions between self and community care. We proceed below in two broad sections. First, we situate how self care has been practiced in the context of a neoliberal capitalism that permeates almost every aspect of our lives. We then shift toward an analysis of the “social self,” which disavows the neoliberal myth of individual independence and therefore necessitates a shift toward frameworks of community care. While we have limited these discussions to the various ways that radical movements have taken up “self care” recently, we believe these discussions remain relevant to broader discussions of care and survival in communities not directly involved in activist organizing who may articulate these concepts in different ways. With these limitations in mind, we offer both a critique of the dominant rhetoric of self care today, as well as some theoretical and ethical foundations for community care framework that is necessary to our work as we move forward.

Self Care and/in Capitalism

Many of the foundations of self care in relation to consumerism and privilege often centre the neoliberal self. Taking care of one’s self becomes the individual’s task of replenishing one’s capacity to participate in the labour process and consume through the market. The burden of care, responsibility, and well-being is a private matter, done on one’s own time, using one’s own resources to take care of needs that are not met from other people. In the context of neoliberal austerity and the restructuring of the welfare state, social reproduction is downloaded from the state governments to communities and, ultimately, individuals or families. The cold, calculating logics of neoliberalism see this generalized and abstract process as disciplining labour in order to produce the “good neoliberal subject.” However, this ideal is rarely met without enough disposable income and time. When you factor in the various forms of oppression and exploitation, access to care becomes another form of labour.

For example, we can see how the burden of care has historically fallen on women. Child-rearing, elder care, cleaning, cooking meals, household upkeep, and community-building – in short, social reproduction – all form basic social needs that lay beyond the neoliberal parameters of work and the public sphere, yet they all require a tremendous amount of skill, time, and effort. They constitute the in-between time that is simply assumed in order to socially reproduce labour power for the market.

The restructuring of the welfare state, the slashing of community services, and the move toward precarity and “permanent temporariness” have all downloaded the responsibility of care away from more broadly public institutions to ourselves, our households, and our communities. bell hooks notes that under neoliberal capitalism, we are simply expected to “change everything in our lives by sheer facts of personal will.”5 This conception of the self as radically independent obscures the broader structural power relations that collectively shape our lives in vastly unequal and violent ways.

In general terms, the capitalist strategy hasn’t changed: increase exploitation in the workplace, push the responsibility of care into the private sphere, continue to invisibilize the labour of social reproduction and subsistence, and then introduce markets that will commodify and provide care services if you can afford them. In this way, self care becomes a burden for some and a privilege for others. Permeated by systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonialism, capitalist privatization of public services such as housing, education, transportation, and other social goods only intensify pre-existing patterns of marginalization. Additionally, the public services that are tasked with providing care to those in our community who need it most do so in profoundly pathologizing and disempowering ways, establishing a dependent power relation via the provision of care.

And so we pose the question: why does it feel so different to ask someone to cook you dinner than to order take-out? Why is it okay to take care of oneself as long as we don’t impose or share the burden with others?

Care is our individual responsibility when something goes wrong. This often manifests itself through individual practices like “retail therapy,” eating junk foods, taking a day to binge-watch your favourite show, and so on. Liz Kessler correctly identifies these practices as coping rather than self care.6 The distinction is important here. We constantly need to cope under capitalism. Coping, then, is a set of temporary practices of care that would not necessarily be sustainable in the long-term. Self care, then, is understood as intentional actions and routines that prioritize physical and mental well-being in a more conscious and sustainable way. This framework laid out by Kessler clarifies one of our tensions mentioned above concerning the definition of self care: coping is a means to get us through a tough time and self care is a broader commitment to reproducing healthy and sustainable practices in our lives. Coping is valued over care in capitalism because it allows us to continue to fulfil our roles as producers; and methods of coping are offered as a commodity and sold to us as ways to improve productivity so we can fulfil our role as consumers.

This capitalist understanding of care can be reproduced in our organizing spaces as well. Some members end up taking on the lion’s share of unrecognized emotional labour and care within collectives, which often mirrors the work they are expected to do in the private sphere. These activities are taken for granted, unrecognized, and systematically made to be less important than the “real work” of organizing. Our organizational cultures similarly reproduce gendered conceptions of care and a hierarchical division of labour that places social reproduction at the bottom. This is because our understanding of care has been thoroughly permeated by the values of capitalism.

The devaluing of social reproduction and absence of community care makes movements fragmented and unsustainable. As explained in an interview with Silvia Federici about the struggle over social reproduction in the Occupy movement,

“Reproduction… doesn’t only mean how humans reproduce biologically, it is a broad concept that encompasses… how communities are built and rebuilt, and how resistance and struggle can be sustained and expanded.“7

In similar ways, the works of Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon have wrestled with balancing processes of self- and collective- transformation in radical struggle. In Marx’s view, the working class struggle is not just against the ruling class but also within itself. Indeed, to transcend capitalism is not only to transform our economic system, but also to transform how we understand and address human needs. In the German Ideology, Marx describes the concept of self-activity – or actualization – under communism: “self-activity coincides with material life, which corresponds to the development of individuals into complete individuals and the casting-off of all natural limitations.”8 Additionally, Fanon’s work not only grapples with the importance of the struggle for anti-colonial independence, but with the struggle to produce a new conception of the human itself. Indeed, the anti-colonial struggle is not only a process of “re-humanizing” the structures that dominate us, but requires us to “turn over a new leaf… work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man.”9

We argue that an important aspect of the transformation of our concepts of “human” and how to re-organize the meeting of each others’ needs on a societal scale is challenging both structural and interpersonal systems of racism, heteropatriarchy, and ableism that are implicit in capitalism and colonization. How we think about care is connected in important ways to such processes of transformation as well. The work, however, does not solely lie with denouncing these relations; we need to commit to building alternatives within our imperfect worlds. We need to nurture radical relationships of care and accountability in the here and now.

To redefine self care and create frameworks of community care is therefore a dual struggle: it exists at the level of interpersonal and community relations as well as within the broader systems that structure our lives. It will never be enough to only create radical pockets of care and accountability, cut off from a broader public sphere. Shifting our understanding of care from one that is individual and privilege-based to a broader responsibility-based framework requires us to hold this dual struggle in tension. It calls for a constant evaluation and re-evaluation of our networks and modes of both self and communal care. It is a long-term commitment to ourselves, our communities, our social movements, our elders, and the generations to come.

The Social Self and Community Care

As we have shown, “self” and “care” in the current paradigm of self care are underpinned by capitalist logics. We are far from the first to point out the ideology of the “self” and the commodification of “care” under capitalism, yet it seems to be a painfully necessary corrective to the dominant understanding of self care today. Two people who have made crucial interventions into the concept and practice of self care are Mia Mingus and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, both through a disability justice framework.

Mingus argues that a disability justice framework allows us to move beyond “the myth of independence.”10 This myth purports,

“that somehow we can and should be able to do everything on our own without any help from anyone. This requires such a high level of privilege and even then, it is still a myth. Whose oppression and exploitation must exist for your independence?“11

Being critical of self care does not signal a desire for independence or for a life that does not require care. For Mingus, disability justice is less interested in an equality model of sameness (summed up as “we are just like you”), opting instead for,

“a model of disability that embraces difference, confronts privilege and challenges what is considered ‘normal’… We don’t want to simply join the ranks of the privileged; we want to dismantle those ranks and the systems that maintain them.“12

And so, the individualism embedded within current understandings of self care can obscure the differences in personal capacity, material means, and physical and psychological ability to practice self care alone.
In fact, for folks without the means to do self care in many of the ways it is assumed to be practiced, self care must be collective and community-based. Piepzna-Samarasinha reminds us that disabled, imperfect collective care models “are works in progress” that entail helping out with personal care, sharing rides, money, and resources, as well as being with each other to combat the isolation that many queer, disabled, elders, mothers, poor, (usually) people of colour experience on a daily basis.13 These collective strategies are certainly forms of self care because in many cases it’s not either/or.14 In other words, if we understand the myth of independence as just that – a myth – then no form of self care is actually independent. This is at odds with how we generally hear self care discussed in many organizing circles, where the individual is expected to do their self care outside of the organizational space and return when they are ready to resume “the work.”

Piepzna-Samarasinha takes issue with the individualized understanding of care. She points out that many practices of self care have been coopted and commodified by a society that is fundamentally colonial and capitalist – such as when yoga becomes primarily understood as a “Special White Healing Thing that costs a bunch of money.”15 Beyond its commodified nature, Piepzna-Samarasinha challenges the almost tokenistic uses of self care within organizations. She argues that typical burnout models of organizing that are,

“Starting to try a little bit not to run their workers into the ground till they get sick… do the same work at the same breakneck crisis pace they’ve done it, and then take… a four day yoga retreat. But that’s not actually using a model of sustainability that comes from disability justice! It’s doing the same kind of organizing non-profit industrial complex movements have insisted on for years – which pushes out parents, broke folks, and disabled folks, just to name a few – but tack[s] on a little self care on the side.“16

And so, it becomes clear that self care cannot simply be another task added to the unending list of our day-to-day, but must be embedded into our organizing cultures and personal lives. In other words, care is political rather than an informal and invisible part of organizing.

Further, we must be conscious of the tendency to engage in oppressive and unsustainable modes of self care. Many activists have used Audre Lorde’s politicization of self care, especially during times of trauma and hardship. In her book Bursts of Light, Lorde claims that, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”17 While we might take this for granted as a powerful meme, we wanted to break down this quote to unpack the link between political struggle and care.

By claiming that self care is an act of political warfare, Lorde makes a profound declaration. She speaks from the position of a Black woman living in a not-so-post civil rights era. Ensuring her own survival in a world that is structured to make the means of life scantily available to Black women is political. This statement could be transferred across a spectrum of oppressed, marginalized, and othered groups; groups that collectively struggle against the society that couldn’t care less for or about them. While “self care as political warfare” is a statement that can inform discussions in organizing circles, it rings true far beyond such contexts as well.

The first part of Lorde’s quote, however, is more puzzling. Lorde claims her self care is not self-indulgence, but where does she draw this line? Are forms of self care that are coded as self-indulgence apolitical? Should they be discouraged or critiqued? It is within these questions that we have seen the most vehement opposition to self care on the Left. We know many comrades who might scoff at the term, claiming its bourgeois character; who may support someone doing self care but still think that it is time taken away from more “productive” causes; or who would expect it to be done in ways that would not take capacity away from ongoing organizing efforts. The process of drawing a moving boundary between self-indulgence and self care is one that is often mobilized in gendered and pejorative ways in organizing contexts. However, self care must be asserted to be not only a necessary practice in our daily lives, but an intentional and political act. Sara Ahmed argues that,

“[In Lorde’s] statement that self care is not self-indulgence we can hear a defence; [she] is defending self care. What from? From who? From, one might suspect, the dismissal of self care as an indulgence. Self-indulgence tends to mean: being soft on one’s self, but also can mean yielding to one’s inclinations.“18

In this editorial, we do not wish to wade too far into the often times messy debate between self-indulgence and self care. Rather than policing some people’s individual acts framed as self care, we are more interested in taking the above critiques of both “self” and “care” in current self care rhetoric and arguing for a shift to a framework of community care for a social self, a class conscious building of long-term supportive infrastructures of resistance. Believe us when we say our movements would be better for it.

Experimenting With Imperfect Models of Community Care

We began with a reference to Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved and the role of community in connecting Sethe with her Self. We don’t use this narrative as the answer to oppression and exploitation, but as a way to understand interdependence in the struggle for a new world. We are addressing the assumption that for those who live with trauma or are healing from trauma, or need more care than others – coping and healing are often left out of conversations of liberation and revolution. And this privatization of healing is no different than how we navigate through capitalism, where we leave our traumas at the door as we enter our work spaces.

Capitalist social relations implicitly place value on how well people can set aside their needs for care in order to increase productivity. And for us, both dichotomies of either ignoring care or removing oneself for care does little to build our activist movements for the long term. By building such infrastructures we mean to foster long-lasting activism, and also to incorporate different generations along with their diverse needs in all areas of our resistance.

After surveying some of the main tensions with how self care is used in our contemporary moments, centering disability justice frameworks of collective interdependence can influence how we organize and take care of ourselves and each other. While many texts offer suggestions, we feel that experimenting with various models means opening dialogue with different organizations working on these issues and writing on our experiments of care as explicit political interventions.

In this regard, we can take lessons from past resistance movements, such as the Black Panther Party which appreciated the importance of community care and “survival programs,” in order to collectively reach a level of consciousness necessary for revolution. Though the limitations were noted conerning the ability of community programs to strike at the very core of systems of oppression and violence that impacted the Black community, initiatives such as the “Breakfast for School Children Program,” the “Community Learning Centre,” “People’s Free Ambulance Service,” the “Child Development Centre,” or even the “People’s Free Shoe Program” were all part of a “survival pending revolution” strategy. A strategy analogous to a survival kit for a stranded sailor: “it helps him to sustain himself until he can get completely out of that situation.”19
More recently, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty has consistently embedded dimensions of community care into their organizing – from covering food and transportation for their community meetings to making accessibility a consistent high priority when organizing events and actions. Members of OCAP have also done the work of holding other organizations in the city to such standards as well, displaying a form of inter-organizational care and relationship building. However inspiring the few examples are that are out there today, many of which are not mentioned here, the individualistic paradigm of self care reigns as the dominant way of thinking about and engaging in care.

Both self care and collective care should remain politically charged. They should be a revolutionary tenet. We want to imagine that care can become synonymous with the social reproduction of resistance. We should tie care so tightly to our movements, embed it so deeply into our organizational cultures that it becomes inseparable from our collective resistance. While those in the seats of power do not care about neighbourhood childcare co-ops, they are unsettled by programs that combine social services, community care, and critical analysis in order to build new infrastructures of resistance.

The way forward, then, is not isolated “intentional communities,” or affinity groups that claim not to reproduce the structural violences that continue outside of their spaces. It does not assume that care is the sole responsibility of the individual who requires it. To achieve collective liberation we need each other to be healthy and well; we need to foster relations of love, care, and accountability that take into account our inevitable interdependence. As one step among the many that are needed in our movements today, we need to stop thinking about care solely as an individual responsibility or a bourgeois value and begin to experiment with frameworks of collective care and accountability that will make our movements more inclusive, resilient, and empowering as we organize as revolutionaries. H

Notes

1 B. Loewe, “An End to Self care,” Organizing Upgrade, October 15, 2012. Accessed June 26, 2016. Available at: http://www.organizingupgrade.com/index.php/blogs/b-loewe/item/729-end-to-self care.

2 Yashna Pasmadee, “Communities of Care,” Organizing Upgrade, July 1 2011. Accessed June 26, 2016. Available at: http://www.organizingupgrade.com/index.php/component/k2/item/88-yashna-communities-of-care.

3 Toni Morrison, Beloved. Penguin Books: New York. 1988.

4 Sherene Razack, Dying From Improvement, University of Toronto Press: Toronto. 2015.

5 bell hooks, Sisters of the Yam, (South End Press: Boston), 4.

6 Liz Kessler, “Why I Don’t Believe in ‘Self care’ (and how to make it obsolete),” Murky Green Waters: March 8, 2016. Accessed: June 26, 2016. Available at: https://murkygreenwaters.com/2016/03/08/why-i-dont-believe-in-self care-and-how-to-make-it-obsolete.

7 Max Haiven, “Occupy and the Struggle Over Reproduction: An Interview with Silvia Federici,” Rabble, December 8, 2011. Accessed: July 22, 2016. http://rabble.ca/news/2011/12/occupy-and-struggle-over-reproduction-interview-silvia-federici.

8 Karl Marx, The German Ideology, Section 10 -  https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01d.htm.

9 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (Grove Press: New York), 314-316.

10 Mia Mingus, “Changing the Framework: Disability Justice,” Leaving Evidence, February 12, 2011. Accessed June 26, 2016. Available at: https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/changing-the-framework-disability-justice/.

11 Mia Mingus, “Interdependency: Excerpts from Several Talks,” Leaving Evidence, January 22 2010. Accessed June 26 2016. Available at: https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/interdependency-exerpts-from-several-talks/.

12 Mia Mingus, “Changing the Framework.”

13 Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha, “for badass disability justice, working-class and poorlead models of sustainable hustling for liberation,” brown star girl, October 16, 2012. Accessed June 26, 2016. Available at: http://www.brownstargirl.org/blog/for-badass-disability-justice-working-class-and-poor-lead-models-of-sustainable-hustling-for-liberation.

14 ibid.

15 ibid.

16 ibid.

17 Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light, (Firebrand Books: Ithaca, New York).

18 Sarah Ahmed, “Selfcare a Warfare,” feministkilljoys, August 25, 2014. Accessed June 26, 2016. Available at: https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/08/25/selfcare-as-warfare/.

19 “The Black Panther Party: Service To The People Programs”, The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, 2008.