11 Break Even
Contesting Hostile Futures with Disabled Kin
As the world heats up and social fabrics wear, we cannot take for granted a better future awaiting us on the horizon. Indeed, as we conclude the writing of this book in January 2025, we are confronted with multiple hostile futures—futures that are shaped by both new and entrenched forms of racial violence, fascist control, capitalist extraction, and genocide. A “golden age” of AI-driven imperialist expansion looms, we are told, marked by unfettered drilling, territorial conquests, the militarization of the Arctic, and the colonization of the cosmos. The future unfolding before us is profoundly antisocial, an antifuture future that, unsurprisingly, many of us are not meant to survive. Indeed, as we have examined throughout this book, we live in a world structured to debilitate, disable, and kill through organized forms of socioeconomic abandonment, targeted violence, and colonial and imperial configurations of domination and erasure. All too often, the supposed fixes for these relentless structural harms—whether through technological and scientific innovation or neoliberal mechanisms like privatization and self-regulation—serve to obfuscate and amplify harm to human and more-than-human lifeworlds. Yet however bleak our current circumstance and trajectory may seem, and however entangled we are in it, it is not the only future ahead. Many disabled artists, scholars, and activists assert that “the future is disabled,” putting forward a crip politics of futurity to mark both a longing for and a struggle toward a world in which disability is anticipated and robustly supported (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2022). Against a backdrop in which disability is so often constructed as “a sign of no future”—or, as Alison Kafer (2013, 3) notes, at best, no desirable future—crip futures instead imagine a time “ripe with opportunities” in which disabled, mad, sick, injured, and debilitated people, along with our cultures and communities, are recognized as “political, valuable, and integral.”
As we’ve seen throughout this book, rather than sustain neoliberalism, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, imperial domination, and white supremacy by attempting to repair or maintain this inhospitable, broken-by-design, antifuturist world, what we need now is to make disabled kin. This means engaging with immediate and unfolding practices of care, mutual aid, solidarity, and interdependence, practices grounded in disability culture and disability justice. Such practices offer vital strategies that can work to stave off harm, mitigate risk, and protect one another from unjust systems and structures that are designed to break us. Cultivating disabled kin nurtures connection and support across disabled and debilitated people, ecologies, infrastructures, and life-giving objects. It is a form of collective world-building that contests the structures designed to break us while also making space for the wisdoms and knowledges that emerge from experiences of breakdown and rupture. Making disabled kin enables us to confront how to live with life altered in the present and, in the process, alter our circumstances and future. We do this to fight for collective survival and more hospitable relations to come, but this fight is not contingent upon the realization of these worlds as we imagine them now. We turn to disabled kin-making as a collective political practice—one that forges interdependent relations of care, access, and abolition—not as a cure or fix-all but as a way of piecing together the skills, strategies, methods, and relations that will help us confront the insufficiency of the present and better enable us to move together toward whatever comes next.
The Making of Disabled Kin
Throughout this book, we have traced how people work collectively to resist the violent infrastructures that sustain racist and ableist neglect, socioeconomic abandonment, and ecological devastation, offering many examples of the ways in which disabled kin are forged through political struggle and its implications. In what follows, we present key aspects of making and maintaining disabled kin in order to contest hostile futures. This involves embracing the disruptive power of disability while drawing from the knowledge, culture, and political practices of disabled people, ancestors, inheritances, and lineages. We further highlight how disabled kinship is cultivated through human and more-than-human relations, which must be upheld through social and material infrastructures. The making of disabled kin is also—and by extension—an act of refusal, an insistence on not abandoning one another that strengthens our capacity to show up and forge a collective “we” that moves together.
We Foster Disabled Kin by Learning from Disability Culture, Knowledge, and Political Practices
Dismantling debilitating social relations requires embracing disability as a disruptive, noncompliant, and frictional difference—one that matters. Disability is not merely a condition to manage but a vital way of being in and of the world, generating meaning, community, culture, and kin. Anticipating and welcoming the ways disability disrupts ableist, sanist, and intersecting oppressive social relations helps us better understand the often-concealed nature of these relations. It also—and most critically—draws our attention to how things could be otherwise and attend to the relational ties that must be forged to bring other futures into being, such as joining in solidarity with others struggling against interlocking forms of domination. Disability culture and justice practices, for example, reveal interdependence as fundamental to the flourishing of mutual aid, solidarity, and relational forms of care and access—practices that underpin abolitionist struggles. Chapter 9 highlights this through the work of mask blocs, which distribute face coverings to antigenocide protesters both to prevent viral spread and to shield against surveillance, doxing, and criminalization. In making disabled kin, we also recognize that it is impossible to address all sites of brokenness at once. Instead, interdependence allows us to fight from where we are, doing what we can while acknowledging the ways our struggles are deeply interconnected. For instance, as explored in chapters 4 and 8, the fight for accessible transit is inseparable from the fight for better working conditions for transit workers. Such struggles also compel us to confront our responsibilities to one another, challenging antisocial, neoliberal individualism through collective access measures. Throughout the book, we have seen myriad examples of disabled and mad people and communities creatively improvising solutions when technical fixes break (us) down—from holding doors open for one another (chapter 4) to holding one another in grief and anguish (chapter 5), from crowdsourcing generators to ensure community members are able to breathe with their ventilators during power outages (chapter 8), to simply making room to breathe together in dangerous times (chapter 7). Recognizing the interconnectedness of our struggles deepens our solidarity and affirms the profound interdependencies shaping our shared future on this planet.
Forging Disabled Kin Requires Us to Attend to Disability as a Relation Between Humans, More-than-Humans, Infrastructures, and Objects
Disability doesn’t exist in individual bodies; it emerges in and through relationships. Disability is a doing, formed in and through the relations of people, nature, culture, and technology, shaping and being shaped by everything from plants and animals to laws, policies, and design. Disability and debilitation are not solely human experiences, unfolding as they do across beings, systems, and material objects. Approaching disability in this way helps us to unpack how it is woven into social, economic, political, cultural, and material realities. As disability is a relational coemergence of nature and culture, extending in and out of bodies, it is enacted in ways that reveal the specific formations and stratifications of these interconnections; human and more-than-human, animate and inanimate—relations of breakdown and disablement abound in and through our broken worlds. Such relations extend from the c-hook in chapter 8 that snapped after decades of corporate neglect to the many people, trees, plants, animals, and structures harmed or destroyed by the wildfire it sparked; from the leaking ceiling in the hallway of an underfunded public school in chapter 5 to students unable to access the supports they need to flourish; from the polluted waters of the Buriganga River—turned black by toxic chemicals dumped by fast-fashion factories along its shores—to the degradation of wildlife and ecologies dependent on these waters and the mass debilitation and death of the garment workers laboring in those same factories in chapter 1; from Karrie Higgins’s missing elevator that led to her breakdown in the Introduction to Engracia Figueroa’s carelessly smashed wheelchair that ultimately broke her body in chapter 8. In each of these fragments of our theory in pieces, the abandonment of objects, infrastructures, and environs is caught up in the abandonment of the people who relied on their design, maintenance, and repair.
The consequences of socioeconomic abandonment and divestment from public infrastructure—whether through the failure to build, maintain, or repair electrical grids, transportation systems, public schools, or accessibility features like elevators, ramps, and escalators—are unevenly distributed. The care of debilitated and aging infrastructure is inseparably linked to the care of the people who rely on it, underscoring the fundamental interdependence of humans and the material world. Throughout this book, we have traced the many ways disabled and debilitated people are dangerously immobilized by broken, decaying, unmaintained, and missing infrastructure—conditions that compound disablement and debilitation and result, too often, in (social) death. “Mobility devices are an extension of our bodies,” said Figueroa prior to her death. “When they are damaged or destroyed, we become re-disabled” (quoted in Riley 2021). Abandoned human and more-than-human life is often discursively and materially objectified—dehumanized to justify a logic of disposal, much like Eli Clare’s broken MP3 player or a car that no longer runs (see the Introduction). These experiences of breakage expose the deep entanglement of disability with broader structures of harm, neglect, and abandonment. By examining how disability becomes sedimented within these oppressive structures and systems, we can more precisely intervene. We echo Shannon Mattern’s (2021) concern that an exclusive focus on “defective objects” risks diverting attention from the social and political relationships that shape and sustain such breakages. Extending this insight to people and communities targeted for abandonment, the struggle for disabled, sick, mad, and other debilitated people’s liberation must include both immediate and long-term strategies for caring, maintaining, and repairing our essential tools of survival, from assistive devices to affordable housing, from plastic tubes and straws to a regulated drug supply, from suicide barriers to safe workplaces. These infrastructures are not mere conveniences; they are the conditions of possibility for collective life and survival.
Making disabled kin in broken worlds draws us into solidarity with that which sustains our lives. In chapter 8, for example, Alice Wong frames the tubes and technologies sustaining her body as a form of critical infrastructure—one that facilitates and ensures her survival and flourishing. This solidarity extends beyond maintaining physical infrastructure to also nurturing social and affective infrastructure. It includes fostering good relations with those who repair and sustain our assistive and adaptive devices, such as the Chicago L train operators in chapter 4 who deploy the ramps, as well as in chapter 10 with the caregivers who nourish and affirm life through palliation. As we have seen throughout this book, infrastructural failures lead to individual injury, community strain, and, in many cases, isolation, debilitation, or even death. Put differently, infrastructure shapes not only our material worlds but the social relations through which disability communities are formed and sustained. Recognizing this connection compels us to reimagine care beyond individual survival, centering the shared responsibility of sustaining both disabled communities and the material conditions that uphold them. This fight forges bonds of solidarity across human, more-than-human, and built worlds, acknowledging that the objects, systems, and structures we rely on for movement, connection, joy, and survival are integral to our collective futures. As we fight for, dream up, design, and build new worlds, we must also develop new infrastructures that support multiplicity—of bodies, movements, and modes of survival—ensuring that liberation is not only imagined but materially sustained for us all.
We Nurture Disabled Kin by Learning from Our Disabled, Mad, Injured, Sick, and Debilitated Ancestors, Lineages, and Inheritances
As explored in chapter 3, disability inheritances may be genetic—biological connections linking disabled people to our ancestors or others who share a diagnosis—or epigenetic, carrying the imprints of trauma and injury across generations. Such inheritances can be painful, harmful, and challenging, yet they can also serve as sources of sustenance and solidarity. We inherit cultural and political communities, histories, knowledges, and skills that shape how we live and make sense of our bodies and minds, affecting how we move through the world and relate to each other. These inheritances not only ground us in shared experience but also equip us with tools to resist, adapt, and build collective futures within and against the often-hostile environments we inhabit.
Too often what gets passed down is what we must struggle against: white supremacy, settler colonialism, neoliberalism, and racial capitalism—systems and structures that are designed to break, injure, disable, debilitate, and kill. Yet, disability is not only produced by these systems but is also reproductive (chapter 3). Disability culture and disabled people’s experience, insight, skills, and wisdom are essential to disrupting the smooth flow of systems and structures designed to unevenly break us. Throughout this book, we have encountered stories of disabled people sustaining and protecting one another, keeping each other safe and alive in the face of murderous structural neglect, as well as more acute forms of state violence. Crip maintenance and disabled mutual aid refuses and resists abandonment, enabling access to, as we saw in chapter 8, life-saving electrical power during state-sanctioned outages (e.g., the #PowertoLive coalition) and mobilizing political power through cross-movement solidarities (e.g., Figueroa and her caregiver June Laing organizing together to improve the conditions of giving and receiving care). These inheritances also live in the creative refusals of twentieth-century asylum inmates and twenty-first-century mental health community care movements, who have long held one another and built life amid the wreckage of colonial and neoliberal mental health systems, as discussed in chapter 5. They are further forged in drug-user-led harm-reduction strategies, caught between a poisoned supply and involuntary treatment, practices highlighted in chapter 6. These inheritances are also deeply material, stitched into the kantha quilts in chapter 1, layers of intergenerational fabrics—protective and softened by wear—marking in our collective memory lives that were lived and lost to racist capitalist neglect and social erasure. We find such inheritances in the broken (dis)figure exposing genealogies of harms and healing in chapter 2, in Chun-shan (Sandie) Yi’s onesies that anticipate disabled futures in chapter 1, and in Stacey Park Milbern’s hand-me-down socks, linking her to disabled activists and organizers who came before in chapter 3. And, as we hope is made clear through the words, images, and citations woven throughout this book—including the graphic retelling of Catherine Frazee’s lecture in chapter 7—we, too, are recipients of these inheritances and lineages. The insights and observations offered here arise from ways of knowing and being cultivated within disability culture, passed down and carried with care across disabled and allied communities, and sustained through the critical solidarities that make it possible to move together in and through broken worlds.
Across time and place, disability inheritances and lineages shape possibilities for not just individual but also collective life and survival, offering ways of navigating diagnostic categories, institutional barriers, and systemic violence. They make room for kinship beyond normative family structures, offering rest, comfort, strength, solidarity, power, protection, and connection in the face of relentless isolation and differential abandonments. And, as we find our place within these lineages, we also confront intergenerational responsibilities to those who will inherit the remains of the stories, social systems, ecosystems, and fossil fuels that we leave behind. At the heart of antiabandonment is the act of witnessing and naming ongoing violences while remaining attuned to the history of the present—including its hauntings, ancestral legacies, and futures. As Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba (2023, 225) remind us, “The work before us is the work of our ancestors and the work of those who will come after: to relentlessly build new worlds, even on the edge of oblivion, and live in them anyway—together. That work, which sounds epic in scope and scale, begins with human connection, human relationships, and reciprocity and struggle. It begins with care.” Making disabled kin requires attending to these disabled lineages, breaking with that which is differentially breaking us, and holding on to one another as we hold out for, and collectively work toward, something better.
Sustaining Disabled Kin Requires New Infrastructures That Expand Our Capacity to Resist Abandonment, Show Up for One Another, and Forge a Collective “We” Capable of Contesting Hostile Futures
Making disabled kin anticipates and fosters new infrastructures, reinforcing our ability to care for one another in the face of neglect. As Hayes and Kaba (2023, 56) argue, “By not abandoning people, we contribute to a culture where we, ourselves, are less likely to be abandoned. By defending one another, or even rescuing each other, in times of danger, we are reclaiming our capacity to help each other survive.” In tending to these connections, making disabled kin shifts our focus from the individual to a collective “we” and moves us from a passive acceptance of how things are to an active practice of collective social struggle. Contributing to our collective needs, showing up, and taking part, these are things that can require significant amounts of time, labor, and flexibility, particular kinds of embodied or circumstantial capacities, and can also involve complex logistics and even personal risks—such as organizing and participating in the solidarity encampments or student hunger strikes in chapter 9 or the Drug User Liberation Front’s safer drug distribution initiatives in chapter 6. Showing up can also materialize in ways that are quieter or more intimate, as with the protective trees that stood watch for Rashni Stanford in chapter 5, dispelling her thoughts of self-harm and saving her life. Or, as in chapter 10, when Christina Crosby’s former student and friend simply sat with her as she recovered from the bike accident that broke her spine: “My friend offered her open, loving proximity, the gift of her presence,” writes Crosby (2016, 9). “I fell asleep, and awoke, and she was still with me.” The work of forging disabled kin requires harm reduction and palliation in the present, even as we work toward dismantling the systems and structures that break us. To struggle for disabled kin in hostile environments is to make holding on more possible—and when it’s not, to simply hold. As chapters 6 and 10 illustrate, palliation and harm reduction are not exceptions to but outcomes of living in broken worlds. Addressing these realities requires a politics that embraces brokenness rather than one that erases or ignores it, one that understands that sustaining the relationships and infrastructures that enable us to be together demands ongoing attention, labor, and nourishment. In fostering antiabandonment infrastructures, we collectivize risk and strengthen bonds of kinship and solidarity. As traced in chapters 3, 5, and 10, risk exists on a graded spectrum, and it can be mobilized as a force for collective survival, solidarity, and kin-making or wielded to deepen socioeconomic abandonment and reinforce individualized interventions.
Making disabled kin is not about erasing difference but about better understanding and navigating it; it requires sustained attention to the unevenness of our grounds for being together, to our shared experiences and struggles, as well as to our divergences. The uneven and contextually specific distributions of power and the differences made by our divergent positionalities, bodies, minds, histories, and experiences remind us that turning toward a collective “we” requires holding together both what we share and where we differ. Moving together demands that we tend to these tensions, learn from them—and from each other—as we forge paths ahead.
Altering our current systems and structures requires that we, too, be transformed, both as individuals and as collectives, and mobilize multiple strategies that are not reliant on any one set of embodied capacities. We need many experiences and perspectives, a wide range of capacities and skill sets, and infrastructure that supports us in showing up for one another. Embracing alteration as an ongoing relational process reshapes us and our conditions, keeping us open to further transformations yet to come in the fight for collective survival and more livable relations.