Care at the End of the World
Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip of Color Writing
Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing (Duke, 2025) demonstrates why we need radical disability politics and aesthetics for navigating contemporary crises of care.
Using an explicitly intersectional disability framework, or “crip-of-color critique,” this work interrupts dominant narratives about who deserves support.
In the aftermath of major US welfare reform in 1996, women-of-color and queer-of-color literature grappled with the disabling effects of state austerity measures and eviscerated social safety nets. By bringing a disability lens to works by contemporary American authors (including Audre Lorde, Jesmyn Ward, Karen Tei Yamashita, Octavia Butler, Aurora Levins Morales, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha) this book calls forward the critiques and possibilities in their literary representations of infrastructure—systems of education, sanitation, transportation, and healthcare.
Care at the End of the World examines and honors the imaginative work that disabled, feminist, and queer-of-color writers do to envision alternate infrastructural arrangements in a world and nation that has refused to support us.
