Behind the Scenes with the Performers of Disability Liberated

October 9th: Online pay-per-view premiere of Disability Liberated (available indefinitely!)

October 11th: Local Bay Area screening of Disability Liberated

This weekend Sins Invalid premieres the footage of Disability Liberated -- a furious elegy paying homage to the countless disabled lives that have been lost to the violence of able-bodied supremacy through incarceration, policing and institutionalization.Today, watch and listen to our performers reflect on their own experiences and interactions with institutionalization, police violence, incarceration, and disability.[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okUNtUwv2Vg&index=8&list=PLFWmB1-4Sk-HGUuHu-tzTX-fjnpqMy2ny[/embed]We cannot comprehend ableism without grasping its interrelations with heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism, each system co-creating an ideal bodymind built upon the exclusion and elimination of a subjugated “other” from whom profits and status are extracted.

Disabled people of the global majority -- black and brown people -- share common ground in our struggle for life and justice. 500+ years of violence against black and brown bodies includes 500+ years of bodies and minds deemed dangerous by being non-normative – “deviant”, “unproductive”, “invalid.” Just as we can trace the origins of the police to slave patrols, the coercive warehousing of people with disabilities and the rampant violence visited upon us today is rooted in eugenics, forced sterilization, and outright genocide.And if the ruthless violence of able-bodied supremacy were not bad enough, we also find ourselves confronted with the myriad ways in which ableism renders this violence invisible. Seldom do we find mainstream discussions of the fact that people with disabilities are disproportionately subjected to police violence, nor do we hear of the scores of children with disabilities that are abused, neglected, even caged as un-human, murdered by their families or “caregivers” for failing to perform able-bodiedness. Similarly invisible is the callous herding of people with disabilities into jails, prisons, and institutions such as “nursing homes,” “psychiatric facilities,” and “rehabilitation centers”While we grieve those who have been lost, we also celebrate we who remain, and struggle towards what is yet-to-be. Disability justice is a vision and practice of this yet-to-be, a map that we create with our ancestors and our great grandchildren onward, in the width and depth of our multiplicities and histories, a movement towards a world in which every body and mind is seen as valuable and beautiful.Text by David Langstaff and Patricia Berne on behalf of Sins Invalid. For more information, visit us on Facebook or email us at info@sinsinvalid.org

Info on our Bay Area Screening

Info on Global Premiere & Online Viewing