Kwetsbaarheid — Over raken en geraakt worden

Poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidence through the mail. They sent each other handwritten and typewritten letters and postcards often with inserted items including articles, money, and videotapes.

The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 gathers this unique correspondence in which Lorde and Parker discuss their work as writers as well as the intimate details of their lives, including periods when each lived with cancer. These letters are a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the minds and friendship of two great twentieth century poets.

Introduction by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan.

Through an Addict’s Looking-Glass is an exercise in meaning-making, a thinking-out-loud. Waithera Sebatindira unravels how it feels to live as an addict under capitalism, pondering how engaging with these experiences could bring the horizon of liberation towards us.

Through embodied explorations of addiction and recovery, Sebatindira invites us to inhabit crip time, a concept that describes different temporal realities in the lives of disabled people. In this collection, the addict’s crip time is distorted, mutable and non-linear, hopping backwards and forwards through memory loops and memory loss. Blackout is time travel; sobriety is failure; finitude, freedom.

An uncompromising rejection of the objectification of addicts across the political spectrum, this powerful meditation on illness, disability, solidarity and spirituality illuminates their indispensable contributions to the building of a new world.

Waithera Sebatindira is a Kenyan writer based in London. Their previous writing and research interests have included food imperialism, drag kings and gender transformation. They are a co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University.

A cycle of stories linking queer memory, activism, death, and art in a transpoetic history of desire and touch.

Dances of Time and Tenderness is a bold, sensual cycle of transpoetic stories that blend memory and movement in an innovative choreo-text of rage, sweetness and sorrow. A dance hall where the dead and the living meet, the tales take us from the dungeons of 1990s San Francisco to the goldsmith’s forges of the earliest cities, tracing a transgenderational lineage of queer carnality. Not a memoir, but a collective memory, Julian Carter invites us to join artists and AIDS activists, sailors and skeletons, to fulfill the trans promise: “what we do with our bodies changes worlds.”

The long-awaited essay collection from one of the most influential voices in disability activism that detonates a bomb in our collective understanding of care and illness, showing us that sickness is a fact of life.

In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the page to How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed? It was not long before this essay, “Sick Woman Theory”, became a seminal work on disability, because in reframing illness as not just a biological experience but a social one, Hedva argues that under capitalism—a system that limits our worth to the productivity of our bodies—we must reach for the revolutionary act of caring for ourselves and others.

How to Tell When We Will Die expands upon Hedva’s paradigm-shifting perspective in a series of slyly subversive and razor-sharp essays that range from the theoretical to the personal—from Deborah Levy and Susan Sontag to wrestling, kink, mysticism, death, and the color yellow. Drawing from their experiences with America’s byzantine healthcare system, and considering archetypes they call The Psychotic Woman, The Freak, and The Hag in Charge, Hedva offers a bracing indictment of the politics that exploit sickness—relying on and fueling ableism—to the detriment of us all.

With the insight of Anne Boyer’s The Undying and Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, and the wit of Samantha Irby, Hedva’s debut collection upends our collective understanding of disability. In their radical reimagining of a world where care and pain are symbiotic, and our bodies are allowed to live free and well, Hedva implores us to remember that illness is neither an inconvenience or inevitability, but an enlivening and elemental part of being alive.

The book Amplifying brings together written manifestations that trace the beginnings of Black feminism in the Netherlands. Amplifying means giving credit to, mentioning, over and over, and supporting the circulation of sources and authors that are formative for our thinking and practices. In the early 1980s, the political term “black” (zwart in Dutch) was introduced in the Netherlands to build alliances between women from different diasporic communities, who were faced with racism in their everyday lives.

Archival materials featured in this book include the original manuscript of the essay “Survivors: Portrait of the Group Sister Outsider” (1984), written by Gloria Wekker in collaboration with the Black lesbian literary group Sister Outsider, the seminal speech Statement of the Black Women’s Group (1983) by Julia da Lima, a contextualizing interview with Tineke E. Jansen and Mo Salomon (1984), excerpts from the book launch of Philomena Essed’s Everyday Racism (1984), and short texts authored by other Black feminist groups in the Netherlands, such as Zwarte Vrouwen & Racisme, Flamboyant, Ashanti, and Groep Zwarte Vrouwen Nijmegen.