No Body is Disposable/Nobody is Disposable

No Body is Disposable is a hand embroidery I made as part of the Crip & Ally Care Exchange. My partner in the project, Lauren Rose, and I spoke a lot about internalized ableism as it relates to the pressure to be productive, and larger themes of internalized capitalism. I read an essay by Ellen Samuels, Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time, that resonated deeply. I was struck by Samuels’ description of how chronic illness impacts her daily life. She states “[crip time] requires us to break in our bodies and minds to new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and feeling and moving through the world. It forces us to take breaks, even when we don't want to, even when we want to keep going, to move ahead. It insists that we listen to our bodyminds so closely, so attentively, in a culture that tells us to divide the two and push the body away from us while also pushing it beyond its limits. Crip time means listening to the broken languages of our bodies, translating them, honoring their words.”

I made this embroidery to illustrate themes from Samuels’ article that really described my experience, including her description that she “had crossed some invisible and excruciating threshold from being someone with health problems to being a problem, apparently insolvable”. I took video of the embroidery hung in a window, with sun streaming through the gauzy fabric, and wind causing the fabric to ebb and flow and distort the image. I hoped to capture the non-linear and unpredictable nature of living with chronic illness, while also trying to capture some of the peace of allowing oneself to embrace this and meet the bodymind where it is, rather than forcing external/internalized expectations upon it. Then electronic musician Mute City created a soundtrack for the video, you can watch it here.