Episode 11: Patty Berne of Sins Invalid talks ”Stages of Grief: Crip Hearts on Fire.”

This week on the pod, I speak with Patty Berne, Co-Founder and Executive and Artistic Director of Sins Invalid, a disability justice performance project that centers people of color, queers, nonbinary and trans people with disabilities. 

 

Patty is a queer disabled author, artist, and organizer of Japanese and Haitian descent and is widely recognized for her work to establish the framework and practice of disability justice.

 

In the episode, we talk about how capitalism and industrial production have defined a normative mindbody as a body that can produce profit, and sees all other mindbodies as disposable, and how disability justice therefore reorients us to an economy based on care, where all mindbodies are sacred and are powerful not despite the complexities of our bodies but because of them. 

 

We also talk disabled ancestors from Frida Kahlo to Gloria Anzaldua, crip-centric liberated zones, disability as an aesthetic from which to make culture, and Patty’s forthcoming graphic novel. We then spend much of the episode talking about Sins Invalid’s upcoming performance, “Stages of Grief: Crip Hearts on Fire” at the ODC Theater in San Francisco, December 13-15th. Get tickets for that performance at odc.dance/sins invalid and follow Sins Invalid via their website at sinsinvalid.org and on Instagram at @SinsInvalid. 

 

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A transcript for this episode is available online. To access it, visit https://linktr.ee/thatshowthelightgetsinpodcast and scroll down to “Transcripts."