10/14/2019
Love, solidarity, and disability pride.
For National Coming Out Week we are highlighting LGBTQIA+ writers, activists and content creators over on our social media pages (Facebook and Instagram) @ UA Disability Culture.
Today we are highlighting Mia Mingus. Mia is a writer, educator and community organizer for disability justice and transformative justice. She is a q***r physically disabled korean transracial and transnational adoptee raised in the Caribbean. She works for community, interdependency and home for all of us, not just some of us, and longs for a world where disabled children can live free of violence, with dignity and love. As her work for liberation evolves and deepens, her roots remain firmly planted in ending sexual violence.
Mia is a founding and core-member of the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC), a local collective working to build and support transformative justice responses to child sexual abuse that do not rely on the state (i.e. police, prisons, the criminal legal system). She believes in prison abolition and urges all activists and organizers to critically and creatively think beyond the non-profit industrial complex.
Mia recently co-founded with disability justice activists Sandy Ho and Alice Wong. “Access Is Love aims to help build a world where accessibility is understood as an act of love, instead of a burden or an after-thought. It is an initiative to raise awareness about accessibility and encourage people to incorporate access in their everyday practices and lives.” You can watch the short video here by Alice Wong all about the campaign https://youtu.be/J_DyjEcMHdI and head to their website to learn more, check out the online store, and access resources & readings about disability justice https://www.disabilityintersectionalitysummit.com/access-is-love
You can read more from Mia on their website https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/ or through her social media accounts .mingus.
[image description: a black and white photo of Mia sitting on a chair in the woods, she is smiling. Text on the right reads “Because I would argue that ‘disability justice’ is simply another term for love. And so is ‘solidarity,’ ‘access,’ and ‘access intimacy.’ I would argue that our work for liberation is simply a practice of love—one of the deepest and most profound there is. And the creation of this space is an act of love.”]