Jina B. Kim, Care at the End of the World

Please join us in Hershey Salon on Thursday February 19th at 4 PM for Dr. Jina B. Kim’s talk on her new book, Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing. This is one of the most highly anticipated books in disability studies this year!

In Care at the End of the World, Jina B. Kim develops what she calls crip-of-color critique, bringing a disability lens to bear on feminist- and queer-of-color literature in the aftermath of 1996 US welfare reform and the subsequent evisceration of social safety nets. She examines literature by contemporary feminist, queer, and disabled writers of color such as Jesmyn Ward, Octavia Butler, Karen Tei Yamashita, Samuel Delany, and Aurora Levins Morales, who each bring disability and dependency to the forefront of their literary freedom dreaming. Kim shows that in their writing, liberation does not take the shape of the unfettered individual or hinge on achieving independence. Instead, liberation emerges by recuperating dependency, cultivating radical interdependency, and recognizing the numerous support systems upon which survival depends. At the same time, Kim demonstrates how theories and narratives of disability can intervene into state-authored myths of resource parasitism, such as the welfare queen. In so doing, she highlights the alternate structures of care these writers envision and their dreams of life organized around reciprocity and mutual support.

Jina B. Kim is an Assistant Professor of English and Gender Studies at Smith College, studying feminist disability studies, queer-of-color critique, and contemporary multi-ethnic U.S. literature. Her talks and publications address topics such as self-care, care and racial capitalism, queer kinship networks, anti-work disability politics, disability justice politics and writing, and contemporary feminist-of-color literature and culture.

This event is hosted by the Asian American Reading Group and sponsored by UCLA Department of English, the UCLA  Asian American Studies Center, and the UC Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice grant.

For more information about this event, please contact Katarina Yuan (kyuan3@g.ucla.edu) or Brenda Wang (wangbr@g.ucla.edu).