Mutual Aid and Its Ambivalences

Lessons from Sick and Disabled Trans and Queer People of Color

Bibliographic Data

ID4413745
AuthorsAlexia Arani (corresponding author), Arani, Arani Arani (corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume46
Issue3
Pages653-662
Publication date2020-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0046-3663 • E-ISSN: 2153-3873
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/fem.2020.0033
OpenAlexW4285081374
LanguageEN
Citations received11

Feminist Studies 46, no. 3. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 653 Alexia Arani Mutual Aid and Its Ambivalences: Lessons from Sick and Disabled Trans and Queer People of Color Mutual aid projects and practices have erupted across the United States in response to COVID-19.1 People are organizing mask sewing projects, grocery deliveries, templates to ask landlords for rent reduction, exchange of hygiene products, and financial assistance for impacted individuals and communities. Demands previously labeled too radical or unrealistic—such as rent freezes, universal healthcare, defunding the police, and freeing all incarcerated people—are now being recognized as not only possible, but as necessary measures to keep each other safe. Amid national Black Lives Matter protests, the Minnesota City Council voted to disband its police force, and the Minnesota Freedom Fund received more than $30 million from over 900,000 donors in just a few weeks. While the mobilizations of mutual aid projects, nonprofits, and local and state governments indicate a willingness to restructure society to prioritize care and collective access, paradoxically, these highly visible forms of care amplify its absence for those who were experiencing multiple forms of marginalization even before the present pandemic, economic crisis, and protests against police brutality. Indeed, the collective care currently being enacted through mutual aid, radical political demands, and everyday acts of service have been 1. For a non-exhaustive list, see: “COVID-19 Mutual Aid,” It’s Going Down, https://itsgoingdown.org/c19-mutual-aid (accessed June 11, 2020). 654 Alexia Arani called for and organized by sick and disabled trans and queer people of color (TQPoC) for decades.2 Sick and disabled TQPoC have ample experiential knowledge on how to care for themselves and others—knowledge that is more important than ever in the face of the ongoing pandemic —yet many continue to lack large public platforms and networks of social support. As mutual aid efforts go mainstream—gaining recognition and resources but also facing the inevitable threat of co-optation— the needs, experiences, and expertise of sick and disabled TQPoC are likely to be invisibilized.3 These contradictions create highly ambivalent experiences for many sick and disabled TQPoC and for those of us who were already involved in mutual aid work before solidarity became a trending hashtag. Mutual Aid and Its Ambivalences Mutual aid is “a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions . . . by actually building new social relations that are more survivable .”4 Unlike charity and state-based social services, which frequently blame social problems on individuals’ moral failings, mutual aid recognizes that capitalist, white supremacist institutions are responsible for producing poverty, inequality, and violence. Mutual aid works to build lasting alternatives to state-sponsored systems of care by organizing grassroots networks of support that are reciprocal, transparent, and guided by participants’ resources, skills, and knowledge. The mutual aid projects of the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, and Zapatistas have 2. Patty Berne, “Disability Justice—A Working Draft,” Sins Invalid, June 9, 2015, https://www.sinsinvalid.org/blog/disability-justice-a-working-draftby -patty-berne; Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018). 3. The Minnesota Freedom Fund, which raised more than $30 million in donations , has come under scrutiny for its predominantly white leadership. This pattern has been found across a range of NGOs and philanthropic organizations . See Jonah Engel Bromwich, “The Minnesota Freedom Fund Has $30 Million and an Identity Crisis,” New York Times, June 16, 2020; and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 4. “What Is Mutual Aid?” Big Door Brigade, https://bigdoorbrigade.com/what-ismutual -aid (accessed June 11, 2020). Alexia Arani 655 shown that, through acts of collective care and mutual support, we can build the worlds we want to live in—where food, housing, healthcare, education, and emotional support are accessible to all.5 TQPoC have historically relied on one another for kinship, care, and resources. Yet, when it comes to care, our communities are marked by tensions between abundance and absence. Long before COVID-19, many

Disabled people · Health care · Mutual aid · Political science · Politics · Queer · Sociology · Demography · Gender Studies · Law · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Psychology · Public Administration

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