Jina B. Kim, "Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-Of-Color Writing" (Duke UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the new Books Network.

Welcome to New Books Network. My name is Clayton Gerard. My pronouns are he, him. And today I'm here with Gina Kim, author of Care at the End of the World, Dreaming of Infrastructure and Crip of Color Writing. In Care at the End of the World, Gina 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 U.S. 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 T. Yamashita, Samuel Delaney, and Aurora Levens 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 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.

So thank you so much for being here with me, Dr. Kim. This is such an exciting book and very important and relevant to the times, unfortunately. But I'm glad that we have. Yes. I'm glad we have this book, though, to like hold our hand a little bit as we're looking at, you know, potential future.

opportunities to create our own infrastructures of care and communities specifically inspired by these feminist and queer of color critiques and interventions into what care actually looks like. So I want to briefly hand it over to you for a little introduction to the listeners, if you want to share a little bit about yourself, and then we'll dive into the book.

Yeah, well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on New Books Network. So yeah, my name is Gina Kim. My scholarship and teaching, you know, engages the intersections of queer of color critique, critical disability studies, and ethnic American U.S. or sorry, ethnic American literature.

I'm originally from Metro Atlanta.

spent 23 years of my life in the South, and I'm currently an assistant professor at Smith College in the departments of English and the study of women, gender, and sexuality. Awesome. Thank you for that introduction, and I'm very excited for this conversation just because, like I just mentioned, a lot of these topics are very near and dear to a lot of our

parts and minds as we're navigating the current times. But to start off, I recognize that this book has been a long time in the making, even while we weren't necessarily having these kinds of conversations all the time, or at least in these

intersections of like disability studies, critical race studies, like also queer and feminist studies. So would you mind telling us a little bit about how this book came about for you? Yeah, of course. So I've been thinking a lot about, you know, the origin point of this book. So technically, you know, it began as a dissertation in 2012. And

And the dissertation discussed public infrastructure. So, you know, roads, wires, pipes, et cetera, as this kind of persistent literary motif that enabled writers of color to grapple with U.S. state divestment and the destruction of social safety nets in what I think of as a kind of long Reagan era.

I was also living in Detroit at the time of writing this dissertation. So, you know, infrastructural neglect, state divestment, state abandonment, these topics were very much on my mind. But, you know, this project was initially formulated during the Obama era. And so the stakes initially were framed a bit differently, right? Yeah.

But I think the actual origin point was my experience witnessing the horrific aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

So I was like a vaguely progressive person before, but this was a key event and key moment of witnessing in my journey towards a more radical politics and just, you know,

This was an event that presented to me on a really visceral level how cruel things are and were in our country. I was in college at the time, and I remember, you know, welcoming in students from New Orleans, seeing news footage of the Superdome and seeing footage of people who were largely poor and Black who were, you know, helpless on the streets and

and being treated as thieves and looters rather than storm survivors or people worthy of our care and support. And I remember being really changed by this event. And so part of this book is about me getting to the root of that shift in my worldview and thinking about how...

how Katrina, in fact, connects to the politics of welfare reform and also to our current gutting, our rabid gutting of governmental support through the Department of Government, so-called Department of Government Efficiency. So one of the ways I work through my

moment of witnessing Katrina is I have a chapter right on Jesmyn Ward's novel Salvage the Bones, which is a novel that is about Hurricane Katrina. And it allows me to connect the politics of disability, reproductive justice, and anti-Black austerity to that novel.

to that historical moment. Yeah, thank you for going over that. I'd love to continue along this thread of a bit of the materials that you drew from that inspired a lot of the work and critique that you develop in this book. So I listed some earlier when I was just describing the book, but would you mind telling us a little bit more about the archive that you draw on from this book? What about the works inspired you and felt really relevant to the critique that you're developing? Yeah.

Yeah, so just broadly speaking, this book reads contemporary feminist and queer of color literature against the grain of anti-welfare state narratives. So, you know, as we mentioned earlier, some of these narratives are the welfare queen, the non-citizen immigrant, and the disabled non-worker. And I really allowed...

feeling and inspiration to kind of guide my choosing of objects, right? So anything that allowed me to see infrastructure in a different light,

So my theoretical archive brings together concepts from feminist disability studies, queer of color critique and feminist studies of care and welfare. So some of the thinkers I draw from are Kathy Cohen, who I love. I mean, I love all of these thinkers. Right. So Leah Lakshmi, Piyapshna Samarasinha, who is really a kind of guiding intellectual spirit for this book.

Patty Byrne, who helped coin Disability Justice, Jasbir Puar, Leslie Fry, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Premalyn Addison. So a lot of the kind of disability, queer of color heavy hitters, right?

But, you know, I also see the literary imagination as an important site of feminist and queer theorizing. So some of the writers I draw from are Jasmine Ward, as we mentioned, Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower is featured in this book, analyzed in this book. I feel like it's a book that a lot of us are thinking about right now. Yeah.

Samuel Delaney is a key author. Audre Lorde, Leah Lakshmi Piepszna-Samarasinha, Cherry Moraga, and Aurora Levens-Morales. And so, you know, what shaped this archive is, well, first of all, foregrounding disabled feminist and or queer of color voices who have been, you know,

discussing the danger, right, of austerity and anti-welfare politics for a long time who have had to live in this atmosphere of cruelty and who have, you know, really borne the brunt of it. And my archive also wants to highlight the necessity of the radical imagination in particular as

a really important tool for us to disrupt state ideology and policy that says some people are more deserving of care than others. Yeah, thank you. I love that. And the centering of like the radical imaginative aspects of this, like that feels so important now when we're like really having to grapple with a lot of the material conditions around us changing shape or... Yes.

not existing anymore. So this idea of

starting to or even just like following along with the people that have been imagining otherwise is really important and it feels very relevant now. And I'd love to talk about kind of the Crip of Color methodology that you use and develop throughout the book. And you've talked about specifically drawing from like queer and disabled voices of color. But can you talk a little bit about how this Crip of Color methodology, how

how you approach the methodology and also how it informs the book. Absolutely. Yes. So, you know, broadly speaking, the Crip of Color method or Crip of Color critique is a method that interrupts these kinds of dominant state narratives about who deserves care and support

And, you know, in these these state narratives, many of which are kind of flooding our our inbox and our digital lives right now. Right. These state narratives, you know, often cast those most in need of care as deserving the least support. Right. It's a very kind of eugenic way of thinking, right.

And the Crip of Color method is an intervention that I see as a narrative intervention, right? Really overriding and interrupting these state narratives and offering different narratives of care and support in their place.

I also see it as a coalitional method. Right. And I think, you know, in this moment, coalition building is of utmost importance. Right. Like how can seemingly different groups with perhaps seemingly different political aims, how can we actually align and work together in this time? Right. So this is a method that tries to expand the coalitional policy possibilities that

between disability politics and feminist and queer of color politics, which is, you know, of course, work that other people are doing as well. So I'm thinking of people like Sammy Shock, you know, her new book, Black Disability Politics,

Jasbir Puar, Julie Avril Minnick. Right. So, you know, I'm not the only one who's doing this kind of coalitional intellectual work, but I'm hoping to, you know, add to that conversation in meaningful ways. Yeah.

And in particular, you know, the Crip of Color method is really trying to address the state-authored storylines of dependency that are used to justify increasing austerity, welfare reform, and the ongoing destruction of social safety nets. So I'm thinking, you know, again, figures like the Welfare Queen, the non-citizen immigrant, figures that are seen as

parasites on the public good. So, you know, these figures are seen as stealing resources that do not belong to them, as being overly needy and not contributing productively to American life.

And, you know, these storylines of dependency were and continue to be an immensely successful ideological campaign that is and was clearly a large scale effort to privatize care for the gain of elite billionaire classes. So what a Crip of Color critique does is

is it demonstrates the necessity of disability analysis in order to both identify and to refuse these narratives of dependency, which, you know, were once kind of a covert eugenics, right, that have straight up become overt eugenics in Trump era 2.0.

So my method not only identifies the eugenic logic at the heart of these, you know, myths of dependency, but also suggests that the solution is to not prove our autonomy and independence and not to, you know, throw disability under the bus, basically. But instead, you know, it encourages us to honor the

the webs of dependency and care that support us and enable us to live. So as a method, I read for relations of care and support in cultural texts and also the presence of a radical crip

Right. And places we might not expect to find it. Again, going back to the coalitional strategy, you know, I think of the Crip of Color method as a way to imagine the kinds of solidarities that might emerge around and not despite that.

So, you know, instead of seeing disability as a liability, we might kind of reimagine a disability politics of care as a means of bringing different groups together in a common context of struggle. Work management platforms, endless onboarding, IT bottlenecks, admin requests. But what if things were different? We found love.

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Yeah, I love that. And also how you specifically highlight dependency and this kind of tension with dependency versus independence. And like, are, I think a lot of impulse right now and dependency, quote unquote, is being thrown under the bus and these different figures that you mentioned. There's this impulse to be like, Oh, no, I'm independent. I work. Yeah. And I like,

provide for myself and everything else, but it really does take away from the web of relations that provide this coalitional politics that we need to fight for and use to fight against a lot of the harm that's happening. So I'd love to kind of continue

down this conversation of like talking about dependency, but also the webs of relations and care, specifically thinking about infrastructure, because it's such a loaded term. And specifically in this book, you're talking about infrastructure in different ways, whether it's like the webs of relations or just the actual like

material infrastructures that scaffold our society. So would you mind talking a little bit about what infrastructure is in this book, how you use it, and also what

the term infrastructural violence is and how that appears in these different visions of infrastructure. Yes. So that's totally spot on. I mean, infrastructure plays multiple roles in the book, right? It's kind of a...

maybe a fast and loose interpretation. But let me, you know, I'll just break down a little bit some of the different roles it plays. So, yeah,

One of the roles is pretty literal, right? So, you know, thinking about infrastructure as the built environmental networks that enable cities and regions to function. So, you know, like I mentioned, roads, pipes, wires, you know, the basic infrastructure

environmental networks that allow for the circulation of people, goods, ideas. But they also, you know, maximize life chances for some while debilitating others. So thinking of infrastructure as like a bio-necro-political instrument, right? So I look at literary representations of hard infrastructure, right, such as freeways and sanitation systems, right?

And I also look at what is called soft infrastructure. Right. So welfare systems, education and health care infrastructure.

Um, it's also key to my theory of disability. Um, so I also think of my theory of disability as a theory of dis slash enablement. So thinking about, you know, who is supported by infrastructure, who is disabled by it and, you know, which racialized and gendered subjects, um,

Through the exploitation of their unseen and unvalued labor, you know, who becomes the living infrastructure for other people's kind of fantasies of independence? And I think of independence as a kind of fantasy, right?

So, you know, related to that, I extend the definition of infrastructure to also encompass people as infrastructure. Right. So it also describes the support, labor of care, service and maintenance that's disproportionately important.

you know, performed by women and people of color. I'm also thinking of the more informal networks, you know, mutual aid networks that distribute resources in the absence of state assistance. Infrastructure is also a Crip of Color reading practice. It's key to the method. And it's key to the method because, you know,

I see a Crip of Color method as reading for relations of support.

Right. Reading cultural texts to see how they depict and engage relations of support and care. Right. How they depict these kinds of webs of dependencies that we're all embedded in. Right. Even though some dependencies are more stigmatized and made more visible than others. So infrastructure is really operating on multiple registers throughout the book.

And infrastructural violence is not a term that I came up with. Right. It's something that I believe is circulating in anthropological conversations. It's also a variation on Omar Jabari Salamanca's use of the term, which he uses to describe, you know, Israel's absolute control over Palestinian utilities and fuel reserves.

So in my book, in the context of my book, I describe infrastructural violence as the debilitating effects of state-sanctioned racialized resource deprivation, which is, of course, only intensifying in this current moment. So, you know, this could apply to the current attempts to cut Medicaid and SNAP, right? Yeah.

Another example being the cuts to levy maintenance that happened prior to the landfall of Katrina. Yeah.

So, you know, I use the term to name the dis-slash-enabling effects of degraded state infrastructures and the U.S. welfare state, as well as pro-austerity politics. So, you know, one of the arguments I make is that it's impossible to understand disability in the United States without understanding infrastructure. Right.

Right. Infrastructural violence is also a part of response to this wonderful interview that Kathy Cohen did yesterday.

In a 2015 issue of Signs where she talks about the necessity of expanding where we look for victims of and resistors to state violence. Of course, this includes police brutality. But, you know, she talks about the necessity of expanding the scope to thinking about, you know, underfunded and overpoliced schools.

and the denial of state welfare. Yeah, that's so key. And I really appreciate how...

clearly you discussed the term infrastructure and then also what infrastructural violence looks like and how different that can be not even thinking about services being cut but also the purposeful decisions of certain services being funded while others aren't and this like idea i really love how you said the fantasy of independence because like that is a very privileged

stance to be in where you don't even see the dependencies that are holding you up. So I love that framing of independence and how we're thinking about infrastructure and the modes of support. I'd love to talk about one of your chapters. So chapter two is on, it's like

refuse work, but also like refuse work. Yeah, I'm reading it correctly. So could you share a little bit about this concept and also how you're drawing from Samuel Delaney's book and you know what he's doing there? And then I'd also love to kind of talk about how you mentioned that

objection is a crip of color affinity. So like, how can we think through these affinities as we're talking about like politics of coalitions and solidarity and, um, what these concepts do when they're put together? Yeah. So, um,

As you beautifully synopsized, Refuse Work has two main readings, right? So Refuse Work, so the refusal of work, right? And Refuse Work, which is about the work of maintenance and sanitation. So I'm drawing it from Samuel Delaney's 2012 novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders.

And just, you know, to clue people in who maybe haven't read it, the novel has at its center this kind of gay, incestuous throuple of garbage workers and

And it takes place in this kinky Black queer separatist utopia that really valorizes the work of care, you know, has disabled characters at the center of its story. And it really leans into the like erotic and kinky registers of care, vulnerability, of dependency, and

And in that way, it does kind of recuperate abjection in a very crip of color way, which I'll get into shortly. And so this chapter also, you know, puts the novel into conversation with

anti-work politics. So thinking about, you know, a refusal of an American work ethos that, you know, ties human value to one's ability to work productively or to perform wage labor. And that also ties our, you know, access to care through work. Right. So I'm thinking about like how it's become so naturalized that, you

healthcare is often given through employment, right?

And I'm also putting all of this, you know, into conversation with disability politics. And I'm thinking about how disability is always a relationship to labor. Right. In our industrial and post-industrial economies, disability is understood primarily as an absence of productivity. Right. Or inability to perform waged labor. Right.

Right. So refuse work tied to the refusal of work. Thinking about how disability, anti-racist and anti-work politics coalesce and come together. Right. True.

back to garbage, thinking about refuse work or the intimate and often devalued work of managing people's waste and caring for them on this kind of very physical and bodily level. And waste management takes on multiple forms in this novel. So there's the literal work of managing garbage, right, of being a garbage worker, but it's also, you know, the erotic work of piss orgies, right?

snot eating and scat play. Am I allowed to say these, these terms on the podcast? Okay. Yeah. So I really think about how the novel is exploring the possibilities of queer eroticism and pleasure that might be derived from care and intimate labors. So garbage work, but also, you know, the work of managing people's literal waste and,

You know, so often care work is thought of as a burden, right, or an individual responsibility. But, you know, Delaney is really imagining a world where care work is hot and sensual and kinky. Right. So really thinking about really expanding, I think, possibilities for queer eroticism derived from care work in particular. Yeah.

And, you know, going back to the question of abjection as a crip of color affinity. So, you know, Kristeva, Julia Kristeva defines abjection as, you know, the piece of filth, waste or dung that kind of.

you know, haunts the borders of societal order and has to be kind of cordoned off or disavowed in order for the social order to function. Right. You know, many scholars have engaged the concept of objection. And I, you know, I think alongside Derek Scott, who talks about the rendering of Blackness as abject and,

And how this rendering creates a break that makes imaginable these kind of alternate understandings of kinship, gender and sexuality. And so in Delaney's novel, I'm arguing that the abject...

the kind of piece of filth, waste, or dung, right? Instead of being something that we need to fear or be anxious of, right? I'm talking about how it opens up generative possibilities for pleasurable connection that might otherwise remain inaccessible to racialized and disabled subjects. So one scene I discuss, for instance, is

there's this disabled character. He's called Little Man. He's one of the main characters in the novel. And he uses a catheter, right? And he uses his catheter bag as essentially like a sex toy or a tool in the middle of another... one of the novel's many piss orgies, right? And the catheter bag is really seen as an asset, right? And he's...

He's really valued in that community for his, yeah, his love of piss, his kinkiness, his nastiness. It's really what gives him value and worth in that context. And so the novel is engaged in what I think of as the very important work of resignifying the abject, right? Thinking about the abject as not...

an opportunity for disavowal, but actually an opportunity for connection and pleasure. Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate that. And just kind of the way that such a interesting and unique novel can reframe how we're thinking about, for example, how you're talking about care work and like the idea of care work being pleasurable. It's expanding what care work

can be and also how it can be experienced by both parties, which is very important, especially as we're talking about like care work and its many, many dimensions and iterations and forms. So I really appreciate that. And I want to also talk about

your discussion in chapter four on creating infrastructures of abundance. I think this is also tied together really well with thinking about the pleasure that can be embedded in care work. So would you mind talking about where this concept of infrastructures of abundance comes from and what such infrastructures would look like and what's so valuable about imagining these?

or realizing them? Yeah. So I think that the concept of infrastructure is of abundance for me comes explicitly from disability justice politics and, you know, refusing the idea that disabled people, low income people, people of color, queer people, you know, trans and gender nonconforming people to dispute the idea that

Vulnerable people deserve the bare minimum, right? And it's a kind of refusal of the bare minimum that is so often given to disabled people and, you know, for which we are expected to be grateful, right? Yeah.

Dory Midnight has this really wonderful quote that I think really encapsulates it, which is she says, more care, more of the time. Right. So and this is kind of in response to thinking about the.

accelerating and accumulating crises of care that are just intensifying everywhere. You know, the housing crisis, food crisis, crises of survival. Right. I feel like, you know, many of us are overwhelmed and we're like, well, what what can we do? Right. What is the right or perfect tactic to approach these crises?

crises of care what kinds of care infrastructures do we actually need and i think at this point in this moment at this juncture the answer is everything right we need everything um

So I feel like that is where the concept of infrastructures of abundance comes from. And, you know, one of the reasons I one of my kind of selective mechanisms for picking different texts is that.

you know, texts that excited me and their depiction of infrastructures of abundance. Right. So, you know, I just talked about Samuel Delaney and his imagination of this, you know, Black queer separatist utopia where there's abundant infrastructures for cruising and public sex.

So, you know, that's one infrastructure of abundance that I highlight. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is incredible at envisioning infrastructures of abundance, really leaning into the registers of speculative fiction and imagination. So, yeah.

In their book, Tongue Breaker, which is another book I discuss, they talk about, you know, a future in which perfume is a hate crime and stairs live in a museum. And they also have this wonderful poem called Femme Futures, which opens up the book where they imagine this like femme of color, elder retirement trailer park, right, where people are held with dignity and respect and

between all worlds. I'm also thinking about, you know, the ADAPT sit-in. It was either a sit-in or a die-in in 2017 where they occupied Mitch McConnell's office when they were trying to push through Trumpcare and defund Medicaid, right? And they won, right? Like Trumpcare in that first round

in that first go-round of Trump 1.0, right? Trumpcare was defeated. And, you know, so it's about also getting more money for vulnerable people and maybe even trying to hold the state accountable in addition to building alternate infrastructures of care, right? I'm also thinking about...

the infrastructures of abundance that are being put into place by people like Clean Air Club, right, in the midst of COVID and pandemic denial, right? So thinking about a future or even a present where we have free masks, air purifiers, free tests, right? And we had a glimpse of this for some time, right, during the earlier periods of the pandemic, but we

You know, there are still organizations out there who are trying to keep that dream alive. So those are a few examples that come to mind when I think of infrastructures of abundance. Yeah. And I just really want to also highlight along with it, you know, this idea of abundance.

for example, masks just being for like COVID or something like, no, they were very useful during the LA fires because of all the smoke and pollution and everything else. Like these kinds of infrastructures of abundance aren't just going to meet one specific need, but, you know, kind of like we've learned from

disability justice, racial justice, like all these different movements, like when you care for the people on the margins, everybody benefits. And I think that's like such a crucial point that you're making with infrastructures of abundance and also thinking about, um,

Like the failure of Trump care, like that's so important. And I'll be honest, I had not heard about that until reading your book. And like a lot of times we don't really acknowledge so much of the struggle that goes into protecting people or caring for people, especially when like the bad thing didn't happen. But we need to look at the examples where bad things didn't happen so we can learn how to, you know, use those tactics and strategies to

build better futures going forward. So I really love this idea and how you're talking about all the different facets of what this looks like. I'd love if we can spend a minute talking about dreaming because that's an important aspect. And like there, it's a very,

precarious thing because like dreaming can be very inspiring and hopeful, but also can feel very distant or even like inconsequential in a lot of ways because it can be a little bit more abstract and just fanciful almost. But would you mind talking about what place dreaming has in all of this and what dreaming can do? Yes. So,

My concept of dreaming of infrastructure, it's in part an homage to the late Patricia Yeager, who was my advisor in grad school. She wrote an intro to PMLA called Introduction, Dreaming of Infrastructure. So it's kind of a nod to her and the incredible intellectual legacy she left behind. But it's also...

building off of Robin Kelly's understanding of freedom dreaming. And he defines this as the imaginative practice of producing a vision that enables us to see beyond our immediate ordeals.

And I'm offering a kind of twist on Kelly's notion of freedom dreaming because disability is often seen as the opposite of freedom, right? Or like as antithetical to freedom. So thinking about the phrases wheelchair bound, bed bound, home bound, right? But this book is trying to explain how disability politics is

asks us to redefine freedom, right? Where it's not about the freedom of the individual, right? It's about recuperating interdependency, centering vulnerability and need, right? And also, again, like just recognizing what enables us to survive, you know? What are the support systems that allow survival of vulnerable people to happen, right?

You know, and I'm also, you know, drawing upon dreams across my whole archive. Right. So the parable of the sower opens up with a dream. Right. With a dream sequence. I'm also thinking back to this bridge called my back. Right. And Cherry Moraga's dream of a bridge. Right. Which is a dream of mutual support and reciprocity between queer women of color in particular. Right. Right.

Dreaming also in the context of my book is drawing on disability justice and what Akemi Nishida and Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha have called bed activism.

And thinking about dreaming as a key disabled practice in particular, it allows you to be in bed. It allows you to go inward. It really prioritizes and valorizes that work of introspection, going inward, the imagination, which is accessible to many. Right.

dreaming and going inward have been really key to disability justice and disability visioning. You know, many disability justice activists have hearkened back to the legacy of Gloria Anzaldúa, right? Who they see as a kind of queer disabled elder who had to do a lot of her writing and theorizing and work from bed, right? Yeah.

I also see dreaming as a tool of refusal. I think it allows us to refuse the infrastructural arrangements of the present, right, which are just increasingly causing more and more death and debilitation.

And I think it also prompts us to refuse the inevitability of a future without any kind of collective support, right? That future is actually not inevitable. And, you know, it's about envisioning and being creative about what kinds of systems of care and support do we want to build, right? Which infrastructures of care are already present?

And, you know, how do these how do these cultural texts gesture towards what we have yet to build or what we have yet to imagine? And I want to just pull in a quote from Leah Piepzna-Samrasinghe because I think it's so both hilarious and powerful. So, you know, they once said to Laura Flanders, they said, I think the imagination is one place that we are powerful.

I think that we don't have the state. We don't have the prisons. We don't have the cops. Thank God. What we do have is the wild, queer, feminist of color, decolonial imagination.

Yeah, that's so powerful. And yeah, it really sums up a lot of what we're talking about with imagination and dreaming and like the actual care needs that we have like on an individual level and then on a collective because right now.

in the U.S. at least, where we're both based, like these resources of care don't really exist as they should. So imagining what this kind of care work and infrastructural support and things can look like, whether that's people or actual like concrete supports is so important. So I really appreciate how you highlight this and also speak to it as people

from a lineage, from like freedom dreaming and from these other interventions that people have been making for many years. So thank you so much for discussing that. I do want to give the opportunity as we're wrapping up to reflect on anything that you would like to speak to that maybe we haven't gotten a chance to address yet, if you would like. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think that just building off of your last comment about legacy and lineage, you know, the timeframe of this book is

you know, the anchoring historical event as 1996 welfare reform, but I'm also looking at a lot of the key feminist writing, feminist of color writing that emerged in the 70s and the 80s where people were grappling with another moment of infrastructural divestment, right? So thinking about how the budgets, you know,

for public housing and for mass incarceration actually flipped from the beginning of the Reagan administration to the end, right? So, you know, I think it's a really important time to look back at these pretty recent legacies, right? To look at the work of Audre Lorde, of Gloria Anzaldúa, of Octavia Butler, right? And just to remember that

we're not alone, right? And that we do have legacies of resistance to draw from, not only for a critique of the present moment, but also for our own spiritual resilience, right? To give us, I don't know if hope is the exact word, but

but to give us sustenance, right? To remind us that, you know, even if we are part of the most targeted groups of the current administration, right, our existence is actually valuable, right? And there are long legacies of many incredible writers and activists who have been disrupting these anti-care, anti-welfare state ideologies for decades.

Decades. Right. So we do have a powerful lineage to draw from. And I hope that this book helps us helps remind us of that.

Yeah, I love that. Thank you. That's such a great place to leave this conversation. So once again, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for joining me, Dr. Kim, and this wonderful conversation and also just this brilliant book to all the listeners. Definitely check it out. It's so relevant and timely, but also very sustaining and inspiring.

careful in both senses of like your very intentional aspects and qualities writing the book, but also just full of care in the sense of all the dreaming that you're drawing on and the dreaming that you're contributing to us. So thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for having me.