ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to understand how survivor narratives subsist as stories of disability. Through a close reading of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's memoir Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home (2015), the author outlines a method of bearing witness to the traumatic and sensorial afterlives of sexual violence and forced migration. An inability to narrate violent pasts arises throughout Dirty River. As a guiding leader in the movement for disability justice, Piepzna-Samarasinha inflects the violence of colonialism into the contemporary politics of disability justice, insisting that abuse and ability are not detached from colonial histories. Reconsidering PTSD as a disability narrative, Dirty River examines the connections between abuse and disability, offering restorative approaches to intergenerational trauma attuned to the varied levels of capacity for sick and disabled queer people of color. Located at the intersection of trauma studies, queer disability studies, and women of color feminism, this chapter destabilizes traditional approaches to disability and recovery, forwarding a method of engaging abuse/disability through the unspoken, the embodied, and the dynamic practice of listening to what goes unsaid.
