Defiant Memory as Disability Justice: An Interview with Patty Berne of Sins Invalid

Abstract

Defiant Memory as Disability Justice: An Interview with Patty Berne of Sins Invalid Alison Kopit (bio) Alison Kopit, a cultural worker, interviews Patty Berne, a renowned activist and artistic director of the Bay Area–based performance project Sins Invalid, about her involvement with the group. They focus on a 2015 visual art exhibition and performance called Disability Liberated as a robust example of defiant memory practices. The interview explores Berne’s arts-based resistance work grounded in disability justice, focusing on the process and production of Disability Liberated, which coincided with the release of the book Disability Incarcerated and a corresponding conference that revolved around the incarceration of disabled people.1 The Disability Liberated project exhibited defiant memory practices and recognized state and interpersonal violence against disabled people of color. Featuring the art and stories of several formerly and currently incarcerated artists, Disability Liberated sought to amplify the voices and struggle of incarcerated disabled people and to visibilize stories that had been structurally silenced. Berne begins by introducing herself and contextualizing her work within the landscape of resistance. Berne: I’m a cofounder of Sins Invalid, along with Leroy Moore. My title is the executive and artistic director of Sins Invalid. I locate myself within a long history of resistance, both as a Haitian Japanese woman and as someone who’s participated in justice movements for over thirty years. Kopit: Do you want to tell readers who might be less familiar with disability justice a bit about it and how it departs from other forms of activism? Berne: [Sins Invalid has produced] a lot of text that describes, in robust and beautiful ways, what disability justice is, but at its core, it’s about recognizing and respecting the ways that our bodies live in the world and not complying with cis-hetero-capitalist expectations of how we move and love and work. That generates the principles of recognizing wholeness, of interdependence, of sustainability, and of anticapitalism. What’s ironic is that these ideas are [End Page 415] understood as revolutionary, but really, it’s the truth of our embodied lives. What is revolutionary is the practice of disability justice. In every organization, there would be collective access and we wouldn’t be ashamed of what we need. We would share responsibilities for meeting people’s needs and we’d keep a conscious balance of autonomy and community. Collective liberation necessarily means cross-disability solidarity. Kopit: I’m interested in some of the various ways that Sins Invalid uses disability justice as a framework in resistance work. Would you speak a little to that? Berne: I think even having an organization led by disabled people of color, built by disabled people of color, and for the benefit of disabled people of color is an act of defiance. To have a space where it’s a given that we are beautiful, that we are important, that we are amazing and sexy and powerful, that we can make history and help create a future of justice is defiant. Kopit: I’m curious about your experience working with other activist and art spaces with this approach. What kinds of responses do you receive? Berne: People have been really receptive because of the way that we can model it. We can start with one community at a time. That’s how movements happen. If people are going to be transformed by this practice, it’s going to take time. Disability justice is not just a theoretical ideal; it’s about how we treat each other and how we see each other in community. Kopit: I think you’re hitting on a difficult balance between this immediacy to do things now, because we don’t have infinite time, and also this patience and grace you have to have in going community by community. Berne: There’s a tension there, certainly, but I think that the process we use to reach each other is as important as the numbers. We’ve seen so many people with disabilities sacrificed. Disabled people of color shared the brunt of [Hurricane] Katrina’s violence. Folks who were in nursing homes and were shot with morphine, which was basically euthanasia.2...