We Keep Each Other Safe: Mutual Aid and the Methods of Graphic Medicine

Abstract

Mutual aid, a framework rooted in crip queer and trans, Black, indigenous, and people of color care practices, has increasingly been taken up through mainstream visibility and parlance. Dean Spade (2020) articulates that while aiming to meet survival needs, mutual aid does further politico-therapeutic work: it builds shared understandings as to why we do not have what we need, mobilizes people to expand solidarity and build movements, and engages communities in participatory problem solving through collective action. How is the project of graphic medicine entangled with mutual aid outcomes and sensibilities? How might a mutual aid framework crip graphic medicine? Elaborating genealogies of mutual aid in disability justice work and crip survival tactics brings into relief graphic medicine’s entanglements with mutual aid. The article first explores graphic medicine storytelling as grounded in shared genealogies of crip care. It then takes up Félix Guattari’s concept and practice of transversality to diagnose politico-therapeutic potentialities of graphic medicine.