In a second-story apartment in Flatbush, three of us are sitting on my friend's bed where we spend most of the afternoon. I've just made us all plátanos and fríjoles after making the hour-long trek by subway and foot across Brooklyn—an effort I was finally able to accomplish (though not without difficulty) after many debilitating flares and pain days between us all, requiring several postponements of our plans to gather. Within the social and material architectures of an ableist world, isolation is itself a treacherous landscape and we often must choose one pain over another. We devour what is on our plates, a shared language by way of food common to our ancestral homes of Guyana, Costa Rica, and Colombia. Black and brown, sick and disabled, (gender)queer femmes, we. Our own kind of anti-colonial coven. Our bodies leaning into each other, sharing childhood memories and stories of our romances and families, dreaming up future projects, spouting ideas backed by critical theory, calling up ancestors, grieving the violent state of the world, scheming against the heteropatriarchy, cackling at jokes until our cheeks are sore. After days and days of isolation from each of our chronic illness struggles, the company we keep on this afternoon is a deep nourishment, a life-giving infusion of queer kinship, affection, and love. We barely leave the bed. The bed is cozy and warm, big enough for us to move around, to adjust our limbs and spines as needed. Our bodies ache and swell with each of our complaints. We pass around the heating pad, the bowls of ice cream, the ibuprofen, the indica, the DJ privileges. We make of the bed a kind of outerspace as the noises of the city, our work-day demands, the fatigue borne of the pervasive reach of racialization and sexualization of our bodies, of the ableist gaze upon our bodies, fade away for an afternoon. The bed as a space for our gathering brings reprieve. It is where the party is at, where we weave our lives in that singular and beautiful moment, us three. The bed is the accessible place where we can both care for our bodily needs and feel alive together. The hours pass, and we stay, and we stay, and we stay.

Bed/Life, Here and in the Horizon

In the 2019 Brooklyn Museum exhibition, "Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall," a piece of a bed is unassumingly placed amongst other brighter and more eye-grabbing art installations. Yet it pulls at me the strongest as I meander through this stunning exhibit featuring queer and transgender artists and commemorating the 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn: a crucial moment in queer and trans liberation efforts. Created by Constantina Zavitsanos and titled, I think we're alone now (Host), 2016 (2008-16), the conceptual sculpture is constructed of a full mattress topper set in a wooden frame and molded by "eight years sleep with many." Placed in the section of the exhibit titled "Desire" it is accompanied by this object label description:

The residue of sleep, sex, and rest suffuse Constantina Zavitsanos's minimalist and poetic sculpture. Constructed from a used mattress topper, the work holds traces and permanent imprints of varying forms of togetherness shared by Zavitsanos and others over the course of eight years. By coupling ideas of being alone with another person and multiple meanings of hosting, the title evokes dependent and hospitable forms of "getting together" and "getting away" to consider the nature of intimacy. 1

Not mentioned in the sculpture's display is Zavitsanos' status as a disabled artist, though many queers in the disability justice and arts community will recognize their name and understand that a framework of feminist care and dependency ethics permeates the work. For many of us existing with chronic illness and disability, the bed is one of our primary locations of residence, and therefore, of living itself. I read this artwork as speaking from and to this experience, an important iteration of what our sick and disabled communities often call bedlife, insisting that to be bed-bound is not to be materially or socially death-bound, but to exist in alternative forms of living that do not adhere to the spatial and temporal architectures of ableist normativity. 3

The mattress topper as a visual metonym for the bed extends the bed beyond its domestic and heteronormativized purpose. Under capitalism, the bed's function is primarily as a site from which to procreate the heteropatriarchal nuclear family that will nurture future workers, and to recover just long enough for the tedium of the next workday. Articulating the bed through a lens of queer disability politics and aesthetics, what Zavitsanos' piece does is revalue the bed as a site of potential for anti-capitalist rest and non-normative, queer and disabled forms of closeness that escape the surveillant reach of compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory ableism. While staying in bed is normatively labeled as a sign of laziness—even for the sick who under capitalism's drag and drone are expected to get out of bed and to work nonetheless—for many of us, staying home, staying in bed is not a choice. It is a matter of our body's survival. As sick and disabled queers, bedlife is also a source of diverse and non-normative intimacies—with ourselves, each other, more-than-human and sensory worlds around us. Sculpted by "eight years sleep with many," the bed, for Zavitsanos, is itself an archive illuminating the politics and poetics of hosting and "the stay" as queer intimacies are formed in and with the body.

Further, the themes of this exhibit's section on desire evoke the linkages between intimacy and future-making, collapsing the space between queer desire for each other and one another's bodies, and the particularly queer politics of desire for a world unbound by oppressive structures and the limitations of imposed binaries. As the end of the section placard states, "Looking toward tomorrow, these artists offer glimpses into other ways of being and remind us that, in the words of theorist José Esteban Muñoz, 'queerness is always in the horizon.'" 4 While for Muñoz, queerness is not an ontologically fixed category, instead a condition of futurity not-yet in existence but always becoming—brownness is pre-supposed in queerness and is constitutive of the utopian impulse. He writes, "Brownness is already here. Brownness is vast, present, and vital. It is the ontopoetic state not just of people who live in the United States under the sign of latinidad but of a majority of those who exist, strive, and flourish within the vast trajectory of multiple and intersecting regimes of colonial violence." 5 The bed is thus a spacetime for cultivating connection in the brown here and the queer not-yet, a postcolonial and anticolonial subversion of the nowhere and no-more that the sick-disabled figure is projected into through a presumed absence from public life and from the future itself. 6 The bed, as a somatechnic mattering, a "dynamic means in and through which corporealities are crafted," and through which we as beings are "engendered in relation to others and to a world," shifts the nowhere and no-more of our sick/disabled bodies into an everywhere and always (have been and will be.) 7

The Brooklyn Museum exhibition title itself, "Nobody Promised You Tomorrow," quotes black transgender activist and leader, Marsha P. Johnson who was a central figure of the 1969 Stonewall Riots. Johnson's statement follows her remark on complaint as a useless practice, calling us instead toward socially transformative action. Nobody promised us tomorrow, so we have to claim it, make of it what we will. A kind of inverse of queer, transgender, disabled, and black, indigenous, and people of color life as being relegated to the death-bound, as bound to the no-future, Johnson's words rally a collective effort that projects our lives into the horizon. They acknowledge the coloniality of violence threatening our futures as a historical mode against which we must labor; the utopian impulse as an ontopoetic project of resonance between all of us for whom tomorrow is not promised, as it is only those deemed "fully human" and not those of us valued as less-than, who are vowed to the enterprise, projections, and machinations of settler colonial futurity, assuredly bonded to it.

I read a kinship between Muñoz' and Johnson's thinking here, communing in the Brooklyn Museum exhibit with Zavitsanos' piece as it invokes the queer, disabled worlding and future-making occurring from the space of the bed, presupposed and constituted by the radical black, indigenous, and people of color impulses of the elsewhere beyond the violence configuring our lives. Ableism contours everyday life for the chronically sick through multiple modes of subjugating and subjectivating policy and discourse. We come up against liberalism's defining of the fully human as a self-determining subject driven by the will to eradicate our disability (and therefore, our disabled selves) through the imperative of cure. We are subject to society's neoliberal accusations of illness-as-unreason, of laziness and failure, and expected to get out of bed and into capital's normative temporal flows of productivity and profit. And we are prone to repetitions of trauma through the medical industrial complex's configuration as a settler colonial diagnostic apparatus of surveillance, impugnment, negation, and alienation. In the face of these systems, bedlife is a vital counterpoint to this violence, a portal to crip fugitivity, existential and political affirmation, and connection. It is an ever-mutating formation and praxis of disabled mattering, hosting in a permeability of body as home and history. Through bedlife, we nurture affinity and desire, intimacy without surveillance, opacious vulnerability and fugitive erotics, life-giving and life-making encounter with each other. What it is to want — in all its senses, suggests there is a relevant kind of intimacy between what we are denied as sick and disabled queers in a heterosexist and cis-sexist society founded on racial capitalism and colonial regimes of body, self and other—and how we share closeness, cultivating desire for each other and other possible worlds. (To want for nothing must be a kind of dwindling, to want is a way of knowing we are alive.) Within the aesthetic-political conjurings of intimacy and aliveness, possibility and becoming, this paper looks to the bed as a heuristic and material site, itself a horizon and already-here-ness for sick/disabled poesis and relation (poesis-as-relation and relation-as-poesis), taken up for a radical politics of feminist carework, queer desire, crip time, and anticolonial worldmaking.

*

We are in the stay. Some in bursts of the short-term—a day or two at a time, a week or a month, in flare. Some in the long-term, years, life-long. In convalescence, we remain in the place of the bed as both limit and expanse. We are in the stay. We keep each other company when we can, present to needs and desires: bring tea, medicine, herbs, hot compress, poetry, soup, groceries, quarters for laundry. We steady each other. We assuage the pangs of loneliness, stay our alienations and fears by tending our bodies, each other's. We stay up late and stay each other up, offer support, nourishment, laughter, distraction from pain. We are in the stay, temporary visitors or live-in companions, friends and lovers, family. We give each other the power of endurance, the stay in us. We suspend the feeling that can overwhelm us in the grief of our debilitations, a stay of the world's proceedings against our bodies. We stay in our joys, creating them together in spite of, because of, through and in our chronically sick corporeal devastations, the devastations of history, of the world. Variously mobile and immobile, we are in the stay.

Host

The framework of illness-as-disability, in articulating the bed as a site of desire, intimacy, and horizon for the sick/disabled queer body, brings a multitude of meanings to the notion of the artist in bed as "host." What does it mean, as a sick body, to be host to chronically-present viruses and bacteria and other complexes of illness, these uninvited guests who feed on my insides and limit my reach to an outside that is considered being in the world, that render me a body assumed to be outside of the world, because I am often bound to the inside of the home? I host and therefore, am bedbound, forced into the stay. Yet, the imaginative and epistemological difference I am afforded from that space invites me to view hosting as a source of connection, moving me out of the isolations wrought by chronic illness. I stay, therefore I host. Hosting is a kind of open door to the other to enter into our field of being, our homes and bed spaces, for a party or a stay. To host is therefore rendered multiple in its meanings: the body in the chronicity of pathogenic presence effected through transnational flows of medical coloniality; and as an anti-colonial practice of disalienation, hospitality, and invitation into the erotic and social life lived in, or supported by, the space of the bed. To host challenges the notion that to be chronically sick and bedbound is an existence delimited by isolation and social death produced in the bedbound subject as one denied full entry into the western, liberal, public-political articulation of the human.

Many of us contending with chronic illness, and whose politics regarding illness, disability, and the body have been informed through our experiences of illness and within the networked communities we've built, (what many call the community of "spoonies"), understand our illnesses in ways that exceed the normative framing foregrounded by western allopathic medicine and the medical industrial complex. Understanding the transnational flows of pathogens hitching rides and spreading through human travel and transport of animals is an important aspect of global efforts to stabilize public health and well-being. And yet, too often, those efforts perpetuate strategies and tactics rooted in medical coloniality, reproducing variform violence that impacts the world's most vulnerable populations. But beyond the global politics of health and its historical inheritances, we also understand illness as not merely an individual phenomenon, an unfortunate confluence of physiological events, a failure of our bodies and immune systems, a challenge posed by particular genetic inheritances. It is never merely pathogenic. It may be some of these things, but chronic illness is also a condition of global entanglement within the colonial and postcolonial milieu of racial capitalism, its afterlives, its historical traumas. It is a precisely constitutive element of the entangled system of the coloniality of power. It is an expression of settler colonialism's ongoingness within society and on our bodily realities; an expression of the confluence of environmental devastations of the earth rendered a worldwide extractive zone; the capitalist imperative for infinite accumulation of wealth that requires vicious exploitation of land and labor; of wars waged in the service of all these things. It is a symptom of the exponential and often untraceable industrial toxicities and toxic patriarchal masculinities animating modernity. 8 We host, as in: we carry the world in the body.

As science has come to be deeply shaped by causality rooted in Newtonian physics, the physicks of etiology and epidemiology tend to rely on empirical research that can identify the determinants, (causes, risk factors) of health-related states. Many indigenous medical sciences have known for centuries about the entangled nature of individual and collective well-being of human and non-human life, and of the human body as an ecosystem deeply intertwined with the social, political, and planetary ecosystems, placing historical memory at the center of knowledges about healing illness. Nonetheless, and not surprisingly, it is only in recent decades that western medicine has begun to consider the impacts of the current social-political order and inter-generational trauma on health, wellness, and the emergence of chronic illnesses. 9 Medical Anthropologist, Dr. Emily Mendenhall has, in more recent years, advocated for an understanding of public and global health through what she calls "syndemics"—the idea that "diseases never exist in isolation," that they cluster based on multiple interacting and intersecting conditions that are biological, psycho-physiological, socioeconomic, political-ecological, and historical in nature. She argues that these factors tend to be overlooked in medicine and public health as frameworks of morbidity and co-morbidity dominate current practices. 10 Despite these emerging frameworks within western medical research, as García et al. have shown in their 2021 research on immigrant health inequities and white supremacy, there remains a limited understanding in the dominant medical literatures, of the various syndemic factors at play in health disparities among vulnerable populations. 11 Further, my own personal experience as well as conversations within my communities of chronically sick and disabled queer and trans people, evidence the fact that this more complex understanding of illness has for the most part yet to emerge in the clinical setting. As Aurora Levins Morales reminds us, the heteropatriarchally and colonially-rooted "contempt for women"—a contempt extended to trans and nonbinary people—"and the vastly profitable medical-industrial complex conspire to write off as hysterical hundreds of thousands of us bearing witness through decades in bed, while we're told all we need is a change of attitude." 12

I turn toward the possibilities of the bed and alternative expressions of aliveness through stillness and immobility—necessitated by and ensuing from chronic illness—as the entanglements of our histories and medical conditions also open space for our entangled practices of care, queer kinship, intimacy, counter-memory, and ontological disobedience: how we refuse to be colonized objects of ruin and find connection despite and also through our isolations. 13 How through the bed we alter the devastated futures taken as a given of our status as disabled. How we persist from the "no-place" and "non-being" of our existence, our being here, our still-and-always becoming in crip space and time.

Being Here, Being Not-Yet

In her book, Feminist Queer Crip, Alison Kafer challenges the societal arrangements that read the disabled body as always-already signaling bleak futures, our bodily differences forecasting what is possible for us, and pre-determining us to a future racked by pain and isolation—a future only altered by the overcoming of the impairments, challenges, and differences that mark us and shape our everyday lives. It is not uncommon for disability to be articulated as a "fate worse than death," a fate that precludes any possibility of living well, whatever that might mean to each of us. The conclusion arising out of that assumption is that disabled bodies have no future, and that the best future is therefore one with no disabled people. 14 At its core, this devaluation of disabled bodies, of chronically sick bodies, underwrites a eugenicist imperative that haunts the present with the brutal idealism of an ableist utopia.

In 2015, after three years during which the majority of my time was spent bedbound and debilitated by the most difficult period thus far of my chronic illness, I entered into a Ph.D. program and confided in a white, female professor—to whom I had been assigned as a research assistant as part of my fellowship duties—about my illness, partly as a way to communicate my access needs during my time with her. Her immediate response was, "Do you really think you should be here?" This question rang in multiple registers for me. I heard it as an echo of eugenicist sentiments as well as evidence of her concern I might be an inconvenience to her. Do you really think you should be here? Should I be here, at all? Where is the here I should not be? Her office? Academia? This planet, this life? But also, in questioning my willingness to think I should be here (the audacity!)—her question, intentionally or not, undermined my own personhood, intelligence, self-awareness, and autonomy related to my body, my future. For her, my choosing to be here, given the illness that shapes my life, was potentially an irrational one. Tapping into both my systemically engendered self-doubt as well as my self-protective fury, her question was one that, for me, could not be separated from living in the afterlife of eugenicist imperatives and their related legal structures that have sought to remove disabled bodies from the human population by way of elimination (through sterilization and killing), assimilation (by cure or overcoming), and exile (institutionalization as well as exclusion from public space such as with the infamous "ugly laws.") 15 The difference of my body, as brown and sick/disabled, imposed a queer, crip temporal relation that challenged the neoliberal-capitalist pace required by academia's normative and normalizing conditions for productivity.

Through my chronic illness, I myself become a presence-absence that refuses what Taraneh Fazeli has called "temporal bullying," or the "spatial temporal controls of the ill or impaired body." 16 When the symptoms of my illness flare up intensely enough, I am forced to rest, to let my body collapse into quietude and stillness, to not work, to exist outside of what Elizabeth Freeman calls "chrononormativity"—the arrangement of power based on compulsory temporal norms. 17 The question of whether or not I should really be here is one that exposes the need for the university to secure itself through compulsory able-bodiedness as a spatial and temporal arrangement aligned with a moral and material economy that hinges on the architectures and codes of neoliberal eugenics. The underlying message is, you shouldn't be here, and you shouldn't dare to think you should be here.

Of course, the feminist and queer disability justice politics that inform my own thinking center on the point that we should indeed be here, and we are and always have been; that a future without disabled people is a future articulated as necessary and desirable within a capitalist ethos, and that such a future would be shaped by the loss of uncountable and vastly vibrant and rich worlds that we bring, imagine up, and create as disabled people. And, like, Alison Kafer, I acknowledge a certain kind of ambivalence insofar as while I value the way that sick and disabled people in our differences bring what I find to be a sacred and vitally political presence to the world, I don't want to see anybody suffer the consequences of an ableist world due to physical, psychological, chemical, or medical injury. I would welcome a world in which civilians walking through fields in post-war Cambodia aren't dismembered and maimed by abandoned land mines; a world in which US veterans and Iraqi civilians aren't suffering the devastating cancers and congenital birth defects resulting from the US military's use of burn pits and toxic munitions like depleted uranium; a world in which rural Colombians don't have to know the intertwined ecopsychosomatic traumas of witnessing one's entire family and village massacred as the land is razed for megadevelopment; a world in which women who survived the genocide in Rwanda don't have to bear the pain of vaginal fistula, a genital injury resulting from sexual violence used as a weapon of war. These kinds of disabilities can be seen as debilitating embodiments of historical and political violence, but imagining a world without these disabilities is not to excise disability as a formation of being from our futures. Rather, it is to hope for a world without the cruel violence that becomes the condition of possibility for these particular kinds of disabling. I would also welcome a future in which I no longer regularly experience debilitating physical pain, nausea, fatigue, and muscular inflammation—a future with no more days where merely sweeping the floor of my one-bedroom apartment leaves me depleted for hours after. I would welcome a future in which I no longer found myself needing to make day-of cancellations for social plans or events because I can barely move my body from the bedroom to the kitchen, let alone across a city by subway and foot. But I also find myself asking, at what expense? As Eli Clare suggests, there is a critical "gap between my desire for less pain and the doctor's desire for cure." 18

It is one thing if "the future without disability" is one that exists because society has been transformed in a way that means it isn't organized through ableist norms that categorize diverse bodies and their access needs through the lens of those norms, thereby eliminating the need for the category itself, because everybody is able to thrive, able to operate in sustainable timescales and relations of interdependency grounded in an ethics of care and collective well-being. That is very different than "the future without disability" contingent on the elimination of disabled people themselves, or the ableist imperative to overcome that is also rooted in western individualism, bootstraps mythologies, and neoliberal responsibilization and self-management.

I've lost track of how many times I've been told by non-disabled people that if I just wanted to get better, like, really wanted it enough, I would. Desire is assimilated into cure's imperative. My failure to pull myself up out of my illness, out of bedboundedness, is seen as just that: my failure, my responsibility, my lack of will to participate properly in my own future-making, my inability to inhabit "curative time" and reach a "triumph over the mind or body." 19 As Wendy Brown has shown, neoliberalism not only operates as a globalized economic policy of free trade, privatization of public resources, and deregulation, but is also a pervasive rationality formed by the reason of the marketplace in which all human activity and relation is maximized as a speculative investment. 20 Under this rationality, a person's ability to flourish, let alone survive, is not understood as a condition of their historically-produced social, economic, and political vulnerability, but a sign of their resilience and capacity for innovative strategy and strategic investment in themselves as potential future profit. As Brown notes, this rationality has led to a devolution of state responsibility toward its smaller and weaker contingencies producing an increasingly collective reliance on the moral burdening of vulnerable populations to adapt through human capitalization, tasking them to take on "strategies of self-investment and entrepreneurship for thriving and surviving" and "measuring, remaking, and reorienting" themselves toward the order of neoliberalism. 21 For sick and disabled people, this rationality is extended to us (by the nation-state, by various institutions, by hegemonic society) as an idealized adaptive technology that will improve our functional capabilities so we may properly participate in the marketplace. That is the assimilative basis for any efforts at capacitation, as well as the imperative to overcome, to cure—the goal of which is inclusion and entry into the (neo)liberal model of the human. Happy, healthy humans are productive humans, profitable humans. As Denise Ferreira da Silva writes, "in scientific rewritings of the human body and territory, self-determination remains the exclusive attribute of the rational mind, which exists in the kingdom of freedom, where transcendentality is realised, namely where reside the ethical-juridical things of reason, modern subjects whose thoughts, actions and territories refigure universality." 22 Self-determination is, for da Silva the ontological descriptor, defining us as free or unfree at the core of our being. When we refuse these logics of self-determination, (what Fred Moten calls a "brutal ruse,") or cannot participate in them, whatever suffering might ensue is viewed plainly as our own doing, our own failure. 23

We have thus, we are told, subjected ourselves to the fate of no future, because under the settler colonial-capitalist regime the only legitimate future is one that is invested in coloniality and the racial-capitalist order, which is to say, the only legitimate future is one in which we offer ourselves up to consistent exploitation, unsustainable temporal structures, and the degradation and depletion of our bodily well-being—one in which our value as beings in the world is contingent on the extent to which we are willing and able to do so. Disability scholars Eli Clare and Eunjung Kim, among others, have critiqued the hegemonic imperative toward cure, which seeks to get us out of bed and into capitalism's racist and ableist coercive temporalities (while labeling us as lazy if we fail to do so—an extension of eugenics-based discourses on the financial burden we pose to society.) Cure's imperative operates as a (re)iteration of settler colonial logics toward nation-making through the removal of disabled bodies from the public sphere, from the future of humanity, what Eunjung Kim names as "curative violence." 24 Under these interwoven logics, it is the well-being and future of the market that is the common good for which we must toil, overcome, and cure—over and above the collective well-being of human and more-than-human planetary life. In the bodily exigencies of chronic illness under this regime, to stay in bed is deemed our own personal failure while to not do so often puts us at greater risk of further debilitation, even death. Neoliberalism's self-determining ethos conscripts us into participating in our own disappearance via curative violence. As Amy Berkowitz suggests in writing about fibromyalgia: "To be sick, then, was a political act: a passive resistance against capitalism." 25

Chronic Illness as Postcolonial Entanglement

I return to a section of a poem I wrote in 2018 to consider the layers of meaning in the lines:

The shared word root between affliction, infliction, and conflict feels important to explore as we consider chronic illness as a set of postcolonial conditions that cross borders, geographies, and epochal constraints of linear history. The -flict stems from the Latin fligere (past participle flictus) and means "to strike." From the 1530s we gain the meaning of afflict as "to trouble in body or mind, harass, distress," and the meaning of affliction as a "cause of constant pain or sorrow" is attested to the 1590s. 27 As colonialism has inflicted its beliefs, desires, and its western political-economic-epistemic order; as it has instigated what governmental powers often call conflicts, but which so often constitute imperial occupation coming up against anti-colonial resistance; de-pathologizing the afflictions of chronic illness and extending our view beyond individualized notions of health and wellness means attending to the entanglements of history and power, and how they trouble the body and mind, how they actively produce "constant pain or sorrow" as intergenerational trauma, chronic pain, and increasingly common mental health struggles like depression and anxiety: how the nervous system and everything it affects, is latticed by the wound.

Aurora Levins Morales, speaks to this powerfully:

If I write about our bodies I will be writing about the "chemical revolution" that began by retooling leftover weapons into peacetime product, and has saturated our environment with 100,000 new molecules, which, in a reckless euphoria of avarice, we were all blithely assured would bring better living to all. If I write about our bodies I am writing about the land and what has been done to it. I am writing about unbreathable cities and abandoned coffee farms and tainted water, about starvation and death by thirst deliberately built into business plans. I am writing about the agricultural choices forced on people whose economic lives are ruled from afar, of shade trees clear cut for slightly higher production, leaving a wake of cancer and erosion, of massive advertising campaigns to persuade Puerto Rican women that canned vegetables and tang are more "civilized" than fresh calabaza and orange juice, about what crossing the border does to the Mexicana pancreas. 28

What Levins Morales illuminates, among other things, is that in the compartmentalization of the human body's various parts and systems, as well as in the ordering of etiological knowledge delimited to the field of the body, a bigger picture is lost. To write about bodies and their conditions, to write our body-stories, to write our bodies themselves, without writing the political and historical conditions of their making as such, is to sustain investments in the settler colonial gaze and its historical-political denial of what has sent us, what has ravaged our nervous systems, poisoned our immunity, incapacitated our organs.

In Eirik Saethre's book, Illness is a Weapon: Indigenous Identity and Enduring Afflictions, he elaborates on indigenous refusal of assimilative settler colonial/biomedical regimes of governance through the chronic illness struggles of the Warlpiri people, an Aboriginal group in northern Australia. For the Warlpiri, illness is understood as an effect of colonialism, poverty, and structural violence, and "an accepted feature of their existence." 29 In this context, the prevalent notion within white settler culture, of indigenous Australians as lazy and neglectful of self-care, merges racist and ableist constructions of ideal productive and self-reliant subjects exclusive of indigeneity. In a sense, to be not-white is always already to be viewed as both intrinsically sick as well as carrying greater propensity toward illness, and to be chronically sick is to fail to perform the emblematic subjectivity of proper self-possessed whiteness. Saethre illuminates not only the impacts of colonization on health but shows how indigenous refusals of the curative regime—of the nation-state and the medical industrial complex as a settler colonial formation—open space for meaningful entanglements of an anticolonial retention of indigenous concepts of being, inclusive of, and with sustained relationships to, chronic illness. For the people he interviewed, "being Warlpiri…meant being sick." 30

In the face of persistent systemic racism, and the health disparities the Warlpiri face, illness becomes a language of relation, an expression of indigenous identity against the idealized presence of the healthy-white-settler subject invading indigenous lands and bodies. Saethre writes that for the Warlpiri, "as Indigeneity becomes associated with illness, being sick is an embodied tool of contestation as well as an effective strategy of resistance…[such that] disease and suffering are vigorous expressions of Indigeneity and, as a result, powerful methods of protest." 31 The refusal of cure is rendered a political-economic, epistemic, and temporal disobedience to the compulsory ableism and will to exploitation and forced assimilation (of bodies, of ways of knowing and being) shaping the imperative to biomedical health.

Under the settler colonial medical gaze, the medical industrial complex often treats chronic illness as etiologically opaque. Additionally, many of us with chronic illness disabilities are accustomed to remarks from non-disabled people such as, "you don't look sick." The need for observable evidence to confirm medical-professional and even public and amateur assessments of health status belies a western fetish of optic presence. What cannot be immediately perceived is brought into question rather than calling for a deeper interrogation of the conditions of one's experience as an act of care. In the absence of visible evidence of illness-as-disability, it is often assumed we are exaggerating, overtly lying (out of laziness, work-shy tendencies, or explicit efforts to manipulate), or given to psychosomatic tendencies of feeling. The statement, "you don't look sick" is often qualified with the additional, "you look great/beautiful/glowing," which can easily be felt as an accusation based in the speaker's observational empiricism while also eliding the fact that many of us, in order to survive capitalism, have learned to minimize how sick or in pain we feel, have learned to pass as well. Despite what I believe are often good intentions by non-disabled people to compliment, the statement "you don't look sick" not only operates as a kind of gaslighting of sick/disabled people that poses the psychosomatic as a kind of fictive or hypochondriac imagining of one's own condition. It also reinscribes ableist and racist norms for what the sick body should look like to be legitimately sick, thereby denying the complex entanglements of psyche- and soma- that produce the psychosomatic not as a kind of hysteria or insubstantial concoction of an overly-anxious subject, but as a very real and very much lived intertwinement of psychological and bodily woundedness or impairment rooted in settler colonial-capitalist histories of violence and their persistence into the present. Ultimately, the body that does not look sick, and which fails to enact the expected frailties or debilitations of illness—"the performative dimension of unwellness"—is treated with suspicion. 32 Under the visual fetish of the western/settler colonial medical regime, "the asymptomatically diseased indigenous body cannot be trusted to tell an immediately ascertainable story" thereby often leading medical providers to narrate indigenous health problems through ideas about culture, race, personhood, and citizenship rooted in colonial concepts of the racialized other. 33

la Paperson reminds us that settler colonialism is often treated in the settler imaginary as confined to the past experiences of indigenous people and "not generalizable to non-Natives," when in fact, it is something that has happened for settlers. 34 This isn't to reproduce an identitarian reduction of subjectivity to the binary of Native and non-Native, nor the triad of Settler/Native/Slave. Rather, it points to how settler colonial-capitalist technologies seek a totalizing reach, shape all of our lives, and "operate everywhere on everybody in intersecting, sometimes contradictory ways, and always with a dynamic specificity that radically changes with context." 35 Acknowledging this also shifts the tenor of anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and decolonial work away from identity as a moralized basis for political legitimacy, and toward possibilities for collectively examining where and how the logics of dispossession and devaluation of life are operating, including toward the non-human or more-than-human world.

From this argument, we might say that "asymptomatically diseased" bodies of many different kinds are treated with suspicion. Differences in subjective proximity to whiteness, cis-masculinity, heterosexuality, and ability may inform the degree to which one is believed about their illness—a phenomenon we could perhaps call "diagnostic citizenship," or patterned belongings and privileges allocated through one's allowed participation in the process of coming to be seen and legitimated as sick/disabled. And the implications of unbelonging in that process have devastating effects, for example, in regard to who even receives disability status. In order to receive disability-related social assistance through state and federal programs that may alleviate financial stress while contending with illness-as-disability, the burden of proof falls on sick subjects and their bodies. In order to qualify for support, we are expected to properly perform pre-determined symptoms that essentially convey the no-future that defines disability in the collective dominant imaginary. And yet, those of us with less resources (who are typically black, indigenous, and people of color; and queer and transgender people) may have a more difficult time collecting evidence and may also be more accustomed to hiding symptoms as a self-protective mode and evasion of the corporeal and epistemic violence of the medical gaze, or to survive by keeping our jobs and thus maintaining our position in the economic and political system that for many of us is one of the primary sources of our illness in the first place.

Nonetheless, I argue that status as sick/disabled alone positions one in relative distance from western, liberal, and settler colonial-capitalist notions of humanity, particularly insofar as the sick/disabled body is seen as failing at the property relation that centrally defines settler colonial relations, as it is projected onto health configured as the self-possession of the territory of the body. As la Paperson notes, for Fanon, the patterning of violence is coded through "the binary relationship between the immune humanity of the white settler and the impugned humanity of the native." 36 Further, "the supremacist 'right' to create settler space that is immune from violence, and the 'right' to abuse the body of the Native to maintain white immunity, this is the spatial and fleshy immediacy of settler colonialism." 37 White immunity, as both the spatial and fleshy immediacy of settler colonialism, suggests a critical linkage between settler securitization of expropriated and accumulated power and land, and securitization of the able body and its well-being. This immunity, while reified as an individual quality of one's ability to resist threat, systemically produces protection and exemption from violence that threatens both the spatial, politico-economic territories of settler power as well as the corporeal, territorialized landscape of the body and immune system. The fleshy here-and-now of the sick body is relegated to an impugned humanity, a site on which the settler-native relation of dispossession and death-boundedness is mapped.

To be clear, I am not saying that sick Native bodies are the same as sick non-Native bodies, nor am I saying that chronic illness is analogous to indigenous experiences of colonization. Rather, I am saying that the dispossessive logics of white-settler-capitalist property relations extend to diverse chronically sick/disabled bodies in ways that shape the ableist configurations of western society and the medical industrial complex. It is through these logics that sick and disabled bodies are also denied a subject position. These dispossessive logics manifest through the imperative of cure as a series of biomedical, cultural and aesthetic, politico and juridical, economic and social, material, symbolic, and affective practices and discourses. They regulate what can be known about the sick body, and therefore, how it is, how we are, relegated to our (no)place in the world, our no-future in time.

The Medical Gaze as Settler Colonial Relation

Perhaps one of the clearest sites through which the dispossessive logics of the medical industrial complex takes place is through the medical gaze in the clinical setting. In Michel Foucault's The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, he excavates the emergence in modern medicine of the "sovereign power of the empirical gaze" and its attendant medical authority over the patient's body—a level of authority that has come to imbue the doctor with an almost magical ability to uncover the hidden truth about illness, which is articulated on the body. 38 This pairing of the doctor's authority vested by the medical gaze and the identification of visible, verifiable symptoms created a new order of knowledge, new ways of knowing about the human body, health, and disease. Importantly, Foucault denaturalizes this order, illuminating its imbrication in relations of socio-economic power, suggesting it is merely one of many ways that knowledge about bodies and illness can be organized. He writes, "the human body defines, by natural right, the space of origin and distribution of disease…but this order of the solid, visible body is only one way…in which one spatializes disease. There have been, and will be, other distributions of illness." 39 Further, "the exact superposition of the 'body' of disease and the body of the sick man is no more than a historical, temporary datum." 40

The sovereign power of the medical gaze, understood as elemental to a settler colonial ethos, assimilates human bodies into this order, delegitimizing other ways, black, indigenous, people of color, queer and trans, and disabled ways of knowing the body and illness—knowledges both ancient and emergent from living in the afterlives and ongoingness of settler colonial subjugation. These other ways of knowing the body often do not identify it as the space of origin and distribution of disease. Alternative ontological and epistemological formations might spatialize illness historically, politically, spiritually, relationally, ecologically, (or all of these, all at once), attending to the body as something very differently conceived of than it is in the order of knowledge that constructs and reduces the body as and to an individuated and solid, visible form. This isn't to altogether shun western medical interventions—those of us living with chronic illness-as-disability most certainly need them more often than we would like—but it is to mark a violence that occurs in the binary that is set up between these orders as rational and irrational. The sovereign power imbued in the medical gaze constitutes a power over the patient, gazed upon and diagnosed within the settler colonial-capitalist order of western, liberal humanism deemed by western science as the only rational order. We are subject to the juridical power of settler medical formations as our bodies are judged worthy or not of access to a variety of possible means of care. We are thus denied a level of agency in the making of knowledge about, and intervention upon, our own bodies and futures.

What is more, under the regime and fetish of visibility, diagnostic criteria often come to be delimited by representations of conditions rather than unfold as a dialogical process between medical practitioner and patient. The discourse of medical science invests belief in its own representational terms as the most comprehensive and legitimate route to establishing the real of disease. Whatever falls outside those terms or fails to enact the performative promise of unwellness for the fetish of visibility under the medical gaze is dismissed as unreliable. This is another medical mode through which we are dispossessed of our bodies and our personhood as complex beings.

In her book Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Peggy Phelan complicates visibility politics showing how the relationship "between the real and the representational, between the looker and the given to be seen, is a version of the relation between self and other" shaped by political and epistemological violence while maintaining a psychic romance that assimilates the Other as the Same through the "pleasure of resemblance." 41 Applying her work in performance studies to disability studies offers a compelling confirmation of the compulsory performative and assimilative dynamics contouring the clinical experience as emblematic of the violence in the medical gaze as it constitutes the settler colonial relation. As she writes, "the trap of the visual field is that it seems to promise to show all" and "[t]he symmetry between the vanishing point and the viewing point…reflects the imagination of annihilation and disappearance." 42 The viewing subject marked by self-possession, in this case, the doctor, is foiled by the patient whose body is objectified as the field of observation, leaving the patient denied self-possession for the very fact of being sick. It is here that "within the psychic and aesthetic economy of the Western gaze, the visible image of the other necessarily becomes a cipher for the looking self." 43 The "invisible" of our illness is reduced to the immaterial, and we are subject not only to dispossession, but to a kind of double negation and disappearance that simultaneously denies our present and presence as disabled, and projects us into the future imagined up through settler colonial-ableist desire that views the absence of our disability as one of medical success. As Eunjung Kim writes, "as the cure rhetoric and spectacle fold past and future over present, disability surreally disappears." 44

Caught in the ableist dialectic of the Hegelian trap, the ontological violence of the master/slave dialectic is transferred to non-normative bodies, submitting us to the position of "being for the settler" (a position that is contoured by white, heteronormative, able-bodiedness) as an extension of the position of black life under human property regimes, of "being for the captor" as if it were being for God. This metaphysical imperative has material effects, not least in the clinic where under the medical gaze, we are expected to show up as "being for the doctor" whose authority over our bodies is given a God-like aura of omniscience and power of judgment. Yet, the subject of the doctor as the looking self remains so fragile he requires the repetition of his confirmation as such. We are asked to sacrifice our motive will and active desire for our bodies and their futures. Our own diverse knowledges about what is happening to us, however mysterious our conditions may be to those in positions of medical authority, are rendered null and void. In sharp contrast, crip constellations of bedlife thrive on and make possible the nexus of illness and intimacy, illness as/in intimacy, illness as weapon and protest. They do so without the policing and surveillance of society's looking judgment and doctors' medically normative diagnostics. The disruption of "normal" bodily function comes to bear on compulsory able-bodiedness-as-law while the queer intimacies expansively woven in and through the bed (as materiality of flesh and politics; and epistemic array) challenge compulsory heteronormativity's own (re)productive mandates. Bedlife escapes from and rearranges the visual order of the body as the constitutive condition of sick/disabled being and its disappearance. It disorders through disorder, multiplying illness's radical disruptions as we host and we stay.

Queer Intimacy in the Stay

Returning to Zavitsanos' "I think we're alone now (Host) 2016 (2008-16)," I reflect on the sculpture's title, which invokes the classic pop hit, "I Think We're Alone Now." Originally written by Ritchie Cordell, and first recorded and popularized in 1967 by Tommy James and the Shondells, the song was then later covered in 1987 and again widely popularized by the pop singer Tiffany. The most famous refrain of the song is probably the chorus, from which Zavitsanos' piece borrows its title:

The lyrics initially conveyed the escape from parental surveillance and prohibition of sexual activities—a theme that holds particular relevance for queer explorations of intimacy given histories of state and social regulation and criminalization of public queer intimacy. What strikes me about Zavitsanos' sculpture is how it extends the space of the bed, normally reserved for private life, into the public conversation about what kinds of "private" spaces might constitute or make possible forms of political life through a sort of cultivated micro-commons. Zavitsanos' piece invokes the lyric, "I think we're alone now/there doesn't seem to be anyone around," and articulates the bed as a fugitive space for sick and disabled queers, momentarily free from the medical gaze and finding in each other a sense of respite and reprieve. This isn't to suggest it is what David Eng names as an "effort to isolate and manage the private as a distinct and rarified zone outside of capitalist relations and racial exploitation." 46 It's not to reinscribe the romance of privacy and privatization of romance.

Rather, it is a collaborative insistence on the political and worldmaking potency of this space that is otherwise hegemonically deemed private and distinct from the world. It is the creation of space and relationship practices responding to the commonplace violences of capital relations and racial exploitation, an underground for planning and scheming and evading the system's total grasp, a movement toward an otherwise through which we withhold our consent to be the subject of bodily ruin and object of curative regimes, which is the only option we are given for being in the settler colonial-capitalist nightmare that is western liberalism undergirded by its attendant fascistic tendencies. 47 In the lyric, "the beating of our hearts is the only sound," we hear the rhythmic pulse as a sign of life, a vital sign, borne by the mutual presence we bring to each other in the collaboratively created lifeworlds that exist in the horizon of queerness and the deep racial histories mitigating our arrival to each other. If even for a moment, the din and cacophony of ableist enunciations fade away. The countless (re)iterations of "should you really be here" and "you don't look sick" and "if you really wanted to get better…"; and the doctor's "there's nothing wrong with you" and "how do you know you're sick?"—all quieten. In the crip spacetime of bedlife represented in Zavitsanos' piece, the beating of our hearts, that evidence that we are here and alive and loving each other, is the only sound.

Notably, Green Day frontman, Billie Joe Armstrong, along with his two sons, also covered the song, recording and releasing it from home in March 2020. Armstrong shared that for him, the COVID-19 pandemic's mandated self-quarantine gave new meaning to the song's lyrics. The song description he posted on the band's YouTube page says, "I figure if we have to spend time in isolation, we can be alone together." 48 Though the few months of self-quarantine for the attempted preservation of public and personal health can't be compared to years or a lifetime of isolation resulting from chronic illness, the social formation of being alone together is a part of what makes up sick and disabled life. We are together in being alone in the archipelago of our beds, scattered across the world; and we are alone together when we gather in and around the bed as the site of accessible activity, collective organizing, and varied kinds of sexual and non-sexual intimacy.

In the exhibit, "Close to You" (April 2021-January 2022) at North Adams' Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MOCA), queer kinship is not only articulated against traditionally anthropological as well as heteronormative framings of kinship based in hierarchical social structures that privilege biological blood ties and nuclear family. 49 The exhibit also extends queer kinship beyond liberal-western ideas of queer kinship, which often map heteronormative family structures onto queer family networks, and create a binary between "family of origin" and "family of choice." While the presence of queer family-making through extended care networks as well as more formally and legally-recognized queer family units has been an important part of our collective queer histories of survival and worldmaking, the centering of the nuclear family as the legitimizing unit for kinship remains the instantiating hinge on which queerness' relations are often organized. This liberal centering of family also inheres queer politics in state agendas of governance and regulation while operating in concurrence with the hegemonic-liberal erasure of racial difference, as queer freedom and racial progress defer to a universalized subject of rights. 50 Even as uplifting "family of choice" kinship networks is meaningful and indeed crucial to queer, disabled, and black, indigenous, and people of color survival, it feels important to ask how the neoliberal emphasis on choice and individuated agency imbricates the idea of "family of choice" into economies of racial capitalism. As Kath Weston suggests, "chosen families do not directly oppose genealogical modes of reckoning kinship. Instead, they undercut procreation's status as a master term imagined to provide the template for all possible kinship relations." 51 But even scholarship that works to intervene on these western norms are still often challenging dominant ideas of kinship through reworking or contesting the normalization in society and law of familial concepts like parenthood, marriage, and coming out or not coming out to one's "family of origin." 52

For David Eng, in this centering of the family as the primary kinship structure, the oedipal complex dominates the familial imaginary not as a stage of development but as a "constitutive prohibition that emerges with the very inception of language, a structuralist legacy privileging certain forms of kinship as the only intelligible, communicable, reproducible, and livable ones." 53 This tends to normalize our psychic affiliations and practices of intimacy, as the oedipal complex remains embedded in a racial-heteronormative-ableist logic of contained and atomized selves that must attain their intelligibility through mirroring the norm. The no-future of non-white, disabled, queer being is transformed into an allegedly livable future through kinship's regulatory modes.

More recent work on queer kinship explores how it is, as Richard T. Rodríguez writes, "fashioned as affectively contoured modes of collective belonging that contrast sharply with the biological or oedipally generated family form contingent on heteronormative reproduction." 54 However, my impulse is to ask here how the continued focus on belonging reiterates, and even masks as liberatory, historical modes of exclusion and inclusion. Belonging as a defining component of relation and kinship still risks recruiting us into ontological formations constituted within the racist-heteronormative-ableist normative compulsions that bear on belonging's ever-changing boundaries.

I'm interested instead in queer kinship practices that are premised on expansive ideas of intimacy, care, and interdependency not reliant on our category and status as subjects so much as cultivated through our refusals to be legible as such and our embrace of each other in, through, and as expressions of abjection's convulsive beauty and possibility. What if, rather than hinging on belonging, kinship were an inciting ethos and affective terrain, an illogics and aspirational persistence from the edge of a world? What if the queering of kinship were not bearing on the western liberal fetish of the familial and familiarity, but were an art of inventiveness cultivating a set of ever-malleable practices guided by a shared political-aesthetic sense of commitment in becoming our improperly formless forms and formations? 55 What if kinship were not premised on belonging but on affinities, resonances, and desires for present and future life to thrive against and outside of that which is teleologically pre-determined for our "monstrous" differences of flesh and mind?

In writing about blackness and kinship, Moten reminds us that in the context of slavery's political and ontological conditions and the antiblackness underlying them, black kinship loses meaning as it is always made available to invasion and dismantling. "The nightmare of normative kinship," he writes, "is always already invaded by property" and thus, under such a system, "the promise of human kinship is impossible." 56 In contrast to normative kinship, "blackness is a showing of invaded, wounded kinship." 57 Consider, too, the wounded kinship of indigeneity, as government policies across colonized lands instigated forced removal and thefted children from their communities, submitting them to residential schools and other programs that disrupted continuities of culture, kinship, reproductive futures, and life itself. The ontological basis for the wounded kinship resulting from anti-black and anti-indigenous violence of enslavement and genocide is, perhaps, a precondition, or co-condition, for queer and disabled kinships and intimacies as also subject to the nightmare of normative kinship. As I suggested earlier in this paper, the property relation haunts us all, however distinctly. But as Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, among other scholars, have shown, freedom cannot be disentangled from the forms of subjection engendered before and through emancipation, and thus, freedom is only available as an inorganic state for those who have achieved sovereignty as full humans. 58

In "The Guild of the Brave Poor Things," Park MacArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos explore the space between systemic ableism and anti-transgender and anti-black violence, producing segregation of bathrooms and water fountains in the landscape of US history. 59 The state's juridical power, they argue, functions to "disentangle the social bonds of lovers in common while supplanting them with the too-proximate harm, deemed care, of sovereignty." 60 In contrast, a radical politics of care invites us to unfold through a blurring of entangled flesh, a non-sovereign relation of queerness in which social bond is found in the status given to us as surplus to society. MacArthur and Zavitsanos continue,

I want to get too close to see, so close you gotta feel through someone elsewhere or somewhere elseone as never one. We arrive together in continuous dislocation. These arrivals constitute a field—a field of consent— where we consent not to be unreasonably withheld, and consent not to be a single being through our completely unreasonable entanglement of need and enjoyment, our joy of missing out, of planning without splaining. 61

While they are addressing the politics of space and disposable, deposable bodies in public restrooms, the bed is yet another field of possibility for consent in which our arrival happens together in the continuous dislocation of our solitary condition of illness. In bedlife, we face each other from the flux of our distances and proximities, asking to not be unreasonably withheld from each other, from the world, in our "unreasonable" entanglement of access needs and enjoyment, in both our fear and joy of missing out. Finding each other there, it is the place of our political scheming, our fugitive planning, without needing to "splain" (condescend by power) or explain (justify our needs.) I get so close to you that there is only feeling through you, elsewhere; and you, brown and already here, queer and not-yet.

The bed as an underground and undercommons of queer, sick/disabled black, indigenous, and people of color life elicits an "erotics of fugitivity," which Moten names as "the unmade promise, the terrible, beautiful, irreducible futurity that sent us and that sends us every day." 62 It is therein the subversive motion of togetherness in our choreographies of rest that we know that a move to sovereignty, however strategic in shifting public policy and the juridical allocation of rights, will always be an assimilative rendering. Bedlife, in the stay, keeps at bay the invasion of the gaze, the systems of value and exploitation under which we are rent. An unsettled space where we encounter each other in non-sovereign rhythms of relation, affective intensities, and historical convergences of skin, bone, hair, and flesh—bedlife invites intimacy as both refuge and opening to the world, not enclosure from it. Maybe, from that place, the future is as incoherent as we are: always becoming and still, not-yet. 63

Nolan Jimbo's exhibit description for "Close to You" invites us to refigure queer kinship into multitudinous dimensions and formations. Though it is inclusive of notions of belonging, belonging is not the central component of its expression. Kinship here, is also "a feeling of intimacy"; "a nurturing and restorative force [that] suffuses closeness with senses of belonging and refuge, sustaining us as we move through the world"; "a form of care that enables renewal"; "a mode of survival"; "affinities found within disparate conditions." Kinship is a conjuring of feelings of proximity to others and to ourselves, to land and place, materials and materialities, histories and visions. 64 Further:

In its most ubiquitous form, "kinship" describes the bonds of a family, privileging connections born of biology and of blood. Close to You frames kinship within more fluid terms, centering relationships that exceed the limits of heteronormativity, government sanctions, and — in certain instances — even sociality. Instead, the artists in this exhibition prioritize queer, amorphous, and solitary forms of intimacy, acknowledging the affinities that we feel with people, places, materials, and histories. The works on view foreground feelings of recognition and rejuvenation that emerge within the deserts of the American Southwest, the warmth of bodily embrace, and the absence in an archive, among other conditions. 65

From the kinships between self and place in the photography of Laura Aguilar; to Chloë Bass' rumination on the varying blues of the sky as a way to question kinship's presumability; to Maren Hassinger's sculptures evoking the uncanny kinship and entanglements between nature, human industry and human bodies; to Eamon Ore-Giron's geometric paintings symbolizing the intimacy of transnational and transhistorical migrations; to Kang Seung Lee's hemp fiber sculpture as an archiving of kinship as care and intimate absences of the dead; to Clifford Prince King's photographic scenes of black queer intimacy—each of these works considered individually and together, transform and queer kinship into a lyric ecology of intimacies and closenesses.

King's work especially invokes the bed and its surrounding spaces as a place of rest and comfort in which black, queer kinship is grown and sustained through the everyday. As Jimbo writes, "King evades hyperbolic expectations of uplift and tragedy." Those in his photos "maintain the nuance and ambiguity of personhood, rendered vulnerable as they are opaque…" 66 King's image titled, "Safe Space" conveys how, as Mandy Harris Williams suggests, everything in the scene is an ecology they become in the safe space of the bedroom, of being with each other. They could be lovers, siblings, friends, and whichever it is doesn't really matter as the queer kinship conveyed here suggests an "intimacy without surveillance." 67

It is this ambiguity and combination of vulnerability and opacity, that also shapes bedlife for many of us queer, disabled, black, indigenous and people of color. The bed for us is reconfigured into a fugitive space of intimacy without surveillance, and of survival, kinship, and sick and disabled worlding in which we encounter each other in our fleshly abjection and bodily vulnerability. Here, we make certain claims to opacity that purposefully maintain our illegibility to the dominant order by refusing to perform the roles prescribed for us under the medical gaze, and by capitalism. From bedlife we refuse to be conscripted into normative narratives of queer racialized disability that seek to exploit us either in the pornography of the tragic or for the absolution found in the spectacle of overcoming our illness, of submitting to cure—what some critically call "inspiration porn"—though this moniker isn't to moralize the pornographic (for indeed, feminist and queer pornography is one kind of vital medicine many of us bedbound imbibe) so much as to point to the eroticization of the content in question.

*

In her memoir, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes of Blackstone River, a waterway that crosses between Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Due to industrial waste from textile and metal factories, Blackstone was deemed the most polluted river in the country, by Audubon magazine in 1971, and by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1990. 68 In the book, the "dirty river" is both a material-historical source of illness for Lakshmi, as well as a metaphor she uses for exploring trauma—a different kind of complex source of illness—and what it takes to contend with our "contaminated" pasts as a process of becoming. Writing of the vulnerability in opening to her own queer femme sexual desire, Lakshmi writes,

Back in the bedroom in Flatbush, we ourselves are signs of life, flesh messages to each other emerging through gestural languages, beings forced to be bodies and ambivalent about it. Being for each other and ourselves, by being with. We choose to stay and learn to stay in and despite and because and through the pleasure and pain, their blur. We extend ourselves toward each other, trembling, mutating, sweating, nauseous, laboring to breathe and walk, joyful and afraid, but so very alive. We are entangled flesh and history in this intimate closeness, haptically gathered, in touch. In the gathering, we defy distances imposed by the state's will to our severing, the outcasting of our love and very being, the prophecy of our future absence. We tend each other, wincing in pain while unfurling in laughter. Even in the distances, we carry each other, we gather. Even in the goodbyes we say, we'll be in touch. We'll be in touch.

We stay in touch.

We stay.

***