In her 2014 self-portrait series 24, the artist, activist, and former ballroom mother Kia LaBeija vogues the glamorous-mundane rituals of her life as a black and Filipina New Yorker living with HIV from mother-to-daughter transmission. One of the photographs, "The First 10 Years," depicts Kia wearing her mother's wedding dress and sitting on the floor in front of a dresser in a small room with a pile of things strewn beside her. 1 The pile occupies most of the otherwise free floorspace in the small room, and so one thing this photograph stages is how much space the pile takes up for Kia, who took the photograph on the tenth anniversary of her mother's death from an HIV-related illness. Kia's mother Kwan Bennett was a Filipina-American woman who was HIV positive, an incest survivor, a dancer, an artist, and an activist involved in ACT UP and APICHA (formerly Asian and Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS). 2 Bennett died when Kia was 14 years old. The wedding dress that Kia wears in the photograph was her mother's, and the pile of things also belonged to her mother. Kia is childlike in the picture, playing dress-up as her mother, an act that recalls how frequently Kia played dress-up as a child with the help of trips to the Salvation Army with Bennett. 3

The photograph is filled with memory, mourning—perhaps nostalgia—a feeling for the past. While the title "The First 10 Years" conjures the duration of this past with "10 Years," it also, with "The First," brings a sense of future, that something will follow. "The First" also suggests a break between the image and some now, a severance. This severance may be registered in Kia's posture and affect towards the pile too, from which she leans back and looks away, her arms wrapped closely around herself and not the pile. Kia describes her making of "The First 10 Years" in the following way:

I took this drawer that had all of my mother's things in it and threw all this shit on the ground and was like, 'What is all of this stuff?' In the midst of being in that moment, I took a photograph of it. And after I took the photograph, I threw a lot of that stuff out. 4

Although expressed casually, there is profound thinking in this statement about disposability and belonging(s), which echoes the simultaneous notions of severance and ongoing attachment expressed in the photograph. Kia describes memorializing with a mess that she impersonally calls "stuff" and "shit," some of which is identifiable in the photograph—a shoe, a clutch, a stamped letter—but some indistinct. 5 When Kia says she throws this stuff away, she notably does so without devaluing it, and, in fact, she finds a way to also keep the stuff. Here Kia presents her art as a performance that at once holds onto things (through photographic capture) and lets them go, a paradoxical enactment repeated in a variety of ways throughout Kia's portraiture and other work.

This aesthetic practice of Kia's, inflected by her illness and her being a black and Filipina woman who finds her sense of self in the ballroom community, provokes my thinking about upending ableism. Since ableism arranges hierarchies overdetermined by disposability and property, those creating a world without ableism are tasked with making space for the free belonging of people and things—or belonging without property. My understanding of property is profoundly shaped by critical race scholar Patricia Williams's thinking about the term (and this on some level gestures towards the ways in which the possibility of critical disabilities studies is rooted in critical race). 6 Williams glosses property as "nothing more than the mind's enhancement of the body's limitation," which is to say that fundamentally property is a refusal of disability. 7

This article contends that Kia's performance throughout her self-portraiture of a material practice of holding on and letting go offers a route towards articulating an aesthetic that supports world-making towards belonging without property. This aesthetic fosters scale-shifting between aloneness, collectivity, and cosmos with an openness to things and self that is non-proprietary. My reading of Kia's work is prompted by recent calls for a disability methodology attentive to, to quote Jina B. Kim, "the systemic devaluation (and oftentimes, subsequent disablement) of non-normative bodies and minds," coupled with an understanding of what Fred Moten calls "a double violation…the denigration of things and the coincident devaluation of people that is carried out by what is supposed to be their reduction to things." 8 Bringing Kim's and Moten's thinking together offers insight into how Kia's orientation towards stuff and herself in her work speaks to a critical disability ethic grounded in a valuing of people and things (that holds them spaciously) not rooted in possession (that lets them go).

This critical disability ethic of dispossessive valuing should be understood in relation to its queer and black feminist lineages, following Kim's invitation to "draw out some of the possibilities for coalition between women-of-color/queer-of-color feminist and disability theorizing." 9 In particular, engaging writings by Audre Lorde (on the uses of things) and José Muñoz (disidentification as a theory of recycling) helps me to clarify how Kia's work offers aesthetic tactics, cutting against disposability, to make life survivable and movement work sustainable. This article also understands Kia's photography of her Hell's Kitchen apartment, and her ethic of repurposing (which is also a ballroom-influenced ethic of housing people and stuff), to be inflected not only by the loss of her mother but also by the devastating impact of the 2008 housing crisis in the U.S., as it is linked to longer histories of displacement, gentrification, and anti-black racism in housing policy. For this reason, I situate Kia's thinking about holding on and letting go in the context of trends in self-help that have risen in popularity in the wake of the housing crisis, such as personal organizing discourses that have emphasized the importance of organizing and throwing things away; and in the context of recent creative works in the Disability Justice sphere that take up the notion of home as a place for gathering, including those by Maranda Elizabeth and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.

Houselessness

"Happy people don't go through garbage." 10

The quote above is from an interview conducted by journalist Stephanie Golden while she was writing about perceptions of unhoused women. Here Golden's interviewee explains why she thinks that most of the unhoused people that she encounters day-to-day are not happy—they "go through garbage." Her explanation has a (likely unintended) double meaning: the intended meaning, happy people do not dumpster dive; and the additional meaning, happy people do not endure terrible experiences. Her statement also metonymically conflates these two meanings such that going through garbage literally becomes the terrible experience itself. This conflation is so commonplace that what is at stake in it might go unobserved. This kind of articulation about garbage and happiness props up contemporary normative discourses in which belonging and unbelonging come to stick to people and things as though (un)belonging were ontological. This conflation is related to Moten's articulation of "a double violation," that devalues and renders people, animals, and things unevenly vulnerable to dispossession, detention, and death according to logics of ableism and racial capitalism. 11 The normativity of this double violation as it comes to particularly mark waste is attached in a heightened way to unhoused people and proximally to people at risk of losing their housing. 12

Beginning here with housing loss offers a way into thinking about Kia's photography, which frequently features her and her family's housing in New York City. When Kia's mother died, Kia had to move unexpectedly. Five years later, the financial crisis of 2007-2008 hit, and millions in the U.S. had lost their homes by 2009. 13 In New York City, where Kia experienced the impact of the crisis, some poor and majority black and brown neighborhoods experienced foreclosure rates as high as 15 percent, as gentrification compounded the impact of subprime lending practices, resulting in an astounding number of evictions and foreclosures. 14 Further, when Kia joined the House of LaBeija, she became a part of a family, many of whom have been unhoused. 15 The language of "house" in ballroom is not incidental; through the House of LaBeija, Kia also became a part of a housing formation forged in histories of mutual aid and activism responding to the vulnerability to housing loss that black and brown queer and trans youths disproportionately experience. 16 Further, the scavenging ethic of reclamation in Kia's work (and in ballroom) is also found throughout the history of AIDS housing activism in New York City. For instance, the New York City non-profit Housing Works, founded in 1990 by ACT UP members to fight the dual crisis of AIDS and homelessness, is, for some, most visible for its thrift stores around the city and used bookstore in SoHo. 17

In these contexts, Kia's attention to New York apartment space and to the things that occupy that space should be understood as reflecting thinking and feeling about housing and the prospect of its loss (among other losses and findings). Her photographs frequently depict spaces offering shelter. For example, the first photograph Kia took for her series 24, called "In My Room," depicts a room sheltering Kia and her things, not unlike "The First Ten Years." 18 In the picture, Kia's closet door is open and reveals her clothes and shoes tightly and perfectly fitting. While her clothes are prominently featured in the image, Kia is in her undergarments and holds herself to cover herself. The closet suggests an array of possibilities for dressing and becoming, and especially in tension with her undressed state, suggests how its loss might impact her.

In fact, Kia notes in an artist's statement that her initial inspiration for her series 24 came first out of a fear that she would lose her apartment:

I began this work out of my home in New York's Hellz Kitchen five years ago, while I was studying at the New School. I was afraid of losing the apartment I grew up in, so I began to photograph it. I was only fourteen years old when my mother died from an AIDS-related illness. It changed something within me. It taught me that nothing is permanent. 19

Here she places the possible loss of her apartment adjacent to the loss of her mother and notes how one loss taught her information about other losses and about letting go: "Nothing is permanent." "Nothing is permanent" invokes an ethic of valuing things in their coming and going that is attuned to an acceptance of their going. This ethic of valuing shares a quality of care expressed by disability justice activist, performance artist, and writer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in her poem "I will take care of you forever." In it Piepzna-Samarasinha writes, "I don't have to hold onto you. There's no way I could lose you…we'll take care of each other forever and even though we'll never speak again"—a valuing, and care practice, not dependent upon possession, one that is mournful and/but also deeply generous. 20

Letting Go

Because Kia's photography has this caring, and even healing, quality to it and because it so much centers her and the arrangement of her stuff, her aesthetics invite thinking about the self-help genre, which not infrequently also take up the subject of letting go. In this regard, her work has some overlap with trends found in mainstream self-help, though with a difference that can be articulated through attention to the notions of trash and recycling. I will first say more about how an ethos of letting go as a material practice of cleaning frequently gets portrayed in self-help, before turning to disability justice, critical disability, and black feminist aesthetics and frameworks; and then will return to a longer reflection on Kia's work.

The normativity with which people and stuff are devalued, as that devaluing comes to particularly mark waste and people supposedly reduced to waste (to again cite Moten), is trafficked in a mundane way by popular self-help discourses that affirm neoliberal notions of personal responsibility and coincident surplus expendability (waste). 21 Following the financial crisis of 2007-2008, personal organization discourses within self-help, which tell consumers that wellness and happiness depend upon how thoroughly they can separate the useful from the wasteful as they economize, have grown in popularity. The story of personal organization goes, apartments are not too small, nor housing too scarce: people just have too much, improperly organized, uncontained stuff. If they sort through it and arrange it better, they will feel better and be better.

This idea about personal order and wellness is reflected in popular titles such as The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2014), Outer Order, Inner Calm: Declutter and Organize to Make More Room for Happiness (2019), or The Minimalist Home: A Room-by-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life (2018)—which have offered such advice as, "Feeling like your coat closet is under control could help you eat more healthfully or exercise better." 22 These titles' popularity also follows the success of the television show Hoarders, which premiered in the wake of the 2008 housing crisis. 23 While Hoarders depicts people whose portrayed level of accumulation and disorder has placed them in dire enough circumstances that they are shown as requiring the professional intervention that the show televises offering, its logic about the need to "let go" is of a piece with personal organizing discourses of the 2010s.

The discourse on the ordering of stuff found in these texts assumes that people equally have the ability and access to choose what they keep and what they toss out, and that the usefulness of the materials in one's arsenal depends upon the agency one has to sort. These beliefs in individual ability may offer some insight into why personal organizing has come increasingly to be associated with not just happiness and success but also with wellness. Wellness, as disability rights scholar Carrie Griffin Basas notes, "pushes for individual responsibility and ascribed models of being" instead of considering interdependence or difference. 24 It puts the onus on individuals to save and extend their lives by following practices that supposedly everyone can follow and which supposedly help everyone. 25

However, the home organization industry's claims about wellness and happiness exclude many people who are non-white, sick, poor, disabled, unhoused, and/or incarcerated from the realm of self-improvement. Basas has described how a wellness paradigm frequently operates against disabled people's lives and movement work because "wellness embraces maximized improvements" while not acknowledging people's different limits, abilities, and situations. 26 Likewise, in her essay "Sick Woman Theory," Johanna Hedva, drawing from Ann Cvetkovich's description of how medical literature presumes its subjects, characterizes wellness in the U.S. as "a white and wealthy idea" that holds the experience of feeling bad as a mystery and an abnormality. 27 Along these lines, the home organization industry imagines its subjects are people who have too much of what they do not need and have control over what they have and what they can discard. 28

Holding On

Against this backdrop, some writers, artists, and activists engaged with disability justice are fostering belonging—against their disposability—through articulations and practices of holding on and holding space. Zinester, tarot reader, and theorist of crip self-defense, Maranda Elizabeth offers such an example with their essay "Trash Magic." Elizabeth opens the essay with two anecdotes of parable-qualities:

"Those flowers belong to the city," somebody shouted as I retrieved a bouquet from a green dumpster on the side of a busy street, my cane resting alongside the bin so I could use both hands. I didn't look up. Whoever it was, they didn't come closer, didn't repeat themselves. I brought the flowers home and placed them on my nightstand beside a tarot deck and a desk lamp with a hot pink cord and a dim bulb. I knew the flowers were a sign. The two-drawer nightstand was found at a junk store in the tiny village where I lived in a haunted house as a baby. While revisiting the place, I picked up a piece of broken concrete from a path leading to another haunted house, this one abandoned, weeds creeping through the cracks. 'Leave that house alone,' somebody else yelled. Again, I didn't look, didn't respond. I'm from here! I wanted to yell. I belong here, too! 29

Here Elizabeth, a white agender femme and cane user who lives with personal histories of forced institutionalization and houselessness, swiftly reflects the often broken relations between waste, use, and belonging; and also reflects how broken and disregarded things can still be used. Elizabeth's intimate and conversational style at once supports and also belies the philosophical and almost alchemical work that she does with the meaning of belonging in this passage. 30

The philosopher Elizabeth Spelman describes things becoming trash when they are treated "as something for which we no longer have any use, debris we don't want among our belongings." 31 For Spelman, waste is what is designated as useless and/or as no longer belonging. By contrast, in the passage from "Trash Magic," the passerby who yells at Elizabeth for taking flowers from a dumpster constructs waste as a belonging claim which works to bar the use of a thing. When he yells, "Those flowers belong to the city," he is not reserving the flowers for the city's use, since the flowers are in a designated space of non-use, the dumpster. Instead, he deploys belonging as a way to prohibit Elizabeth's reclamation of the flowers. When, later in the essay, Elizabeth recounts a similar experience in which they pick up "a piece of broken concrete" and are yelled at for touching an abandoned house, they recall wanting to yell, "I belong here too!" Here, through both the similarity of the experience and the repetition of the word "belong," they draw a connection between the first passerby's claim, "Those flowers belong to the city," and an implicit assertion that they do not belong, either to the city or the tiny town. Their disabled and scavenging person is not offered the defense of belonging afforded to the concrete or the flowers, which they cannot afford.

Then again, belonging does not seem to actually offer much protection to the flowers and concrete, trashed and broken respectively. Belonging only prohibits their use and access. More than that, belonging discards them ("Those flowers belong to the city," i.e., they are trash!). With both hands, Elizabeth takes hold of the trash-flowers anyways—an unrecognized rite/right of reclamation, a theft from waste. Along with the flowers, and through their writing, they also take hold of and repurpose the word "belonging," which the passerby had hurled at them. They re-sign it to indicate their place rather than their exclusion—"I belong here too." However, they do not discard the association the passerby has made between belonging and trash; instead, Elizabeth takes hold of trash-belonging: a critical disability ethic of trash magic that reveals sanctuary as simply a slow gathering of the prohibited and the unusable. Calling this ethic a "critical disability" one does not merely invoke one of Elizabeth's lines of identification, but cites the direction that disability studies scholars such as Jina B. Kim, Julie Avril Minich, and Sami Schalk have been pushing the field towards: a direction that aligns itself with and finds its origins in "movements for the liberation of people with bodies and minds that are devalued or pathologized. 32 In its rootedness in activism, this direction takes up hierarchies of disposability in its consideration of the production of disability, disregard, and (dis)possession; and also actually animates to end hierarchies produced by control systems and to sustain forms of belonging not bound up by municipal (or any) possession. This second piece is the ethic of the study. Elizabeth's gathering of things offers a revaluation against the de-valuation of the non-normative, and it is in this way that she enacts an ethical hold.

My invocation of holding cites recent work in black studies, such as scholar Christina Sharpe's theorization of "beholding," and cites tactile and kinesthetic registers of holding, such as "holding on" and "holding space," that have become increasingly popular in both academic and activist work. 33 For example, the disability justice and transformative justice organizer Mia Mingus writes in a reflection on holding as a practice of giving and receiving stories in the frameworks of disability justice and and the black feminist notion of intersectionality:

I often think about all the things needed to hold my story, just to name a few: someone who understands disability, ableism, abled supremacy; the medical industrial complex, histories and notions of cure, ugliness and the myth of beauty; race, white supremacy, orientalism, adoption, transracial adoption, transnational adoption, the commodification and ownership of children, immigration, forced migration; korea, diaspora, US imperialism, war, borders; the Caribbean, colonization, the US South, anti-black racism, slavery and the US slave trade system; misogyny, patriarchy, sexism, gender, domestic and sexual violence, child sexual abuse; feminism, queerness, queer people of color; rural lands, islands, rural communities. And how all of these intersect with each other. I wonder what the things needed to hold your stories are? I wonder how many pieces of your story weren't told because there wasn't anyone who could understand and hold them? I wonder how many parts of all of our stories that we still have never told anyone because of this? 34

Here Mingus offers a long list of "things" and "pieces" that expresses an accumulative—almost hoarding—tendency. 35 What is surprising is that this crowding of things actually fosters the invitation and space to receive someone else in their potential expansiveness. It is fundamentally generous and creative, and also troubled by a kind of impossibility: Where does the space for this holding come from? 36

Audre Lorde's work on use and resourcefulness helps me to think about the possibilities for creating this space, too. 37 A writer, teacher, and activist whose work, as Kim describes, "urges us to hold racism, illness, and disability together," Lorde offers an analysis on subjects ranging from the erotic, to anger, to her mastectomy, which reminds us that "useful" and "wasteful" are not a part of the ontology of anything; instead, whether and how something is used determines its usefulness. 38 Her poem "For Each of You," for example, powerfully expresses this idea: "Everything can be used/ except what is wasteful/ (you will need to remember this when you are accused of destruction.)" 39 Significantly, Lorde uses the word "wasteful" instead of "waste" in these lines. While the claim "everything can be used except what is waste" would point toward a normative notion of waste, the statement "everything can be used except what is wasteful" is about performance and use, which for Lorde is directly linked to survival as a racial justice practice. The following section returns to Kia's work, which does similar ecological thinking about space and the use of one's resources to Lorde's, and helps with a consideration of how letting go can actually be a part of the critical disability ethic of holding on—of belonging—without possession.

Letting Go (An Embrace)

In their essay "Not Over It, Not Fixed, and Living a Life Worth Living," the Sri-Lankan-American activist-writer Piepzna-Samarasinha draws from their experience with a chronic illness to read the trauma of having been sexually abused by their mother through a disability justice lens. This lens offers the insight that she does not have to cure her trauma, just like she does not have to cure her disability, in order to survive or be well. 40 They describe the pressure they have faced to "cure," "get over and 'move on' from" the abuse—a reminder that cure and movement (and "letting go") are often portrayed as narratively linked. 41 However, Piepzna-Samarasinha challenges this link by making use of the doubleness of the word "fixed" to build a poetic association between movement and brokenness, which reflects her own experience of moving with a disability and with trauma. They conclude the essay, "I don't want to be fixed. I want to change the world." 42 Throughout the essay, she primarily uses the word "fixed" to mean unbroken, and she means that here too; however, she also means "fixed" as in static, as her expression of desire for change in the next sentence indicates. When they say, "I don't want to be fixed," they refuse cure not in order to stay how they are but as a way to claim transformation, while shifting between the scale of themselves and the world that might change.

Like Piepzna-Samarasinha, Kia also lost her mother, although the history of loss and trauma is different. And like Piepzna-Samarasinha, Kia theorizes unstuckness as a disabled and survivor ethic that facilitates movement. For Kia, the movement in and through holding comes from letting go. Kia describes the importance of letting things go in order to clear space for movement:

We take on all this stuff, we build up all these stories in our heads, and then it becomes all this junk and clutter, and we can't move forward, or past, or move through anything else because we're just stuck…I need to get unstuck. I need to be okay. 43

Kia offers this answer when she is asked to say more about a practice of hers that she has mentioned in previous interviews: She gives away and throws away things after featuring them in her photographs, as she did with the stuff in her photograph "The First 10 Years," as mentioned.

Art critic David Velasco has likewise observed how Kia uses autobiography and self-revelation to proffer resources for others: "With her instruments, she has carved secrets from her life and gives them to the world. She knows someone else will find use for them." 44 He is not here speaking about how Kia literally gives away and throws away things in her photographs (although he almost could be), but about how she turns private moments into things that can be shared and used by photographing them. That Velasco's words can be applied to both Kia's process and her photographs suggest the important connection between the material and the supposedly immaterial, or at least differently material, components of Kia's work. It is all stuff that can be lost or gifted.

However, the photograph is not just a clearing; Velasco, for example, registers another aspect of the work with the word "carve," a wounding and painful aspect, which feels the clearing as loss (a way of holding the loss). To return to the photograph discussed earlier, in which Kia sits with her mother's stuff surrounding her: "The First 10 Years" holds. It holds Kia, her mother's things (in their partial indecipherability), and a moment. Kia stages this hold also by holding, hugging, herself and her mother's dress in the image. The posture signals the photograph as a tender hold, an embrace. These layered holdings—Kia holding herself and her mother's dress and the photograph holding both—share qualities with what scholar Dagmawi Woubshet calls "the poetics of compounding loss" in his study of expressions of mourning and memorialization that emerged in the early years of the AIDS crisis. 45 He argues that this poetics should be understood in relation to the paradigm of loss found in black mourning in the U.S. because of its insistence on the nonlinear relationship between past and impending losses, as well as intertwining the losses of others and loss of self. 46 As Woubshet writes, "Redirecting loss to signify that which is still outstanding, still living, still here demands a reorientation of loss's grammar." Woubshet's articulation of this shifting temporality helps to explain how Kia's photograph can feel both nostalgic and futuristic. 47

In the heavy static of past and future loss, Kia practices letting go as a way to manage accumulations of stuff (including loss), not as an erasure of what has been lost or let go, but as a memorialization practice open to transformation—and as a way of willing freedom to what has been lost, and to herself: compounding possibilities. Kia describes taking the picture, "I captured that moment as kind of a way of embracing an act of letting go." 48 When she calls "letting go" an "act," I read her as indicating the materiality and motion of "letting go," and also the performative aspect of it. Her process here resists personal organizing's seeming need to devalue stuff or rank things in order to let them go. Instead, in her work letting something go can actually become a way of embracing and caring for it in its freedom and potential.

—

When I spoke to Kia, she again mentioned her concern with getting stuck, although this time she was not talking about an accumulation of stuff taking up her space for movement. Kia told me, "The thing with routines is that you get stuck with them." 49 Routines, which can be carried out at a range of scales from the everyday to the intergenerational, might be likened to choreography, which dance scholar Danielle Goldman describes as "a series of movements that unfold in a set rhythm." 50 Within choreography and routine, a performer has space for creative interpretation, but they cannot change the rhythm or movements, which are "set."As with clutter, when routines sediment, they can become obstacles to new movement too. However, for Kia some arduous and tiring routines have been necessary and life-saving, and she cannot simply let them go. For example, she goes to the doctor frequently to have her viral load tested, and she takes a number of pills and medications every day.

Especially in her series 24, a title which reflects her age at the time she took the photographs and also the repetition of hours in a day, Kia captures some of her routines; she holds a piece of them with a pose. In the photograph "Eleven" for example, Kia captures herself in her doctor's office sitting on the table. 51 Her doctor, the first person other than Kia to have appeared in one of her photographs, draws her blood in real time. This is a scene of routine care for Kia, who has gone to get her blood drawn by this doctor since she was four years old. However, she does not dress for the everyday in the photograph. She wears a sparkling red prom dress (her prom dress) which fans across the doctor's table and red lipstick to match, and holds a rose in her free hand. She looks straight at the camera in acknowledgment of a viewer, which disrupts the privacy of the medical scene.

In addition, the white partition behind her, and the way shadows appear against it, makes it resemble a theatre curtain. Kia's dress—fanned like a tutu—suggests dance, and her position makes her look almost like she might be standing to perform or to take a bow rather than sitting. Kia's doctor too, wearing what looks like a suit, seems dressed for a formal dance. This conjuring of dance is literally right. When Kia photographs herself, she vogues, or practices a form of improvised dance, for the camera. She sets a 10-second timer on her camera, then she strikes a pose, and the photograph of the moment is captured. "It feels like an extremely classical way of vogueing, the play between the pose and the camera as a dance," says Kia. 52 Doing things in the classical way appeals to Kia, who at one point wanted to be a ballerina and who was trained at the Alvin Ailey School. However, classical does not mean choreographed or already written, and Kia's vogueing is always improvised. Goldman's writing on improvisation in dance presents a useful framework for thinking about improvisation as an adaptable technique that emerges from preparedness rather than rehearsal. Goldman writes, "improvisation's most significant power is as a full-bodied critical engagement with the world, characterized by both flexibility and perpetual readiness." 53 In training for improvisation, repetition leads to practice but not to the stuckness of routine. For this reason, Kia's improvisation in her photography, which is signaled by her glamour and dress, might be seen as another way that she disrupts the routine scenes she represents and lives with.

In addition to suggesting dance, Kia's prom dress in "Eleven" is significant because, as Kia has said in an artist's statement, growing up she had been unsure about whether she would live long enough to attend her prom. 54 The dress, thus, invokes her longevity and resilience, while turning the confines of the doctor's office into a glamorous and dream-like scene. Kia told me, of the photograph and of the series 24 more broadly,

I was looking at the idea of using fantasy as a way that a young emerging woman can cope. There are so many moments [in the series] about being able to get out of your head. That's a major coping mechanism. 55

While fantasy is sometimes thought of as precisely located within someone's head and only there, here Kia presents fantasy as a way out of the scale and space of the mind—that is, a route towards not just escape but also towards the possibility of engagement. While her exploration of ways that "a young emerging woman can cope" is self-reflexive, she does not speak of just herself here but of a "young emerging woman" generally. With this exploration in her work, she stages a reaching towards other young women who are struggling to cope, with whom she can share secrets and tactics of care that align with a critical disability ethic.

This construction of audience as care circle goes some way to explaining differences between Kia's self-portraits and other artists' portraits and self-portraits of people with HIV/AIDS, particularly from the 1980s and 1990s. Many of these portraits—such as those by Alon Reininger, Judy Chicago, Mark Morrisroe, Rosalind Solomon, and David Lebe—draw the viewer's eye to a body's rib cage or Kaposi sarcoma lesions, signs of illness on exposed skin. 56 Jonathan David Katz describes this portraiture: "The art called forth an empathetic reaction to another person's body, often portrayed in extremity, illness, or even death." 57 I would add that these photographs might also shock, challenge, or offer evidence, among a range of other potential reactions, many of which suggest that the audience does not share the situation and position of the photographed body. Thinking with scholar Marianne Hirsch's work on the relationship between trauma and the reproduction and recirculation of photographs, it also seems likely that these photographs of bodily demise might produce "the effects of traumatic repetition," especially in young viewers who are HIV positive and so already are reenacting the history in their own bodies. 58 Kia's photography, by contrast, fosters something closer to a circle of giving for young femmes—and especially black and brown femmes and those who are sick, disabled, and/or have complex trauma—in need of shared "coping mechanisms."

Similarly to how Kia's work disrupts representations of everyday routine with elements of glamour, her art responds to the exhausting sameness with which art from HIV-positive artists is received, exhibited, and historicized by centering the vibrancy of queer nightlife. She does so to stage a reawakening in a distinctly queer temporal space connected to the glamour of the ballroom scene, a scene where no one forgets that black and brown women who are HIV-positive exist creatively. It is also the place where she was able to find them again after her mother died. Kia references the artistry involved in walking the ballroom runway in her photography with make-up, costume, sparkles, paint, shine, darkness, and poses. These elements also help her to explore the protective yet still generous potential of glamour.

Kia captures this power of the after-dark's glamour in her series Fear is Only a Fraction of Love (2018). In all of these photographs she appears shimmering and painted like night, dusted with glitter and kissed with red lipstick, against a dark background, sometimes alone or with a single prop such as a mirror or the moon. Although she is alone in the images and took the photographs herself, the photographs do not exactly represent a one woman show; her partner Taina Larot helped her to paint her body for the images, which is not insignificant in a series about love. As the title Fear is Only a Fraction of Love suggests, the series concerns not just love but a readjustment of scales. In the photographs this readjustment is invoked by Kia's body. She looms large in the images, taking up much of the frame. Because the background is the same color that Kia is painted, there is little definite indication of Kia's size. However, with glitter on her body like stars, Kia is connected to the scale of the cosmos. In one of the images, "Kia LaBeija Featuring the Moon," the moon floats above her hand, smaller than her palm. Here she takes on fantastic grandeur, power, even immortality. 59

Kia's layering of glitter, paint, and makeup in her staging of this power reminds me of Eve Sedgwick's description of idealization as a process of layering sparkly materials ("sequins," "powdering," "fairy dust") over something. 60 In A Dialogue on Love, in the wake of learning that her cancer has metastasized, Sedgwick recounts conversations with her therapist about her depressive tendency to idealize her friends, a defensive tendency which prevents "the world being revealed as awful or just plain dead" but also actually "improves the environment." 61 Written prior to and in a more memoiristic mode than her theorization of reparative reading, Sedgwick's writing on idealization nonetheless draws from a similar hope about the potential of seeing things as good—which, yes, maybe hides something but also makes something. Here I am drawn to idealization rather than reparative reading because idealization is more about transformation through use or performance than about fixing or making whole (what, in fact, already is whole, to cite Sins Invalid's principle "recognizing wholeness"). 62

As a way to conclude this section, I want to think about Sedgwick's understanding of idealization as a practice of defensively yet generously layering shiny materials on others in relation to how Madison Moore writes about "throwing" "a look" on the vogue floor. Although vogue contestants do not in general literally throw shiny materials at their audiences, Moore compares vogue contestants' runway walks to Joseph Roach's reading of Mardi Gras krewes' tradition of throwing beads:

"Krewes" are street gangs who have labored extensively on the creation of Mardi Gras looks as a way to one-up or out-fierce other rival street gangs, and here Roach shows that the confrontation is not about urban violence but beads and sequins. The simple act of throwing objects at an audience is about demanding presence, and as Hooda Pooda stands there in front of the crowd, throwing not beads but a fierce look, he is also demanding recognition of his queer esthetic labor. 63

Moore's reading of a demand for recognition seems right, and I see that in Kia's work. However, what strikes me most in Moore's articulation is the oddness of a demand for presence that happens through a kind of thrown presence (since the presence is presented through the beads) that touches and even gets taken on by the audience. I am drawn to reading this throwing in Kia's work as a demand but also as an act of giving away. There is something glamorously defiant, even holding, about a gift in that it says, there is still more here without this, and I can withstand you having it.

Recycling

"Disidentification is about recycling…" - José Esteban Muñoz 64

Kia has noted that she thinks of Fear is Only a Fraction of Love as a reworking of the themes in her poem "Tainted." 65 It is not unusual for her to move the materials of an idea from one form to another, which makes sense for an artist inspired by vogueing: a dance form that turns the property of a proper noun (Vogue) into a verb, into performance. One of vogueing's origin stories narrates that it began as imitation of fashion photography. 66 In the absence of a camera, vogueing turned photographs into a dance of photographic poses. Kia's work, of course, turns this movement between forms in the other direction, when she makes the dance back into photography; and then she makes it back into dance or into something else. This recycling is another way she enacts resourcefulness, and also loosens her attachment to the individual things she makes. Kia uses disappearance and recycling to enable a loosening of the propertying grip of permanence and scale-shifting between activism and care, that again aligns with a critical disability ethic of anti-capitalist belonging.

With her artist and activist collective GrenAIDS, Kia created the digital print To Do List, an image of a short printed list in simple bold font that reads, "To do list: MAKE ART, CURE AIDS, EAT BREAKFAST." 67 The form and material of the list displays some intergenerational recycling. Kia has recounted finding a to-do list in one of her mother's journals, which begins, "Get rid of HIV, get rid of my daughter's HIV." 68 This repetition may partially have the feel of habit, but there is room for non-habitual movement in the list as well. In the format of GrenAIDS' list, the three to-do items are presented in a non-hierarchical relation to each other with equally weighted font. Though they have different scales of impact and different temporal rhythms, they are not ranked against each other. The to-do list also conveys potential movement, perhaps from one item to the next, although it does not preclude the possibility that multiple items are being worked toward simultaneously. All of the items on the list involve care and have a relationship with healthy living on some scale. As a way to think about self-care in relation to activism, I want to focus on the task "eat breakfast." "Eat breakfast" most obviously centers care for the self, and it is the least likely activist or militant task on the list. Breakfast is often small and private. Sometimes just something snuck from the pantry, breakfast is also a kind of movement tactic: a way to start the day, a way to start each day; a signal for habit, for a new start, and for moving on. Breakfast's association with the start to movement can be seen also, for example, in Genevieve O'Brien's performance piece Selfcare, which includes a self-care deck with performance directions. Many of the cards in the deck provide short to-do lists. One reads, "1) Make breakfast to go. 2) Go." 69 Here breakfast not only provides sustenance but a way of beginning to go, especially when it might be hard to go, when going requires care.

In the context of GrenAIDS's To Do List, breakfast's association with movement takes on more weight. Eating breakfast requires less time than making art or curing AIDS; it is just a small task, and so it can be done many times over. Breakfast can be a routine and for that reason it has the potential to turn the other difficult or unthinkable tasks on the list into parallel routines. That "eat breakfast," a day-beginning task, comes at the end of the list reaffirms this potential. It represents a new start at the end of every attempt. In this way, "eat breakfast" actually makes movement through the whole list more possible: Each item becomes a way of living again and again. To "make art" and "cure AIDS" becomes less overwhelming as they transform into everyday practices. At the same time, to "eat breakfast" becomes an impactful act, a part of the ecology of cure and art. Here self-care offers the wisdom that "eating breakfast," "curing AIDS," and "making art" inhabit the same planet, can be done with shared and mutually replenishing resources, and can have a proportionate relationship with each other.

I draw from Audre Lorde's writing to make this observation. Her work also attends to the potential of self-care to facilitate movement between scales in the "habitat of being," especially in the pressure of her cancer diagnosis. 70 Lorde is often credited in popular media and elsewhere as an inaugural influence on current discussions of self-care, but not always in ways that consider her particular use of the concept, and so I want to turn to her writing. 71 In her essay "A Burst of Light," in the paragraph directly following her often-circulated words "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence," Lorde writes, "My days are a thirsty atonal combination of the mundane and the apocalyptic…My aim is to move more easily between the two, make transitions the least costly." 72 When Lorde writes "costly," she means of all the resources she might put to use, not primarily money. For Lorde "caring for myself" is what makes transitions between the gulfs of herself less costly, so that she is not overextending herself. Here self-care is a way of moving resourcefully back and forth across the space found in the recognition that self-struggle stretches the width of political struggle. That self-struggle can be made available for the use of political struggle becomes more livable when the power derived from either struggle is carried in both directions, so that resources are not divided between the two. Lorde writes, for example,

"Visualizing the disease process inside my body in political images is not a quixotic dream. When I speak out against the cynical U.S. intervention in Central America, I am working to save my life in every sense. Government research grants to the National Cancer Institute were cut in 1986 by the exact amount illegally turned over to the contras in Nicaragua" 73

For Lorde, caring for the self is a way of recycling the materials that she can draw from to fight for herself, the planet, and those bodies and objects in between.

Over the last decade, self-care has been increasingly taken up in mainstream self-help discourses often as a way to elevate indulgent consumer practices—"Rosé all day" or a spa day—into an aspect of normative wellness regimens. 74 Self-care has at the same time, and relatedly, engendered suspicion and critique from some activists and scholars because of its association with individualism and so with capitalism. 75 If self-care is sometimes a way of sustainably traveling between scales of being, it is still also sometimes a way of selling people the belief that their care is a luxury they ought to afford alongside a belief that they are not responsible for others' care; that care and personal responsibility are "delinked from history." 76 An extreme example of this delinking might be seen, for example, in the Real Estate section in The New York Times in the summer of 2022, where a headline reads, "Investing in Real Estate as Self-Care." 77 This article asserts a self-care that does not merely respond to housing crises in inaccesible ways (like the personal organizing discourses discussed earlier); instead, this "self-care" actually drives the crises. It is difficult to imagine a formulation of care that is more uninterested in the welfare of others.

In the context of such uses of "self-care," Chad Shomura has suggested using the phrase "micropolitics of mental health" rather than "self-care" in order to convey "the minutiae of lived experience[,] habits, feelings." 78 For Shomura, in contrast with self-care, micropolitics "extends beyond the individual" and counters a capitalist framework by acknowledging interdependence. 79 While being less individuated, the micro- shares the smallness of the self- and is likewise related to the everyday as it takes the form of minutiae. Both the self- and the micro- potentially cut against notions of nation and public, and instead zoom into the particular, the local, and the renegade. Attending to the small, and practicing movement at its scale, offers a way to cut against the magnitude of harm done by large entities: nations, empires, corporations, the prison industrial complex, and the medical industrial complex.

But it is not really that the small is good and the large is bad or that the large is state and the small is autonomous, though sometimes. Other times, as the activist-writer Aurora Levins Morales writes in her essay "Bigger is Better," "When we think big, we fight for everyone." 80 She argues for the strategic benefits of activist work that is big in the sense of being both coalitional and radical (i.e. having bigger demands). Terms (like large and small) are mostly just would-be waste in the dumpster that belongs to the city, which is also to say that they are resources to glean and then recycle. They are, to cite queer and performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz's theory of disidentification, "raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture." 81 This is not to say that every term comes from the dominant culture, but that anything can be appropriated by the dominant culture and that it does not automatically become waste once it has been.

In an act of disidentification, the representation is meant to be impermanent, a mystical and transitory landing: a pose gleaned and then recycled to free space for holding a different useful pose. To use the word "unthinkable" in a different way than Muñoz's use—"unthinkable" as in too horrific—the more permanent things are the unthinkable ones. Impermanent holdings are, like self-care or eating breakfast, a movement tactic for those rendered unthinkable (to return to Muñoz's use), a way of shaping limbs or wheels for the still unimagined (or, at least, that is one potential). Bringing Muñoz's influential theory of disidentification to bear in thinking about a critical disability ethic highlights the materiality and ecological nature of the theory because disability studies is so well suited to thinking about how things (including words) and people get ordered and contained in spaces according to a range of oppressive logics, as well as to thinking about subverting these orders and containers. 82

GrenAIDS' To Do list, especially when paired with Kwan Bennett's earlier to-do list, tells us something like, "Curing AIDS is unthinkable. Recycle those words, and this time have them say something else. Some of us think AIDS is already cured. Recycle again…Start with eating breakfast."

Belonging without property

Kia wrote the poem "Drafted" on her phone while taking one of her ritualistic warm baths, an ordinary and glamorous act of care. The poem begins,

The lines move between the scale of the city's giants and the scale of "I" as Kia recounts a change in her beliefs regarding belonging, loneliness, permanence, and obligation. Her altered beliefs affect how the different scales touch and measure each other. The poem begins with the speaker's sense of belonging, an effect of her loneliness. Although belonging is often conceived of as loneliness's opposite, here her belief that she "belonged to this city" results from her "fall[ing] in love with objects" propelled by her loneliness. If her sense of belonging is precipitated by this falling, it also involves looking up, since the "objects" are giant. The size difference between her and the objects shapes her "obligation" to them, a debt owed to compensate for her unequal belonging to the city—a promise to rescale herself to fit.

This upward-looking form of belonging that generates obligations might be compared to scholar Sara Ahmed's description of desire: "Desire is both what promises us something, what gives us energy, and also what is lacking." 84 Obligation, like desire, involves a lack and a promise, something to be filled and something to be fulfilled. However, in the case of obligation, a desire has theoretically already been fulfilled, but the lack remains as a debt. Kia's indebted belonging is conditioned by the lack that her belonging supposedly generates. Her smallness against the city's invincible giants is the difference between her and what she owes for the permission to be where she is. Her debt is odd in that her repayment must be made upon herself; her obligation is to self-improve, so that she can earn the belonging she already has. However, the towers' destruction intrudes upon the size and duration of the city, impacting its obligating force and what she could owe it. The city's objects are suddenly much smaller, gone: ash, more unbreakable than "metal and steel;" but even ash, already broken, can break again. Her obligation was generated by her access to things giant and permanent, then proved otherwise.

The poem actually implicitly registers an intrusion upon the permanence of the city that is even prior to 9/11. Kia's "belief in invincibility" does not fully crumble with the towers, but with the death of her mother from AIDS-related causes. That is to say, that her belief in her mother's invincibility turns out to be more primary than her belief in the city's, though the loss of her mother comes after. This other binding relationship, not to the city but to her mother, also disrupts her obligation to the city's objects. It is the scale and the potential force of another person, a mother, heavier and more enduring than the city's objects, although still loseable. The obligating spell of the city also breaks with the weight of this heavier mourning. The loss of her mother returns her to loneliness. Her first loneliness was remedied by obliging belonging. Her second loneliness will not lead her to oblige, since the materials that constitute its promise and lack, the giant objects and her relative smallness, have been called into question.

Kia ends her poem "Drafted" with the impossibility of keeping herself and her stuff together, with breaking; but then travels from this breaking somehow to moving and to a new form of belonging outside of the property-making of obligation:

There are a number of things to notice about this ending. First, it is in going with the impossibility of uprightness, in going with brokenness, in "sinking," that she is able to rest (in "it's quiet now") and also move. She emphasizes this newfound movement: "my body moving," "bodies moving," "runaway slaves." In this repetition of "moving" she also shifts between aloneness and belonging. Her movement placed next to the movement of other bodies including their and her fugitive black ancestors conveys this sense of belonging. However, this new belonging is not founded in possession or obligation but in their "in sync-ness," their shared movement that offers a view of a world without private property—a gathering that empties and opens—even as the bodies are still held by designated street corners. In the resourceful magic of use or performance, the other dancers glorify and welcome Kia not through their definite status as icons but through "call[ing] themselves icons," which is also to say by refusing the power of any authority other than themselves to name them or order their meaning, potential, or use.

That the bodies are "moving in sync" also changes Kia's initial "I sink;" she "sinks" and also "syncs." Her breaking gathers her. Their breaking holds them moving. Nothing is permanent, but they are "immortal" like "weeping petals of yellow roses during a rainstorm."