Embodied Worlds of Collective Love: Critically Re-Turning Liberation in My Burmese Disabled Poetry

In the West, the main options for approaching disability are usually as follows: attempt to fix your disability through medical solutions or take on a disability identity to access communities, resources, and beliefs that are alternative from the medical model. However, these limited options mean many are not only excluded from disability dialogue altogether, but also cannot access care, community, or agency in the same way—especially if they cannot readily mesh with white, Western, and individualistic ways of thinking. This means that Indigenous, Black, Brown, transnational, and immigrant communities and beyond are often erased, missing, and neglected in disability discourse. And yet we are here anyway, disabled and debilitated in more ways than one, regardless of whether we’ve been able to access white Western care around disability.

In my major research paper, I use my intersecting disabled Burmese experiences to highlight, honor, and nurture those non-Western ways of knowing and caring. I explore structural and relational perspectives of disability to move beyond identity-based disability, centering non-Western marginalized experiences and navigations of disability. As such, I excavate how communal love enables Burmese disabled existences and occasions of liberation. Using myself as a sample, I engage in critical autoethnographic poetic inquiry and a diffractive lens as a methodology for reflecting and honoring the fruition of my Burmese disabled self as it is born from communities. Ultimately, I inquire how the collectively-created self can create and house an intimate and political space of communal love to foster existence and collective liberation with others.