Asian American Feminist Antibodies
COVER ART OF FRONTLINE HEALTHCARE WORKERS BY AMIRA LIN (IG: @AMIRA_LJX):
I was born in Shenzhen, China. As an Asian international student, currently, the amount of hatred and discrimination towards Asian people due to coronavirus is a new experience. Most of the Chinese international students worry about their families back home and fear being racial attacked. I wish to use art to communicate that our enemy is not a certain region or cultural community. We should try to understand the hardships people are going through.
A new zine from the Asian American Feminist Collective (AAFC) features an amazing collection of essays, resources, and artwork on how to “make meaning of the coronavirus crisis through long-standing practices of care that come out of Asian American histories and politics.”
With permission from the collective, we’ve posted an excerpt from their latest zine below:
With the COVID-19 pandemic neither behind us nor solely ahead of us, this zine offers a way to make meaning of the coronavirus crisis through long-standing practices of care that come out of Asian American histories and politics. We bring together first-hand accounts and analyses from our communities, including health and service workers and caregivers on the front lines, students, people living with chronic illness, journalists, and organizers.
Together, this collection of stories, essays, and artwork shows how we experience, resist, and grapple with a viral outbreak that has been racialized as Asian, is spoken of in the language of contagion and invasion, and reveals the places where our collective social safety net is particularly threadbare.
This moment of precarity and disaster reminds us that we cannot rely on the state for our wellbeing. The legacies of imperialism, capitalism, and patriarchy undergird forms of violence that unevenly expose many in our communities to further risk, rendering people disposable.
Yet, in this moment, we also see how revolutionary love and care can reshape our world. We see the urgency, necessity, and radical possibilities of decarceration, language justice, healthcare and housing access, economic redistribution, and mutual aid.
Our dreams, visions, and desires for an alternative world and future can
be realized. We are made of communities with deep collective knowledge on how to care for each other and the earth around us. Together, we can survive and build interdependent communities.
Download and read Asian American Feminist Antibodies: Care in the Time of Coronavirus, and also check out this reading list and webinar about Black & Asian-American Feminist Solidarities during COVID19 from AAFC and Black Women Radicals.
