Mia Mingus

Last updated
Mia Mingus
Occupation Writer, community organizer, teacher   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Website https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Mia Mingus is an American writer, educator, and community organizer who focuses on issues of disability justice. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] She is known for coining the term "access intimacy". [6] [7] [8] She advocates for disability studies and activism to centralize the experiences of marginalized people within disability organizing. [9] She is a prison abolitionist, and she advocates for transformative justice in her work against child sexual abuse. [1]

Contents

Personal life

Mingus self-describes as a "physically disabled, queer Korean transracial and transnational adoptee" and a survivor of child sexual abuse. [1] [10] All of these identities are integral to her work as an activist.

Childhood

Mingus was born in Korea and adopted by white parents when she was an infant. [11] She was raised on the island of St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. [12] She has a younger sister who was also adopted.

When Mingus was a child, her mother and nine other women founded the Women's Coalition of St. Croix, the first organization on the island dedicated to helping victims of domestic violence, rape, and sexual assault. Mingus's childhood experiences with this organization and the feminist community on the island would later inspire her own work as an activist. [13] These experiences also led her to understand that, as she wrote in a 2018 blog post, "violence...was systemic and more than just a couple of 'bad apples.' It was happening in every community." [14]

Education

Mingus attended school in the Virgin Islands until she was 17 years old. [13] She then attended Agnes Scott College, an all-women's school in Decatur, Georgia, where she earned her degree in Women's Studies. [13] While volunteering at the National Human for Rights Education Center in high school, Mingus was introduced to Loretta Ross, an African American reproductive justice activist. [13] Through similar volunteering, Mingus was able to earn a community service scholarship to go to college.

Career

Early career

After graduation, Mingus began her career by working at a feminist bookstore in Atlanta, Charis Books & More. Through Charis, Mingus found an activist community, including a group called Queer Girls, which threw house parties specifically for queer women of color. Later, Mingus worked at Georgians for Choice, an organization associated with the National Abortion Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL). Later, Mingus was accepted to a reproductive justice fellowship in Chicago. She later became the co-director at Georgians for Choice. Mingus also served on the board of SPARK: Reproductive Justice NOW as the co-founder and co-leader. [13]

Mingus was a part of numerous national coalitions such as Causes in Common, which focused on achieving reproductive rights, health, and justice work for the LGBTQ+ community. She was also a part of the Access Project, NILNY, CLPP(Civil Liberties and Public Policy), and more. Mingus built a partnership with the Atlanta Transformative Justice Collaborative [ATJC], between SPARK and CWPE, and also Project South.

Current career

Mia Mingus's work focuses on disability justice as a means of liberation. Mingus founded the Living Bridges Project, which focuses on listening to people's responses regarding child sexual abuse. The goal of this project is to offer support and resources to survivors. Similarly, Mingus is the cofounder and core member of the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC), which also collects such child sexual abuse stories and further creates transformative justice responses that promote healing and accountability. [10]

Currently, Mingus has a popular blog titled Leaving Evidence, where she focuses on different social justice issues. Her articles have been showcased in numerous magazines and publications. [10] On October 14, 2021, Mingus was awarded the Robert Coles "Call of Service" award by The Phillips Brooks House Association. [15]

Known for

Mingus' approach to disability justice focuses on dismantling privilege: "We don't want to simply join the ranks of the privileged; we want to dismantle those ranks and the systems that maintain them" (Mingus, 2011, para. 5) [16]

She is especially well known for her work on 'collective access.' Collective access emphasizes how disability interacts with other aspects of an individual's identities, making disability justice activism necessarily intertwined with anti-racist, feminist, reproductive justice, queer, and prison abolitionist activism. [17] Emphasizing solidarity between movements, collective access focuses on community-supported access and mutual independence instead of individualized specific accommodations. [17] [18]

Mingus believes that ensuring access or participation for disabled people is not considered justice, but rather people must transform their subjective realities at the core of their humanity to ensure community. [18] Mingus preaches the idea that a focus on exclusion causes people to lose focus on inclusion. [18] [19]

A key element of Mingus's work is her embrace of interdependence. [20] [21] She believes that people needed to rid the myth of independence as interdependency is what forms communities. [19] [21] This concept can be further broken down into the term "access intimacy". Access intimacy is a concept that Mingus formulated as she believed that people can understand and be there for each other, which will provide an unexpected amount of comfort. [19] [20] Mingus believed that the disabled community was missing access intimacy. [20]

Through her work with the BATJC, Mingus developed a tool called pod-mapping, which allows individual to identify the individuals and organizations they could rely on for support to heal or take accountability were they to experience or cause harm, violence or abuse. [22] [23] Pod work is rooted in transformative justice principles of harm and accountability, including a community-based approach to intervening in and preventing violence at all levels.

Mingus has consistently spoken up about the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC) as well. She wrote a lot about all that the complex encompasses: its deep-rooted connections to various forms of oppression, and its complicated relationship with marginalized communities. [24]

She specifically focused on how the MIC can connect to ableism. According to Mingus, while the Medical Industrial Complex can play a critical role in aiding people, it can also be incredibly harmful. [24] In her blog, "Leaving Evidence", Mingus described in-depth the major roles that eugenics, charity and ableism, population control, and desirability play within the complex and how it connects to the overall profitability of the MIC. [24]

She constructed a visual that was included on the blog post, listing all of the different ways that the Medical Industrial Complex intersects with other aspects of societal life. She specifically criticizes how people within the complex can constantly perpetuate ableism in everyday life, noting that as a result of ableism within the MIC, many disabled people can feel alienated within the complex. Thus, making them less likely to want to interact with the Medical Industrial Complex. [24]

Mingus emphasizes the importance of people coming together to dismantle a strong system like the Medical Industrial Complex, stating that there is a need for people to "live out the simple truth that we need each other." [25]  She recommends that people learn to contend with the pain and oppression brought by systems such as the MIC so that change can be created. [25]

Accomplishments

See Also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Disability</span> Impairments, activity limitations, and participation restrictions

Disability is the experience of any condition that makes it more difficult for a person to do certain activities or have equitable access within a given society. Disabilities may be cognitive, developmental, intellectual, mental, physical, sensory, or a combination of multiple factors. Disabilities can be present from birth or can be acquired during a person's lifetime. Historically, disabilities have only been recognized based on a narrow set of criteria—however, disabilities are not binary and can be present in unique characteristics depending on the individual. A disability may be readily visible, or invisible in nature.

Disability studies is an academic discipline that examines the meaning, nature, and consequences of disability. Initially, the field focused on the division between "impairment" and "disability", where impairment was an impairment of an individual's mind or body, while disability was considered a social construct. This premise gave rise to two distinct models of disability: the social and medical models of disability. In 1999 the social model was universally accepted as the model preferred by the field. However, in recent years, the division between the social and medical models has been challenged. Additionally, there has been an increased focus on interdisciplinary research. For example, recent investigations suggest using "cross-sectional markers of stratification" may help provide new insights on the non-random distribution of risk factors capable of exacerbating disablement processes. Such risk factors can be acute or chronic stressors, which can increase cumulative risk factors The decline of immune function with age and decrease of inter-personal relationships which can impact cognitive function with age.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha</span> Canadian-American writer

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a Canadian-American poet, writer, educator and social activist. Their writing and performance art focuses on documenting the stories of queer and trans people of color, abuse survivors, mixed-race people and diasporic South Asians and Sri Lankans. A central concern of their work is the interconnection of systems of colonialism, abuse and violence. They are also a writer and organizer within the disability justice movement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reproductive justice</span> Social justice movement

Reproductive justice is a critical feminist framework that was invented as a response to United States reproductive politics. The three core values of reproductive justice are the right to have a child, the right to not have a child, and the right to parent a child or children in safe and healthy environments. The framework moves women's reproductive rights past a legal and political debate to incorporate the economic, social, and health factors that impact women's reproductive choices and decision-making ability.

Laura Ann Hershey was a poet, journalist, popular speaker, feminist, and a disability rights activist and consultant. Known to have parked her wheelchair in front of buses, Hershey was one of the leaders of a protest against the paternalistic attitudes and images of people with disabilities inherent to Jerry Lewis's MDA Telethon. She was a regular columnist for the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, and on her own website, Crip Commentary, and was published in a variety of magazines and websites. She was admired for her wit, her ability to structure strong arguments in the service of justice, and her spirited refusal to let social responses to her spinal muscular atrophy define the parameters of her life as anything less than a full human existence. She was also the mother of an adopted daughter.

Kay Ulanday Barrett is a published poet, performer, educator, food writer, cultural strategist, and transgender, gender non-conforming, and disability advocate based in New York and New Jersey, whose work has been showcased nationally and internationally. Their second book, More Than Organs received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award by the American Library Association and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Literature Finalist. They are a 2020 James Baldwin Fellowship recipient, three-time Pushcart Prize Nominee, and two-time Best of the Net Nominee. Barrett's writing and performance centers on the experience of queer, transgender, people of color, mixed race people, Asian, and Filipino/a/x community. The focus of their artistic work navigates multiple systems of oppression in the context of the U.S.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Medical–industrial complex</span>

The medical–industrial complex (MIC) refers to a network of interactions between pharmaceutical corporations, health care personnel, and medical conglomerates to supply health care-related products and services for a profit. The term is derived from the idea of the military–industrial complex.

Jael Silliman is an author, scholar, and women’s right activist. She currently works as a consultant on gender and development, women of color and reproductive rights, and gender and environment issues. She lives in New York City and Calcutta. She is widely held in libraries worldwide.

Sins Invalid is a disability justice-based performance project that focuses on artists with disabilities, artists of color, and LGBTQ / gender-variant artists. Led by disabled people of color, Sins Invalid's performance work explores the themes of sexuality, embodiment and the disabled body. In addition to multidisciplinary performances by people with disabilities, Sins Invalid organizes visual art exhibitions, readings, and a bi-monthly educational video series. Sins Invalid collaborates with other movement-building projects and provides disability justice training.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lydia X. Z. Brown</span> Autistic disability rights activist

Lydia X. Z. Brown is an American autistic disability rights activist, writer, attorney, and public speaker who was honored by the White House in 2013. They are the chairperson of the American Bar Association Civil Rights & Social Justice Disability Rights Committee. They are also Policy Counsel for Privacy & Data at the Center for Democracy & Technology, and Director of Policy, Advocacy, & External Affairs at the Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network. In 2022, they unsuccessfully ran for the Maryland House of Delegates in District 7A, losing to state delegate Kathy Szeliga and delegate-elect Ryan Nawrocki.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Loretta Ross</span> African American activist, writer and teacher on reproductive justice

Loretta J. Ross is an American academic, feminist, and activist who advocates for reproductive justice, especially among women of color. As an activist, Ross has written on reproductive justice activism and the history of African American women.

Nidhi Goyal is an Indian disability and gender rights activist who has been appointed to the UN Women Executive Director's advisory group. Goyal is the founder and executive director of Mumbai-based NGO Rising Flame and works in the areas of sexuality, gender, health and rights for women and girls with disabilities. She is also a stand-up comedian.

Val Kalei Kanuha is a scholar, teacher, and activist on gender violence, anti-oppression, and social justice focused on Native Hawaiian/indigenous peoples, people of color and LGBTQ communities.

Disability justice is a social justice movement which focuses on examining disability and ableism as they relate to other forms of oppression and identity such as race, class and gender. It was developed in 2005 by the Disability Justice Collective, a group including Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, Stacey Milbern, Leroy F. Moore Jr., and Eli Clare. In disability justice, disability is not considered to be defined in "white terms, or male terms, or straight terms." The movement also believes that ableism makes other forms of prejudice possible and that systems of oppression are intertwined. The disability justice framework is being applied to a intersectional reexamination of a wide range of disability, human rights, and justice movements.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carceral feminism</span> Forms of feminism that advocate for increased prison sentences

Carceral feminism is a critical term for types of feminism that advocate for enhancing and increasing prison sentences that deal with feminist and gender issues. The term criticises the belief that harsher and longer prison sentences will help work towards solving these issues. The phrase "carceral feminism" was coined by Elizabeth Bernstein, a feminist sociologist, in her 2007 article, "The Sexual Politics of the 'New Abolitionism'". Examining the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States, Bernstein introduced the term to describe a type of feminist activism which casts all forms of sexual labor as sex trafficking. She sees this as a retrograde step, suggesting it erodes the rights of women in the sex industry, and takes the focus off other important feminist issues, and expands the neoliberal agenda.

Dána-Ain Davis is a professor of urban studies at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY) and the Director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society.

For the Hong Kong actress and singer, see Miriam Yeung.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stacey Milbern</span> Korean-American disability activist (1987–2020)

Stacey Park Milbern was a Korean-American Disability Justice activist. She helped create the Disability Justice movement and advocated for fair treatment of disabled people.

Liat Ben-Moshe is a disability scholar and assistant professor of criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ben-Moshe holds a PhD in sociology from Syracuse University with concentrations in Women and Gender Studies and Disability Studies. Ben-Moshe's work “has brought an intersectional disability studies approach to the phenomenon of mass incarceration and decarceration in the US”. Ben-Moshe's major works include Building Pedagogical Curb Cuts: Incorporating Disability into the University Classroom and Curriculum (2005), Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada (2014), and Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition (2020). Ben-Moshe is best known for her theories of dis-epistemology, genealogy of deinstitutionalization, and race-ability.

In disability studies, the term bodymind refers to the intricate and often inseparable relationship between the body and the mind, and how these two units might act as one. Disability scholars use the term bodymind to emphasize the interdependence and inseparability of the body and mind.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "20 Queer People of Color You Should Know". OutSmart Magazine. May 1, 2014.
  2. ↑ "Seeing in the Dark: Fighting against ableism". The Bay Area Reporter / B.A.R. Inc.
  3. ↑ "Mia Mingus". Woodhull Freedom Foundation.
  4. ↑ "Mia Mingus | QPOC Affinity Resources". campuspress.yale.edu.
  5. ↑ Nahmad, Erica (January 28, 2019). "13 Reasons Why Mia Mingus is the Kind of Feminist Everyone Loves".
  6. ↑ Grace, Ellen (January 28, 2020). "The task of mental health".
  7. ↑ Nugent, Molly. "Civic Nation BrandVoice: Access Is More Than Just Inclusion". Forbes.
  8. ↑ "A Performance Festival by and for Disabled Artists". Hyperallergic. May 9, 2019.
  9. ↑ Carla Rice, Eliza Chandler, Elisabeth Harrison, Kirsty Liddiard & Manuela Ferrari (2015) Project Re•Vision: disability at the edges of representation, Disability & Society, 30:4, 513–527, DOI: 10.1080/09687599.2015.1037950
  10. 1 2 3 Heller, Tamar; Harris, Sarah Parker; Gill, Carol J.; Gould, Robert (2018-12-07). Disability in American Life: An Encyclopedia of Concepts, Policies, and Controversies [2 volumes]. ABC-CLIO. ISBN   978-1-4408-3423-3.
  11. ↑ Alok (26 October 2018). "Why Ugliness Is Vital in the Age of Social Media". them. Retrieved 2020-04-20.
  12. ↑ Nahmad, Erica (2019-01-28). "13 Reasons Why Mia Mingus is the Kind of Feminist Everyone Loves". BELatina. Retrieved 2022-06-21.
  13. 1 2 3 4 5 Kwon, Juhee (2013-08-05). "Mia Mingus" (PDF). Asian American Reproductive Justice Oral History Project.
  14. ↑ "Finding Each Other: Building Legacies of Belonging". Leaving Evidence. 2018-04-10. Retrieved 2022-08-30.
  15. 1 2 Correspondent, Lian Parsons Harvard (2021-10-20). "Mia Mingus receives award for disability advocacy". Harvard Gazette. Retrieved 2023-03-31.
  16. ↑ Andrews, E. E., Forber-Pratt, A., Mona, L. R., Lund, E. M., Pilarski, C. R., & Balter, R. (2019). #SaytheWord: A disability culture commentary on the erasure of "disability". Rehabilitation Psychology, 64(2), 111–118. doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/10.1037/rep0000258
  17. 1 2 Kumbier, A., & Starkey, J. (2016). Access is not problem solving: Disability justice and libraries. Library Trends, 64(3), 468–491. doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/10.1353/lib.2016.0004
  18. 1 2 3 Annamma, Subini Ancy; Handy, Tamara (January 2021). "Sharpening Justice Through DisCrit: A Contrapuntal Analysis of Education". Educational Researcher. 50 (1): 41–50. doi:10.3102/0013189X20953838. ISSN   0013-189X. S2CID   225219291.
  19. 1 2 3 Waggoner, Jess (Fall 2020). "Visionary Politics and Methods in Feminist Disability Studies". Journal of Feminist Scholarship. 17 (17).
  20. 1 2 3 Volion, Ashley M. (2020-08-12). Access Intimacy: The Missing Piece (thesis thesis). University of Illinois at Chicago.
  21. 1 2 "Canadian Journal of Disability Studies Special Issue: Survivals, Ruptures, Resiliences". cjds.uwaterloo.ca. Retrieved 2022-06-16.
  22. ↑ Carpenter, Zoë (2020-10-07). "A Reckoning Inside the Domestic-Violence Movement". ISSN   0027-8378 . Retrieved 2023-04-07.
  23. ↑ "What Does A World Without Cops Look Like? Just Ask Domestic Violence Activists". Bustle. 21 July 2020. Retrieved 2023-04-07.
  24. 1 2 3 4 Mingus, Mia (2015-02-06). "Medical Industrial Complex Visual". Leaving Evidence. Retrieved 2023-04-27.
  25. 1 2 Rosa, Sophie K. (2023). Radical Intimacy. Pluto Press. doi:10.2307/jj.1094296.9. ISBN   978-0-7453-4516-1.
  26. ↑ "An introduction to five incredible women of color feminists you need to know". HelloGiggles. 6 September 2016.
  27. ↑ "Two Atlantans named to glossy's '40 Under 40'". Project Q. April 15, 2010.
  28. ↑ "Forty Under 40". www.advocate.com. April 7, 2010.
  29. ↑ "Oakland Hosts BUTCH Voices and Femmes of Color Symposium National Gatherings This Weekend". GLAAD. September 14, 2011. Archived from the original on July 31, 2021. Retrieved January 28, 2020.
  30. ↑ "Femmes of Color 2011, Keynote by Mia Mingus". August 25, 2011.
  31. ↑ "Feminists We Love: Mia Mingus – The Feminist Wire" . Retrieved 2020-01-28.
  32. ↑ "AAPI Women". The White House.
  33. ↑ "Five California Asian American women recognized by White House as "Champions of Change"". cafwd.org. 2 May 2013.
  34. ↑ "Wanting More and Finding Disability Justice". whitehouse.gov. May 13, 2013.
  35. ↑ "An Interview with Mia Mingus, Oakland Champion of Change, on transformative justice". July 10, 2013. Archived from the original on January 28, 2020. Retrieved January 28, 2020.
  36. ↑ Long, Kat; Collins, rew; Frances, Jacqueline (June 14, 2013). "100 Women We Love: Mia Mingus". GO Magazine.
  37. ↑ "2018 Keynote Bios". disummit. Archived from the original on 2020-11-30. Retrieved 2020-01-28.
  38. ↑ "Disability Futures Fellows". Ford Foundation. Retrieved 2020-11-03.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.