About #NoBodyIsDisposable
Part of the power of #NoBodyIsDisposable is how it connects the dots between many social movements. Our oppression is not theoretical. Once we are determined disposable, our bodies are directly injured and killed.
Patty Berne coined the expression No Body is Disposable in the Sins Invalid context. In 2017, she and Stacey Milbern shared analysis of disability justice, ableism, and disposability in a video series with the Barnard Center for Research on Women.
Patty describes disposability further in Skin, Tooth, and Bone: A Disability Justice Primer:
“Ableism tells us that some bodies are valuable and some are disposable. In the U.S. context, ableism has been forged with and through white supremacy, colonial conquest, capitalist domination, and heteropatriarchy so that bodies are valued for their ability to produce profit or have it extracted from them, or are otherwise excluded or eliminated through isolation, institutionalization, incarceration, and/or death.”
— Disability Justice – A Working Draft, by Patty Berne in Sins Invalid’s “Skin, Tooth, and Bone: A Disability Justice Primer“
In 2019, Max Airborne re-ignited the phrase as the hashtag #NoBodyIsDisposable, along with Stacey Milbern and Dawn Haney, in an action with Fat Rose and Disability Justice Culture Club to bring Fat and Disability communities together to Close the Camps.
In 2020, the #NoBodyIsDisposable Campaign came together to resist triage discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fat Rose, the Fat Legal Advocacy, Rights, & Education Project, Independent Living Resource Center San Francisco, Sins Invalid, Disability Justice Culture Club, and others were part of this broad and building campaign bringing together people targeted by triage plans.
Other groups are picking up the #NoBodyIsDisposable hashtag to resist disposability and insist on care, to fight nursing home immunity from accountability, to demand PPE for frontline workers, to end police violence, and more.