Catching Up with Keeley Koch

Welcome to our fat friend chat recap featuring the incredible Keeley Koch here to talk about Disability Justice, the reality of living with disabilities in the US, and how to start navigating the medical system.

Meet Keeley…

Keeley is an elder, fat human who has been disabled the past 14 years. Her journey into the world of Disability Justice wasn't by choice, but it's one that has shaped her profoundly. Like many of us, Keeley’s understanding of the importance of Disability Justice evolved when she herself became disabled. Navigating the complex healthcare system and financial challenges that come with disability opened her eyes to the reality of life for many disabled individuals.

The Reality of Disability: More than Meets the Eye

Keeley helps us understand that disability isn't always visible, and its effects can be far-reaching. She shares her personal experiences of being immunocompromised in a world before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. It's a stark reminder of how anyone can become disabled at any time, and how important access to financial support, space, care, and community is.

Supporting Our Disabled Friends and Loved Ones

One of the most important takeaways from our conversation is how to support disabled friends and loved ones. Keeley highlights the emotional labor that comes with explaining your needs as a disabled person. She emphasizes the importance of empathy, compassion, and community care. Sometimes when we don’t know what to say we don’t say anything and it’s important that we aren’t isolating our disabled community members or ourselves because of internalized ableism.

Mutual Aid and Community Care: The financial reality of disability support

Keeley reminds us of the vital importance of mutual aid for the disabled community.  Mutual aid involves coming together as a community to support one another's needs, whether it’s bills, groceries, transportation, or emotional support. Keeley shared that in order to receive disability support she had lost everything and that so many people have had the same experience. She was rejected 3 times before they approved her disability claim. So not only are folks supposed to fight for care and support, but they are also going to get the door shut in their face multiple times before receiving less than enough financial support to survive. This is America….

A Call to Action: Learning More About Disability Justice

If you want to learn more about disability Justice, Keeley recommends starting with the book "Care Work" by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. It's a thought-provoking read that delves into the concepts of mutual aid, community care, and the importance of intersectionality within the disability movement.

Our Fat Self-Care Invitation

As we wrap up this informative and tough conversation, we want to extend care to everyone reading this. Disability affects so many folks, and it's crucial to approach it with empathy, understanding, and a willingness to learn. Let's continue to support one another, share our stories, and work together to fight for more access so that we can help make the world a more accessible and welcoming place for all.

To find out more about Keeley check out FAT CONCIERGE HERE, or her IG HERE!

We want to leave you with the 10 Principles of Disability Justice:

1. Intersectionality
We know that each person has multiple identities, and that each identity can be a site of privilege or oppression. The mechanical workings of oppression and how they output shift depending upon the characteristics of any given institutional or interpersonal interaction; the very experience of disability itself is being shaped by race, gender, class, gender expression, historical moment, relationship to colonization, and more.

2. Leadership of Those Most Impacted
We know ableism exists in the context of other historical systemic oppressions. We know to truly have liberation we must be led by those who know the most about these systems and how they work.

3. Anti-Capitalist Politic
We are anti-capitalist as the very nature of our body/minds resist conforming to a capitalist "normative" level of production. We don't believe human worth is dependent on what and how much a person can produce. We critique a concept of "labor" as defined by able-bodied supremacy, white supremacy, and gender normativity. We understand capitalism to be a system that promotes private wealth accumulation for some at the expense of others.

4. Cross-Movement Solidarity
Necessarily cross-movement, Disability Justice shifts how social justice movements understand disability and contextualize ableism, lending itself toward a united front politic.

5. Recognizing Wholeness
We value our people as they are, for who they are, and understand that people have inherent worth outside of capitalist notions of productivity. Each person is full of history and life experience. Each person has an internal experience composed of their own thoughts, sensations, emotions, fantasies, perceptions, and idiosyncrasies. Disabled people are whole people.

6. Sustainability
We pace ourselves, individually and collectively, to be sustained long-term. We value the teachings of our lives and bodies. We understand that our embodied experience is a critical guide and reference pointing us toward justice and liberation.

7. Commitment to Cross-Disability Solidarity
We value and honor the insights and participation of all of our community members. We are committed to breaking down ableist/patriarchal/racist/classed isolation between people with physical impairments, people who identify as "sick" or are chronically ill, "psych" survivors, and those who identify as "crazy," neurodiverse people, people with cognitive impairments, and people who are of a sensory minority, as we understand that isolation ultimately undermines collective liberation.

8. Interdependence
Before the massive colonial project of Western European expansion, we understood the nature of interdependence within our communities. We see the liberation of all living systems and the land as integral to the liberation of our own communities, as we all share one planet. We attempt to meet each other's needs as we build toward liberation, without always reaching for state solutions which can readily extend its control further over our lives.

9. Collective Access
As brown/black and queer crips, we bring flexibility and creative nuance to engage with each other. We create and explore new ways of doing things that go beyond able-bodied/minded normativity. Access needs aren't shameful—we all have various capacities which function differently in various environments. Access needs can be articulated within a community and met privately or through a collective, depending upon an individual's needs, desires, and the capacity of the group. We can share responsibility for our access needs, we can ask that our needs be met without compromising our integrity, we can balance autonomy being in community, we can be unafraid of our vulnerabilities knowing our strengths are respected.

10. Collective Liberation
How do we move together as people with mixed abilities, multiracial, multi-gendered, mixed class, across the orientation spectrum—where no body/mind is left behind?