Patty Berne is a disability justice activist, artist, and co-founder of Sins Invalid, a performance project centering disabled artists of color and queer/gender-nonconforming disabled artists. With Mia Mingus and others, Berne co-created the disability justice framework, which insists that disability cannot be addressed in isolation from race, class, gender, sexuality, and other systems of power.
Berne is a Japanese-Haitian American who identifies as a queer disabled person. This positionality informs the core insight of disability justice: that the disability rights movement, when led primarily by white middle-class disabled people, tends to pursue reforms (legal accommodation, accessibility standards) that leave deeper structures of oppression intact. Disability justice instead draws on traditions of mutual aid, collective access, and intersectional politics to address the compounding effects of ableism, racism, poverty, and heteronormativity.
Sins Invalid, founded in 2006 and based in the San Francisco Bay Area, operates as both a performance project and a political home. Its performances bring together disabled artists whose work addresses embodiment, desire, and liberation. The project’s 2019 publication, Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People, articulates the ten principles of disability justice, which include interdependence, collective access, anti-capitalist politics, and cross-movement solidarity.
Berne’s work has been influential in shaping how organizers and scholars across social justice movements think about access, bodies, and solidarity. The disability justice framework has been taken up in environmental justice, reproductive justice, and transformative justice movements, each of which faces questions about whose bodies and needs are centered in political struggle.
Related terms
- disability justice — the intersectional framework Berne co-created
- Alison Kafer — disability studies scholar working on crip futures
- Mia Mingus — disability justice organizer and co-creator of the framework