The rates at which Black people, disabled people, and disabled Black people have borne the brunt of suffering and death in the COVID-19 pandemic have made structural inequities visible. They also drive home the need to pay attention to and think more comprehensively about the lives of people who are both Black and disabled, who live at the intersectionality of race and disability: How are their experiences of the world different from and similar to those of nondisabled Black people and disabled White people?

Few people, if they paused to reflect on the question, would disagree with the idea that various aspects of a person’s identity have a bearing on their experiences in the world. There are differences in how a person of twenty-five years versus one of sixty-five years mediates a dispute, trains to run a marathon, or walks into a dance club. Completing a graduate degree versus dropping out of high school affects the opportunities a person has when applying for a job or running for office. Identifying as a woman, a man, or neither will affect a person’s experience of serving in the military, seeking a job promotion, or being the primary caregiver for young children (at least in many locales). Most of these variations in experience have little to do with persons’ biological differences. Instead, they grow out of social environments and others’ expectations. To the identifiers of age, education, and gender suggested above, we can add race, disability, immigrant status, sexual orientation, and other markers of identity. And it is the intersection of those multiple various aspects of a person’s identity, combined with personal choices and life experiences, that make each person distinctive and shape each person’s experience.

This chapter uses Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s 2009 performance piece “The River” to provide an overview of queer disability studies in the United States. As with many cultural workers writing about disability from queer perspectives, Piepzna-Samarasinha complicates concepts of pride and identity; explores the effects of diagnostic categories; and yearns for queer crip futures. Sexuality plays a significant role in her piece, but Piepzna-Samarasinha avoids a straightforward narrative of liberation; pain, precarity, and debility co-exist here with pleasure. In order to situate Piepzna-Samarasinha’s work within a larger context of disability justice and queer disability studies, the chapter supplements her narratives with those of other contemporary theorists, artists, and activists. With an emphasis on the questions that queer disability studies poses for the study of literature and other cultural forms, the chapter attends to both the resonances and the friction between queer studies and disability studies.