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00:00:30.000Hello and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today I'm speaking with
00:00:38.700Chiara Francesca. And with that, to never approach the choices that people are making
00:00:44.960as good or bad, right? But to approach the choices that people are making as the very
00:00:51.680best choice that they can make under the circumstances in which they're living.
00:00:57.120Originally from Italy and currently residing in Chicago, Chiara is a queer artist, writer, organizer, acupuncturist, immigrant, and former teen ma living with multiple disabilities.
00:01:10.500Their clinical focus is on mental health, trauma, CPTSD, and queer trans health.
00:01:17.760She is committed to building collaborative spaces for community care and centering collective health in and out of movements for justice.
00:01:26.260Oh, Chiara, I am so happy and really filled with joy to be speaking with you.
00:01:35.200I just want to say that I feel really connected to your work, and it always brings me a smile and groundedness and a feeling of not being so alone.
00:01:56.260Yeah. Well, as we open, I just want to recognize that we are all experiencing the world through
00:02:10.180our bodies. And these bodies are marked by trauma and love and pain and health and all that goes
00:02:19.360on around us. And taking the time to ground ourselves in our embodied reality
00:02:25.080seems particularly important for your expertise, Kiata. So I'm wondering if you could give us
00:02:32.560some insight into what it means to be aware of our bodies and the way that they feel in this world.
00:02:41.480maybe it would be nice to begin by you know as you as you ask that question i think about
00:02:49.860all the bodies that are hearing our voices in this moment wherever they are and just taking
00:02:58.980a moment to take a collective breath together perhaps and to acknowledge right that
00:03:07.800as our disembodied voices reach all of us we sit with our flesh and bone organs and
00:03:18.020all of it all of it as we are so used to being in our brains right and in our thinking thinking body
00:03:28.320yes and also you know as I think about embodiment I think about the path that it took to be a little
00:03:43.420bit more in my body at least and how so much of that path involved not being in my body and
00:03:54.200disassociation and the contentious relationship to disembodiment and disassociation and really
00:04:03.380you know one of the keys to to be more in my body was to start seeing uh disassociation as a friend
00:04:10.920instead of being at war with it and to see it as one of the set of tools that um
00:04:23.880got me to stay alive and to really transform the relationship to the ways in which my body
00:04:32.580responded to trauma and responded to external stimulus or responded to just being alive in
00:04:40.260the world. And instead of, you know, forcing embodiment or, you know, almost having like
00:04:47.220hacks for coming back into my body to instead appreciating and becoming just as good friends
00:05:00.060to the moments in which I had to leave my body behind. So that's what comes up with that0.99
00:05:06.600question. And I think in my work as a healthcare provider, there is a lot of holding space for
00:05:15.360folks to become friends with all of the strategies that kept us alive and also then to expand
00:05:30.060and learn other tools and to always connect and bridge our bodies to the systems that they are
00:05:42.340living in reacting to and learning to move through right in your work of acupuncture
00:05:53.680you experience this embodied reality not only through your own body but also in connection
00:06:00.800with others as both a participant and a practitioner how does acupuncture blur the
00:06:07.520lines between self and other and show us the ways even our physical lives are not separate from
00:06:15.260those of others in our community. Talking about acupuncture is, I think it brings me immediately
00:06:23.440to how I learned acupuncture and to, um, being really aware of the specific context in which
00:06:36.920I learned that medicine. And, um, because of that, um, having a very specific angle at which I
00:06:48.440understand and answer that medicine and you know to be more specific right um I learned acupuncture
00:06:57.960in a really specific context which is divorced from its source which is Chinese medicine right
00:07:05.220and divorced from the reality in which the medicine arose I learned acupuncture as an
00:07:12.540italian immigrant in the u.s right um learning in a school that is uh mostly white teachers that is
00:07:23.620chaired by a white man uh and where most of the students are white uh even though the city itself
00:07:30.540it's two-thirds by park um so the version of acupuncture that i learned is imbued in that
00:07:41.160reality right i learned chinese medicine in a u.s environment that is white supremacist and also
00:07:50.100where the medicine itself was fetishized and where the power relationship um of the how the
00:07:59.480knowledge was passed to other people was unchecked and unquestioned um and i'm not talking about you
00:08:08.320know, I graduated in 2018, right? So this is recent, recent history. And talking to other
00:08:14.860people around the country, the kind of reality of what Chinese medicine schooling looks like in the
00:08:20.920U.S. is close to what I described, right? Like what I experienced was not a fluke or an anomaly.
00:08:28.900and so because of that i think it it does not feel i i it's hard for me to talk about anything
00:08:39.060that is specific to acupuncture as a medicine because the way that i learned it was so distorted
00:08:47.000and i just want to mention as part of that you know that there is work being done now to think
00:08:54.360through what a more liberated, you know, pedagogical system might look like to learn
00:09:03.420Chinese medicine and other medicines. And that questions who needs to be centered in teaching
00:09:10.460the practice, right? And how the practice itself needs to shift to not replicate colonial dynamics
00:09:17.380and white supremacist dynamics. And I just want to uplift the work of Influential Point and Dr.
00:09:23.120Thames and Lee, who have been really vocal in picking apart and surfacing how the acupuncture
00:09:34.360field has worked in the United States.
00:09:40.100When I think of embodiment and acupuncture, I think more about how I came to acupuncture
00:09:46.960and the, uh, lineage that I hope to practice acupuncture out of, which is the lineage of
00:09:56.240healing justice, right. And of liberated medicine within a U S context. And, um, so my first
00:10:05.620encounter with acupuncture, um, was actually at the allied media conference in Detroit,
00:10:10.540which is the big kind of movement conference, um, that has happened in Detroit. I think
00:10:16.120since 2007. And this was in 2010 or 2009. And the way I encountered acupuncture is that I showed up
00:10:25.080to this place that was called the Healing Justice Practice Space. It was a free space for folks to
00:10:31.740come that were there for the conference and sit and receive ear acupuncture. So, you know, as I
00:10:39.300sat in a circle, this practitioner came to me and put needles in my ears. And, you know, I remember
00:10:48.840being nervous and also looking around and being in a communal space with other people that I did
00:10:55.960not know, but I trusted because we were all, you know, movement comrades and that the needles in
00:11:05.520my year, um, you know, immediately had this effect on my nervous system, um, where I felt
00:11:12.160relief from, you know, the anxiety that comes at being at a huge conference with, you know,
00:11:21.580lots of sensory stimulus. Um, and also that the space itself mattered so much. It was a politicized
00:11:28.440space it was a communal space and it was a space where i could show up um with less defenses up
00:11:36.300um so i came to acupuncture through this framework of healing justice and you know
00:11:42.800through being in relationship with politicized healers um like tanuja uh juggernaut adela nieves
00:11:49.980martinez uh stacy ehrenberg and yoletta donawa and these are just some of the folks the framework
00:11:56.600of healing justice itself um is grounded in the work of movement for movements for justice and
00:12:02.840liberation and as i understand it it has crystallized in the work of kindred southern
00:12:08.300healing justice collective um the people's movement center um and some of the architects
00:12:15.320of this framework are k.r page charity hicks anjali taneja mia mingas shira asan susan rafo
00:12:23.440Mariam and Kaba, and many others that have dreamed up the possibilities for healing justice.
00:12:32.360And also acupuncture has been used as movement medicine in the U.S. by the Black Panthers and
00:12:39.060the Young Lords famously, which set up a detox center at Lincoln Detox in the Bronx and were
00:12:46.820doing ear acupuncture as a mutual aid community-centered practice to have help folks through
00:12:54.620addiction um and PTSD um and one of the people that was involved in um the Lincoln Hospital
00:13:04.020detox is Motulu Shakur who is currently incarcerated for a murder that he says he
00:13:10.160didn't commit and there is a campaign to free him if people want to look it up and support that
00:13:16.380So that's kind of the soup and the roots, both in the sense of trying to be aware of the distortion that I learned the medicine from and also that the roots from which I practice comes from movements of social justice.
00:13:41.560and that informs how I show up for this work.
00:13:50.180Thank you for sharing that origin story.
00:13:53.980I went to the Allied Media Conference,
00:20:00.020May the rich us, teach us, oh great mother
00:20:05.120To bring, to bring from us to this land
00:20:10.540May this body, we are born from the water
00:20:15.720I want to talk about another extension of your work around the body, which is disability justice.
00:20:36.120And your work in the field is particularly interesting to me as you navigate the space,
00:20:43.600not only as an academic, but also as a community member and a practitioner.
00:20:50.460So how does the disability justice framework shape how you interact with individuals and communities?
00:20:57.680Yes, disability justice is a complicated beast.
00:21:04.220And part of that is, you know, I think a lot about why does disability justice feel so different than other movements for justice?
00:21:16.360And I think one of the, you know, the best answers I can come up with for myself is that the experience of being a disabled person operates so differently across what it could mean to be disabled, right?
00:21:32.900So in concrete terms, you know, my experience as someone who's half blind with a visible disability and, you know, other other disabilities is so different, right, than somebody who uses a chair or has been in an accident and lost a limb or any any of the spectrum of what disability can look like.
00:21:56.500and that reality is twofold on one side it makes organizing quite difficult because there is such
00:22:06.920a huge um spread of experience right not to even talk about right like what it means to be um0.84
00:22:16.060like a poor working class uh disabled person and what it means to be a disabled person who
00:22:24.860access to health care um or money right like those those experiences are so so different
00:22:31.260um so that can be really tricky when it comes to movement building and organizing and bringing
00:22:38.700people together the opportunity that i've seen that is that um that learning how to organize
00:22:49.480across difference it's something we have to do anyways right like in in in the movements
00:22:55.720um in and out of movements right so that disability justice might have thought about
00:23:03.720this question of how do we organize across difference maybe for longer or or in a different
00:23:10.120way than other movements for justice right um and that's not to say that there's not tensions or
00:23:16.740divisions, but also questions like, you know, what choices will benefit the most of us?
00:23:24.240What are some things that we can build community around? Or what are the common challenges that we
00:23:30.220can tackle are questions that have been part of disability justice for a long time. And then I
00:23:38.900also think about you know just how much the field has changed since you know I was uh growing up
00:23:47.420like in the 90s and you know disability was um disability was societally seen as kind of an
00:23:58.420inequivocally negative thing right um that um being disabled meant a lot of things but you know
00:24:07.400that it was seen as a reason to devalue someone
00:24:36.520where I feel like my disability is actually romanticized, right, or fetishized, and how also
00:24:42.780that doesn't feel like it's pushing towards a more fully human way for people to see me, right?
00:24:56.240And I think of that for other parts of my experience and other parts of my identity,
00:25:01.200you know, like being an immigrant or being working class or being queer, like I didn't choose
00:25:05.800any of those things right and yet in my life um i have seen how they have shifted from something
00:25:12.360that for which i was treated as less than to something that sometimes is fetishized and it
00:25:20.100just leaves me wondering about the pitfalls of demonizing or romanticizing you know parts of
00:25:26.300people's lives that they have no control over, right? There is a lot to just explore with
00:25:34.920the topic of disability justice. And I'm grateful that you shed some light for us. And in this guide,
00:25:44.280which is called, What Could a More Just Healthcare and Healing Practice Look Like?
00:25:50.060one of the things you write is let's talk about what building a trauma-informed harm reductionist
00:25:57.120accessible anti-racist anti-capitalist ethical health care and healing practice
00:26:02.540could look like and yeah i would just love to learn more about this harm reduction framework
00:26:10.820and how we ensure that we care for the caregivers as well yeah you know caring for the
00:26:20.040caregivers is being on my mind a lot as, as I see more and more people that, um, I'm in community
00:26:28.720with just, you know, approach or be past burnout. Right. And that guide, um, I think the seed for
00:26:40.300that guide was, you know, coming home from a visit to the free clinic, uh, here in Chicago or
00:26:49.300the medicaid clinic or like the clinic where you can use your medicaid card um and just being so
00:26:55.780frustrated by what the standard of care is and also you know being on the other side as a
00:27:04.660health care worker and having people come in for acupuncture and be grateful you know and say thank
00:27:14.240you for things that felt so basic right that the very act of telling someone you have a choice over
00:27:25.580what happens in this room right i'm not gonna do anything that is gonna be a surprise um i'm going
00:27:32.320to speak out loud what's going to happen before it happens and then ask you if that's okay or not
00:27:40.460and check in many, many times throughout the session
00:27:46.340so that you can tell me if we keep going,
00:27:50.040if we stop, if you have a question, right?
00:27:53.760And with that, to never approach the choices
00:27:56.700that people are making as good or bad, right?
00:28:00.520But to approach the choices that people are making
00:28:02.980as the very best choice that they can make
00:28:06.620under the circumstances in which they're living.
00:28:08.980and I understand that as one of the hearts of arm reduction right that somebody has full
00:28:18.620sovereignty and agency over the choices that they make and because we are not in their body and
00:28:24.040we're not in their life we actually cannot make a judgment um around those choices right and I
00:28:32.100think about trauma when it comes to that too like i think of you know the way that trauma has been
00:28:39.980one of the most significant forces in my life uh because you know it shaped my decision to
00:28:47.320immigrate and it shaped my decision to become a parent and to learn english you know or to stay
00:28:53.120in certain relationships um and it has determined what jobs even i could or could not do right and
00:29:01.660for somebody outside of that experience, it might've been really hard, if not impossible to
00:29:08.020understand why those choices were the very best choice I could make at that time. So that's how
00:29:13.720I try to approach folks that come into the clinic, right? By holding that they are making the best
00:29:23.140choices that they can, and then to hold space for transformation. And I mean, maybe this goes back
00:29:29.220to what we were talking about with this association at the beginning of the conversation, right? Like
00:29:33.860we cannot force our way to embodiment, um, that what we can do is just hold space for change and
00:29:42.420to put as many things in place as we can for that change to be a way for trauma and towards, um,
00:29:53.100what looks like wellness for us. Um, and with that, you know, I think that a lot of that
00:29:59.340conversation in the U S especially is so individualistic, right? Like it's so much about
00:30:04.380like self-care, right. Or like, how do we set up our life perfectly in our individual bubble so
00:30:14.060that we can heal. And, you know, the more I think about how trauma is played in my life and the more
00:30:21.280I see trauma playing in people's lives that I'm around, including my patients, the more
00:30:28.680I see that so much of healing is a collective endeavor, right? And so much of healing
00:30:37.360happens when we have systems in place that allow us to feel safe. And that means affordable housing,
00:30:48.160right like that means access to food that means access to health care that means access to mental
00:30:54.920health services it means walking around in a neighborhood and not having the cops arrest you
00:31:00.340right and how not having to be stuck in survival mode is what allows healing to happen right and
00:31:09.860not to knock the you know the individual strategies that we can all learn you know but
00:31:16.600the systemic is where the deep change happens yeah i was really following the way you were
00:31:28.240explaining how we heal and what we need to be able to get to places where we have the space to do
00:31:38.500that. And I wonder too how healing can be a process rather than a singular act. And harm
00:31:47.280certainly does not happen all at once and neither can healing. So how is healing different from
00:31:54.180simply, you know, quote, finding a cure? Or how may a shift away from looking for easy one-step
00:32:01.440solutions change the way we view harm and healing and honor more subtle forms of healing?
00:32:08.500Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes. So much to that. How is healing happens outside of finding a cure.
00:32:23.880um one of my least favorite sayings is um uh the end justifies the means right
00:32:32.260because it's the same as as creating just worlds right it's a process it's the becoming it's a
00:32:43.380state of change that we are always trying to orient towards justice um and when i think about
00:32:51.400that kind of the end justifies the means which is unfortunately you know used in organizing or
00:32:56.860i've heard it like in in movement work and organizing um and i always think about you
00:33:01.780know the the means is actually all we got um we don't have the end and we don't know at all what
00:33:08.420that end is gonna look like uh what we have is you know the in between and the learning and the
00:33:15.640building and they're messing up and then trying again and that's the work and that maybe what
00:33:23.440matters more than to think about you know this idea of utopia or or what the end might be
00:33:31.300is to think about what kind of compasses we want to build and follow you know and i think a lot of
00:33:39.400the compasses that we follow, when we're in it, it's hard to stop and realize, you know,
00:33:46.660the underground currents that end up stirring our direction. And, and I think that there's
00:33:56.140something about being an immigrant that helps surface that because, you know, coming to the1.00
00:34:02.400U S to me, this culture is never being normal. It's never been just invisible because it's,0.91
00:34:08.740it's just the way it is. And so, you know, what I see as the compass in the US, in dominant culture,
00:34:16.720it's so much about accumulation, and whether it's an accumulation of power, whether it's an
00:34:21.880accumulation of money, right, and even an accumulation of happiness, right, and happiness
00:34:28.940as an individual pursuit. So this idea that, you know, we could always be happier, we could always
00:34:35.180be more fulfilled i mean i feel like there's like some quote you know from like goop um that is
00:34:42.620exactly that you know it's like you might be healthy and okay but like could you be more
00:34:47.620fulfilled could you you know and happiness becomes a commodity too that we can uh accumulate and
00:34:54.600And so that's always oriented towards this not yet here, you know, future that is perfect, right?
00:35:06.820So what happens if we take away the idea that there's a perfect future and instead we look at the reality of how do we orient ourselves in the now?
00:35:21.360and what does it look like to build systems that are human-centered versus systems that are
00:35:29.520destructive. And I think a lot about, you know, how do we diminish preventable suffering
00:35:37.060right now? It's not about utopia. It's not about a time where suffering doesn't exist and we're
00:35:43.400all healed right it's about um there's so much harm that is occurring right now that doesn't
00:35:52.500have to occur you know and i mean i think about the military i think about the carceral industrial
00:35:58.540system you know and privatization and and capitalism and you know we know that those
00:36:04.820systems increase suffering and i think about what it would look like increasing the quality of life
00:36:12.340for marginalized people, which also means for everyone, right, through health care for all
00:36:19.640and affordable housing and reparations and redistributing wealth and, you know, free
00:36:26.080childcare and forgiving student debt, right? And then what can happen when we start orienting
00:36:34.200towards a system that prioritizes people's wellness instead of profits is that the next
00:39:28.780So the kind of way to think about the body's health and then the body as connected to the
00:39:37.520health of everything around it is that there are so many forces that are tugging at what we think
00:39:45.800of as health um and that the the way forward oftentimes is to to zoom out and to look at how
00:39:55.540these things um tug at each other and in the positive and in the negative right so and i mean
00:40:04.800this is also part of kind of my, my cultural tradition is growing up in a place where,
00:40:10.420you know, the way that you eat and the way that you dress and the way that you orient yourself
00:40:16.000is really different depending on the season, right? So that in the summer, when it's, you know,
00:40:23.360a million degrees out, you do your life from seven to 11 in the morning, then you go inside
00:40:28.760from 11 to 5 30 or 6 and then at 6 you come back out until midnight right so instead of pushing
00:40:37.900through to maintain a rhythm that is divorced from your environment you incorporate how your
00:40:49.720environment um affects you fully acknowledging that your body is uh deeply affected by uh by
00:41:01.060how hot it is outside or how humid it is or uh the cold winds right um and that you develop or
00:41:10.860you're taught to develop this respect for for how you are part of that environment instead of pushing
00:41:18.900through and, and building artificial ways to have the same schedule, regardless of it being August
00:41:29.720or January, right? And again, this is not necessarily a pitfall of American culture.
00:41:35.180I think this is more telling of how much capitalism has demanded that we leave our bodies behind
00:41:43.440and pretend that, you know, the environment doesn't exist, right? And keep producing.
00:41:53.640Yeah. Oh, gosh. Yeah, I just want to mention that so much of the labor of care goes unnoticed
00:42:04.760within capitalist systems. Disability justice advocate and organizer Mia Mingus writes about
00:42:11.800care saying, quote, I want to be with you. If you can't go, then I don't want to go. If we are
00:42:18.260traveling together, sharing political space together, building political family together,
00:42:23.480then I want to be with you. I want us to be together. We resist ableism dividing us. I
00:42:30.940resist my disability being pitted against your disability. We will not be divided, end quote.
00:42:37.160and this type yes yeah it's so beautiful and this type of intimate relational care is deeply
00:42:45.380illegible to many of the systems we exist under today so how can we look at care not just as
00:42:52.160transaction but as relationship oh yes um Mia Mingus um such such a shout out yeah she was
00:43:04.980one of the people at the allied media conference that you know the the memory I have of being
00:43:12.080around her is that um it was one of those pivotal moments where I think I started shifting my sense
00:43:18.480of being a disabled person as somebody who moved through the world you know oh with my hair I mean
00:43:28.040just to give you the image you know with like my hair in front of my face so that people wouldn't
00:43:32.220see that my eye was blind I just have that memory of like entering the room and literally like
00:43:38.540moving the hair out of my face um as we we were there for a a workshop on disability justice and
00:43:47.720I'm just so grateful for her work and how you know it changed my life and so many other people's
00:43:53.780lives and in thinking about uh relationship you know we talked about you know big systems and we
00:44:01.200talked about uh individual healing and how trauma kind of shows up systemically and individually
00:44:08.420and i think that this quote really gets at the heart of the fact that you know a lot of community
00:44:16.200building a lot of organizing comes down to relationships right and to conflict resolution
00:44:22.120and to healthy communication which are things that we are not taught as the norm and again you
00:44:30.800know that's true in my life but it's true in a lot of in a lot of folks lives right like when uh
00:44:37.300we don't have tools to be in relationship to work through conflict to employ healthy
00:44:44.800communications that's when things fall apart um and that's when you know campaigns fall apart
00:44:51.920organizations fall apart and projects disintegrate and i think about that as how you know trauma shows
00:44:59.800up in organizing um there was this you know tiktok um song where this person was singing this like
00:45:08.940really fun dance song that said something like your trigger triggers my trigger and then my
00:45:16.620trigger triggers your trigger and we go around and around and around you know and i feel like
00:45:21.040that feels like a accurate depiction of movements sometimes like we are reacting to each other's
00:45:31.760trauma and then relationship becomes really difficult and even if trauma is not part of our
00:45:36.640life um knowing how to be in relationship with each other um is really tricky without tools to
00:45:45.320work through conflict and to communicate um across difference right so i think about the
00:45:52.340importance of building tools for conflict resolution right for mediation for self-awareness
00:45:59.920for regulating um for even knowing what it feels like to be deregulated in our bodies and how that
00:46:07.340shows up in organizing and also in our friendships and romantic relationships and all that stuff right
00:46:13.780And this ties into abolition, too, of course, right, in the sense that if we are to create systems of justice outside of the carceral system, that these tools are necessary, not just for organizing, but to ultimately build more just futures.
00:46:34.460and these quote from mia feels like it embodies all of that that um when there is a pause or when
00:46:45.200somebody stalls or when um it's demanded of us that we slow down or um you know not just keep
00:46:54.280going and going and going that that's a very useful place to be in to kind of be able to reflect
00:47:01.940and be able to ask, you know, why is that person being left behind? And what tools are needed
00:47:09.780to bring everyone, and if not everyone, the most, most, most people that we can with us as we
00:47:18.820move towards justice, right? There is this book called, I think it's called We Won't Leave Our
00:47:24.760Friends Behind, but you know, it's about parenting, right? And it's about parenting in movements,
00:47:28.480Um, which is, you know, those experiences to me, my life, I felt really similar, like
00:47:34.200being disabled and being a parent and how those, uh, experiences, there was not space
00:47:41.540for those experiences to exist within not just dominant culture, but within a lot of