Depathologization as Healing Justice

Healing justice, as with disability justice, and transformative justice/abolition, has largely been a queer-, trans-, woman of color-led intervention into the rights-based, reform-based, and neo/liberal agendas of whitestream movements. We see each of these movements for justice as deeply intertwined with the others, where interdependence and leaving no one behind are key commitments that are not compatible with the individualism of rights and reforms. In this roundtable conversation, we define depathologization and its relation to (queering) anti-normativity; discuss it as an important coalitional site of liberation; an intervention of abolitionist world-making. We argue that healing need not be understood in a corrective, carceral (medical) or ableist lens. Rather, healing justice models a philosophy and praxis of anticolonial resistance, communal interdependence, and abolitionist care. We offer the conversation as praxis and a way of learning and unlearning from each other.