Our article brings together several of the research projects carried out at QUEERCIRCLE about the kinds of creative health practices they offer there. We explore what a more intimate and expansive understanding of research might look like, than the one most of us are familiar with. We suggest it could be valuable for all of us to engage in research into ourselves (embodied), our relationships (entangled), and our communities and wider cultures (embedded).

We invite a TenderQueer approach to research and practice, recognising just how painful, vulnerable, and loving it is to stay with the trouble in ourselves, our relationships, and our world through such hard, hard times.

• You can read our Polyphony article here.
• You can read the rest of the QUEERCIRCLE takeover articles here.
• If you’re interested, you can also check out our QUEERCIRCLE zines about Queer Creative Health, and Researching Ourselves. There’s a review of these zines on The Polyphony here.

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This zine was commissioned by Queer Circle to explore what queer creative health might look like, as part of their programme for developing creative health practices with queer community.

Queer people experience worse health struggles than others, and health systems are often not safe enough for queer, and other marginalised, people.

Queer people also engage with different forms of creativity, often employing creative methods to queerly create themselves and their communities, as well as exploring and communicating their experiences.

So what might queer creative health look like?

Creative health is anything that brings creativity and the arts together with health, such as art therapies, creatively expressing our health experiences, bringing music into health settings, or making health practices or understandings accessible through books or comics.

This zine explores the different meanings of queer, health, and creativity, as well as introducing a number of practices that you could try as forms of queer creative health.

The zine divides these practices into embodied, entangled, and embedded practices, to recognise that we are embodied beings (carrying all the things that have happened to us, and to previous generations), entangled beings (always in relation to other human and non-human beings and communities), and embedded beings (in the time and place we live in, and in the systems, structures and cultural norms that are present there).

The zine gives a taster of the kinds of workshops that took place at Queer Circle for anyone who couldn’t access them in person. It also explores how you might bring queer creative health practices into your own life.

Find out more:

You can download the zine here.

QueerCreativeHealthZine

You can check out the Queer Circle website, and a report of the queer creative health programme here.

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