Thanks to an invitation by colleagues at the Scottish Parliament, I was recently drawn back to the question that started me working on this series of graphic guides back in 2014. That is how we can understand the word queer. You can check out our discussion here and I’ve written a few more thoughts below.

One of the reasons that my editor at Icon approached me to write Queer: A Graphic History, was that she came across presentation I’d once been asked to give about what the word queer meant. In that talk – and in the book that followed – I began by unpacking all the different meanings that the word can have, how these have shifted over time and location, and how the different meanings can co-exist as well as being contradictory in places.

While the Sexuality, Gender, and (hopefully) Mental Health and Love graphic guides don’t have the word queer in the title, they all take a queer approach, and they all dig deeper into themes and topics that were touched on in the first book. The word queer is often taken as a catch-all reclaimed word for marginalised sexualities and genders, but queer activism and queer theory have generally had a wider remit: to challenge any cultural ideals around what is ‘normal’, to reveal where they come from, and the systems of power these serve.

Queer approaches also question whether a person can have any kind of individual identity separate from the systems, structures, and cultural messages around them, and the impact that the sense that they do has on us. Like intersectional feminism, queer approaches recognise that the ways in which we experience ourselves are inevitably impacted by how we’re positioned in relation to gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, age, and much more – and that these aspects cannot be disentangled.

For these reasons it makes sense to me to be equally queer when it comes to writing about mental health and love as about gender and sexuality, and hopefully other writers in this series will take a similar approach to some of those other interconnected themes.

For example, the idea – and ideal – of being normal is pivotal to the way we’ve come to understand what is mentally healthy. Also we’re impacted by the legacy of the individualising of struggles which are due to social injustice or toxic cultures. Similarly, cultural norms of what love should look and feel like impact which relationships are, and aren’t, seen as acceptable and afforded legitimacy, and these are deeply connected to colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. This is something that I explored a while back in my queer relationships zine which takes each different meaning of queer and applies it to relationships.

There’s more in this recent blog post about how we might question the cultural separation of gender, sexuality, mental health, and spirituality (as well as race, class, disability, ways of doing relationships, and so much more, of course). This one tackled how queerness can apply to creativity. Perhaps we can benefit from considering all aspects of identity and experience a little more queerly.

You can check out more of my posts, vids, and podcasts about queerness here, here, and here.

Patreon link: If you liked this, please feel free to support my Patreon.

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In my piece I explore how we might write in ways that resist attempts to marginalise and silence queer people, how we can capture queer identity and experiences in our writing, how we might challenge normativity and raise up voices from the margins, and how we can tell stories queerly, and apply queerness to our writing process as well as content.

To celebrate the launch of this awesome new queer writing magazine I thought I’d reflect on queerness and writing. I’ve been writing, myself, for my whole life in one way or another, but I would say that queerness has only gradually infused my writing – as it has my self – over time. Perhaps it has followed something like the journey through queerness which I’ll follow here.

In addition to writing myself, I currently mentor a number of other queer writers including Simon Forsyth, Daniel Morrison, Jeanne Devlin, David Darvasi, Stacy Bias, Katie Green, and Russ Wolf, whose work is referred to here. It’s through my dialogues with them that I’ve come to approach both the content and process of writing ever more queerly. I’m deeply grateful to them for the wisdom and learning they’ve shared, which very much inform this piece.

Jules Scheele and I started our book Queer: A Graphic History by exploring the different meanings of the word queer, and I thought that’d be a neat way to structure this piece. So let’s consider queer writing in relation to otherness, to being LGBTQIA+, to being non-normative, and to the overall project of queering everything.

Queer as in other

The original meaning of queer from the 16th century was of something strange or illegitimate. You might think of phrases like ‘nowt as queer as folks’ or ‘queer as a three dollar bill.’ From the late 19th century, this meaning became attached to same-sex attraction specifically, and queer began to be used as a term of homophobic abuse, for example in the letter from the Marquess of Queensberry which become famous through the trial of Oscar Wilde.

It’s due to this meaning of queer that a magazine like Queerlings is necessary at all. We still live with the legacy of queer people being regarded as something different, something other, something abnormal or illegitimate.

It remains rare for queer experience to be the focus of mainstream fiction or non-fiction. For years queer characters have been depicted as the bad guys, as tragic, or in tokenistic ways like the ‘gay best friend’. We still see this today, particularly in the representation of trans people, as highlighted in the recent documentary Disclosure.

Novels and memoirs centring queer experience are generally targetted specifically at queers, seen as only of relevance to us. This is unless they sensationalise queer experience in ways deemed interesting to a cishet audience, for example by depicting a promiscuous bi person or by telling a conventional narrative of a trans person ‘changing sex’ through medical procedures, with before and after photos.

While things are gradually shifting, there remains a sense – sometimes even explicitly taught in creative writing classes – that the white, cishet male protagonist is the only one that audiences can really relate to, or want to read about.

For these reasons we need magazines, bookshops, writing classes, and more which centre queer experience, and outlets which publish specifically queer stories that may well not be accepted or celebrated by mainstream publishers. Bravo Queerlings!

Being LGBTQIA+

The reclaiming of the word queer from the 1980s onwards has led to it being used as an umbrella term for gay, lesbian, and eventually also bi, trans, intersex, ace, and other groups beyond the cishet supposed-majority. This is the meaning of queer that Queerlings is using when it says it ‘seeks to publish queer works of fiction, non-fiction and reviews from LGBTQIA+ writers.’

There are many reasons to encourage and celebrate this understanding of queer in relation to writing. As I’ve said, we need people to write about queer experience, as LGBTQIA+ people, in order to get queer stories and voices out there, to counterbalance the heteronormative cisnormative nature of so much that is published, and to claim our place in writing and in the world.

Writing therapist Simon Forsyth quotes poet Ted Hughes who said ‘what’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life’. In a world where queers remain marginalised and stigmatised, where our identities are up for debate and our realities are called into question, writing ourselves as queers, and writing characters who represent us, could be seen as a vital personal and political act.

Being non-normative

Many people who use the word queer – rather than gay, lesbian or bi, for example – often mean something more than being under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella, however. They’re questioning both heteronormativity and homonormativity, or normative ways of being LGBTQIA+.

The battle for gay rights was historically fought on the basis of being members of a minority group who were treated unequally in society. This battle often involved arguing for the right to do things that the normative majority got to do, such as getting married and serving in the military, and having the ‘pink pound’ recognised as a valuable target of consumer capitalism. The more revolutionary understanding of queer challenges this approach.

We might question whether the institutions that people have fought for the right to join are anything that we should support. This might involve, for example, pointing out the problematic history of marriage in relation to the ownership of women and children, taking an abolitionist stance towards policing and the military, or questioning consumer capitalism for its built in injustice and the toll it’s taking on the planet.

Such an understanding of queer often endeavours to centre the voices of the most marginalised, rather than trying to present queers in as normative ways as possible in order to gain acceptance to normativity. Core agendas may be ones like addressing trauma, poverty, homelessness, and violence, rather than relationship or occupational rights, for example. It is this understanding of queer that Queerlings are referencing when they say ‘we especially encourage submissions from BIPOC, Trans, Non-binary and other underrepresented voices in our community.’

What are the implications of this understanding of queer for queer writing? As well as centring the voices of the most marginalised, we might attend to the diversity of queerness represented in our writing. In our fiction are we including gay and lesbian characters, but not bi, trans, intersex, or ace ones? If we do include gender and sexually diverse characters are they mostly white? Middle class? Non-disabled? Do we represent queer experiences and agendas beyond the more normative ones? Of course there are important considerations here about who we can and can’t adequately represent beyond our own lived experience, and there are many good resources out there addressing these tensions and how we might navigate them.

In non-fiction we could ask which views and knowledges we’re centering. This is something that Jules and I have endeavoured to address in our graphic guide series by bringing the thoughts of activists alongside those of academics, by emphasising the voices of BIPOC, trans and non-binary scholars and activists, and by ensuring that the characters who we depict navigating the terrain of the book are diverse in age, gender, sexuality, class, disability, race, and more.

I hope that readers will see themselves represented in the books, in both the characters and the experts, and that they’ll be able to connect with what the characters are navigating. There’s still a long way to go, of course, in decolonising my own knowledge as an author with a background in white western versions of psychology and psychotherapy, and I’m constantly endeavouring to learn more from the margins.

It’s my hope that these graphic guides function as a jumping-off point for people to learn about other people’s work, so it’s important for me to think carefully about who I represent and how. It’s also important to carefully consider who I can adequately represent, and where my job should be, instead, to step back and raise up other voices. Being part of a queer writing community feels important to me for this reason, because there’s the opportunity, for example, to offer mentorship, to facilitate writing events, and to endorse other people’s work and get it out there as widely as possible.

Queering writing

The final understanding of queer that we covered in Queer: A Graphic History challenges the sense of queer as an identity at all. Queer theory and queer activism view the fixed hierarchical binary identities which people are put into  – man/woman, straight/gay, cis/trans, etc. – as part of the problem.

For a start, we might question whether queer really is a minority position. Added together, the vast majority of people tick one or more of the boxes of:

• Being attracted to more than one gender,
• Experiencing their gender beyond the rigid masculine/feminine binary,
• Being fluid in their expression of gender and/or sexuality over time,
• Enjoying kinds of sex other than penis-in-vagina (PIV) intercourse – or no sex, and
• Doing their relationships outside of normative coupledom.

Yet more people are queered off the heteronormative model of a lifecourse at some point. They don’t tick certain boxes of being a ‘successful’ self such as marriage, kids, home-ownership, career progression, etc. This may happen due to choice, disability, mental/physical health conditions, unemployment, caring for others, infertility, etc. As Jack Halberstam has suggested, we could regard such ‘failures’ as queer, because of the challenge they present to normativity.

As well as denying the reality of many people’s invisible queerness, fixed binary identities support the division of people into normal and abnormal, legitimate and other, healthy and unhealthy, and so on: all of which serve the power structures of neoliberal capitalism, encouraging people to police and monitor themselves and each other, and strive to conform to cultural ideals.

What might the implications of these kinds of understandings of queer – as challenging identities and binaries – be for queer writing? In this case queer writing might look something like what architect and writer Kyna Leski describes when she says ‘a creative process comes from displacing, disturbing, and destabilising what you (think you) know’.

Rather than focusing on which identities or experiences are represented in our writing, we might turn to explore which stories are told, and which are not, and in what ways we do or don’t tell them. For example, does our queer romance novel conform to a standard heteronormative story of falling in love, getting together, having the first kiss and first sex, moving in together, and living happily ever after? What might different queer love stories look like? Might they follow a different narrative arc, or include multiple stories, or start and end in different places, or celebrate different kinds of love – like ace or aro love for example.

A great example of queering writing in these ways are the wealth of trans memoirs which have been published in recent years. Many of these deliberately mess with – or queer – the conventions of a trans story according to the standards of a medical approach to transness and/or of what is palatable to the wider public. The conventional trans narrative is frequently an account of always having known you were ‘born in the wrong body’, having a moment of realisation, coming out, getting ‘the surgery’, and living happily ever after in a new gender.

Authors like Juliet Jacques, Travis Alabanza, Juno Roche, CN Lester, and Amrou Al-Kadhi have all queered this standard trans memoir form in interesting and important ways through their writing. For example they:

• Centre experiences other than surgery,
• Celebrate trans as a gift for others to be around rather than depicting it as a loss for others,
• Explore the ongoing experience of transness beyond key moments of transition,
• Focus in on everyday moments of transness,
• Offer multiple equally valid answers to an early sense of difference,
• Foreground who they are beyond their transness, and
• Mix up their trans stories with other people’s tales and/or with non-fiction elements.

I’m excited by the idea of queer writing as writing that tells different kinds of stories in different ways. For example, some of the queer folk I’m working with, and reading, engage in projects where they:

• Capture different aspects of themselves and their experiences in multiple characters through a book,
• Tell stories of past interwoven with stories of present, queering standard linear narratives of experience,
• Deliberately interfere with the way queer and trans people have been depicted in previous works of fiction by cishet authors, by writing alternative versions of those stories or the same stories from different character perspectives,
• Create artistic/writing pieces where ‘seen’ stories are told on one side and ‘unseen’ ones are told on the reverse, or where their own stories are interwoven with the stories that have been told about them,
• Play with incorporating elements like ‘choose your own adventure’ to offer multiple possible journeys through the same life,
• Mash up different genres and/or fiction and non fiction elements,
• Include narratives which challenge any normative sense of which aspects of our lives should be viewed as ‘success’ or ‘failure’.

Ideas I’ve played with myself include a memoir where I take all the different common stories of transness that are out there and write a chapter telling my gender story through each of these different lenses. I would present all of these approaches as offering something potentially useful, but as inevitably being only a partial story. This gets beyond binaries of right or wrongs stories to ask what different stories open up and close down. I’m also keen to write a graphic plural story of my life where multiple, differently gendered, sides of me are represented as engaging in the unfolding narrative, also challenging binaries between ‘real life’ and imagination, and plurality as a form of madness or sanity.

This connects with what author and writing teacher Anya Achtenberg says about the importance of finding a multitude of voices in our writing, as well as the writing prompts she offers such as ‘what story lies next to the one you are writing?’ It also makes me think of Juno Roche’s response when asked at an event by a cis author how he could best write a trans character. Juno responded that he should find the trans person within himself.

So writing queerly might involve thinking beyond the identities that we depict in our writing to the form, structure, and narrative arcs that we engage with. We might deliberately endeavour to queer – or trouble – standard writing formats.

I was fascinated that most people I mentor began with a more standard kind of project – a memoir or a novel for example. However during the pandemic many of them moved towards something very different. A couple of these projects question the divide between art and writing by incorporating both words and visual or three dimensional aspects. Some engage with explicitly transgressive modes of writing. Many have moved away from aiming at conventional publishing, towards alternative forms of putting words out there, via social media, zines or chapbooks for example. Some are challenging the writer/reader binary by drawing people into conversation and making that part of the work.

One person is collecting together the experiences of queers during lockdown and how they have engaged in creative processes of self-shaping through this time, which makes me wonder about seeing the creation of (queer) selves as, in itself, a creative/writing project.

Writing queerly

This leads me to my final consideration, that queerness might be a way in which we approach the process of writing as well as the content.

When I became a writing mentor, the thing that surprised me most was how much I ended up encouraging mentees – and myself – not to write. This became such a theme that I’m now considering writing a whole writing book on ‘not writing’!

My stance on this came from what I’d learnt in queer community about consent. I noticed that most of us were engaging in writing from a non-consensual place. We were trying to force ourselves to write when we didn’t want to, we were trying to undertake projects because we thought that was the kind of writing we should do, or because it seemed most likely to get published, we were aiming for a certain number of words per day and feeling bad if we didn’t manage that. All of this seemed to me very much like the heteronormative way of approaching sex: feeling that we have to do it, that it should happen a certain amount, and that it should take a certain form (PIV) and result in a certin outcome (orgasm) in order to be valid.

One thing I’ve learnt from ace community is that sex can never be truly consensual unless we know absolutely that it’s okay not to have sex right now, and indeed that it’s okay never to have sex. We need to know that we’re free and safe enough to not have sex, that we’re under no pressure to do so, and that nothing else is contingent upon it. All of this is pretty threatening to the heteronormative – and even homonormative – way of doing sex and relationships.

So I figured that writing worked in the same way. We can’t be in consent, as writers, unless we know that it’s absolutely okay not to write. What most of us, myself and my mentees, found, when we stepped away from writing in our previous way, was that we ended up engaging in different forms of creativity which were far more fulfilling to us, many of which challenged those binaries around ‘proper’ writing vs. play, art vs. writing, writing practice vs. therapeutic/spiritual practice, and creation-of-writing vs. creation-of-self.

All of this takes me to a place where I also have to question the writing/not writing binary! Going through a very personally traumatic year, during a pandemic, I’ve ended up having to tell a lot of people that I’m not writing, despite having given up the day job to ‘become a writer’ in 2019. However I then take a look over at my bookshelves and realise that I’ve probably written more words this year than ever before, it’s just all been in the format of journaling through my process. And even if I hadn’t been journaling, I’ve been working on myself more this year than ever before. Could that not be seen as an act of writing: of writing myself?

What about the stories I tell myself in the form of fantasy, to soothe myself to sleep each night or to enjoy a solosexual moment in the middle of the day. Do those only count as ‘writing’ if I physically write them down? If other people read them? And what about all the painstaking emails and messages I’ve written in the last year, as I navigate trauma, letting people know what I’m going through, expressing my needs, and setting my boundaries? I never count those as ‘writing’, but of course they are: and they are a way of writing myself and co-creating my relationships, and my not-relationships. Another not-binary for you!

Most of my mentees struggle with something that I also still struggle with, 23 books in, which is whether we get to call ourselves a writer. ‘I’m not a writer because I haven’t been doing it very long.’ ‘I’m not a writer because I haven’t published anything.’ ‘I’m not a writer because I haven’t written a full book.’ ‘I’m not a writer because I don’t write fiction, or poetry, or something proper like that.’ Imposter syndrome is incredibly high around being a writer.

But, taking a queer perspective, is it even possible to be a writer, or indeed to not be a writer? Neither of these things is a stable identity, and this binary is as questionable as any of them. So perhaps we can lift the burden of trying to determine which category we fall into. Personally I love authors on writing like Natalie Goldberg and Lynda Barry who take us back to the bare bones of writing: back to the little queer selves we all – perhaps – once were, who simply enjoyed playing with words and/or stories and/or pictures, not worrying whether we were ‘writer enough’ or ‘normal enough’, or even ‘queer enough’.

In her wonderful essay The Uses of The Erotic, Black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde questions the divisions we have made around what counts as ‘sex’ and the disciplining, oppressive functions these have. She suggests expanding out our understanding of ‘the erotic’ to encompass all kinds of sensual and creative experience, including making love to a partner in a patch of sunlight, writing a poem, and constructing a bookcase.

This is perhaps why it makes so much sense to me to apply the same understandings to the writing process as I do to the process of sex. If we can expand out our understanding of queerness, and writing, and queer writing, in such ways, perhaps we can acknowledge the personal and political power of claiming all of us as writers, at least of our own stories and the stories of our (queer) communities.

“Once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of… This is a grave responsibility… not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.” Audre Lorde.

Further resources

You can read writing therapist, Simon Forsyth’s piece, where I found a couple of the quotes included here at: writing.ie/resources/writing-therapy-and-the-power-of-the-pen-by-simon-forsyth

You can read about Daniel Morrison’s project on queer lockdown here: facebook.com/Queer-Spirit-in-the-Great-Pause-116361600151780

There’s some great videos about queer writing during lockdown here: newwritingsouth.com/within-the-four-walls-queer-lockdown-stories

You can read my thoughts on writing, and on queer failure, on my blog here:

• rewriting-the-rules.com/self/how-to-start-writing
• rewriting-the-rules.com/self/embracing-failure-in-work-home-and-relationships

Jules’s website is: julesscheele.com

Anya Achtenberg can be found at: thedisobedientwriter.com

Lynda Barry at: thenearsightedmonkey.tumblr.com

Natalie Goldberg at: nataliegoldberg.com

Audre Lorde’s essay at: uk.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/11881_Chapter_5.pdf

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I think you’ll understand why I didn’t want to say no to this opportunity. Not only is this a whole issue devoted to feminist comics, but also it takes an international perspective including comics from artist and writers in various countries across South and East Asia, Africa, Europe, and South and Central America. This introduction by editors Sally Munt and Rose Richards gives an overview of what’s included in the open access special issue and why feminist comics are important.

In my interview, Róisín asks me about how I got into creating comics and why they’re a good medium, particularly for getting across ideas about gender and sexuality. We talk about the importance of working across different mediums and genres in order to be accessible to diverse audiences. I explore why gender and sexuality have been such important themes in my work, what the main ideas are in these areas that I want to convey to readers, and why. We also get into the trans moral panic and recent gender ‘debates’ and why I think it’s vital to engage with the process of these more than the content. I got to chat about why I enjoy collaborative work so much, and why I think intersectional and non-binary thought are important in relation to gender, sexuality, and beyond.

The next article which I didn’t want say no to is a piece called ‘Plural Selves, Queer, and Comics’ coming out in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. It explores mental health and queerness in comics, particularly in relation to my comics and zines about plural selves. It develops some of the themes I explored in my talk at the Graphic Medicine conference last year. I’ll link to that here as soon as it comes out.

• Read a summary of my talk on queer, mad comics here and the article based on it here.
• My experience and thoughts about queer comics are here.
• My first plural comic is here.
• Read my interview in Feminist Encounters here and here:

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What was your relationship to comics as a child? Right now?

As a kid comics were where I escaped. I spent all my pocket money every Saturday on Beano and Topper and a bag of sherbet lemons. Later I was bought girl’s comics specifically which were full of stories of brave orphans and best friendships.  While kid’s comics all had boys as the title characters, the girls in those comics like Minnie the Minx and Beryl the Peril were at least naughty like the boys. Girls comics were basically a tutorial in normative femininity – being for others and self sacrificing if you wanted to be popular and, later, to get a boyfriend. Luckily I also got into horror comics which offered something different, with ones like Misty particularly aimed at girls.

Needless to say there were no queer or non-binary characters in those kinds of comics back then. Although check out No Straight Lines to read about the underground queer comics that were happening in the 1970s and 80s when I was sadly too young to know about them.

Now my relationship to other people’s comics is mostly re-reading my favourites when I’m looking for comfort, so I was keen to hear more about newer queer comics at the event (more on that at the end of this post).

I’m also creating comics a lot myself as a way of figuring my own stuff out and communicating ideas simply to others. For example, my experience of trans is one of plurality so I’ve created a comic zine about how people can explore that idea as well as the first of a series of comics where I imagine my team of selves helping each other where they’re stuck. It’s great to be able to create basic comics myself, and to illustrate my books with these, as well as working with a proper illustrator – Jules Scheele – on our Icon graphic guides: Queer and Gender.

Are there characters or story arcs about queer characters or issues that stand out to you? Influences on your work?

I got into more indie comics when I was at university. Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For, Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise and Tim Barela’s Leonard and Larry were important ones – dealing with lesbian, bi, and gay people respectively. I love how Bechdel’s particularly moved with the times incorporating more trans characters and other kinds of diversity as the series progressed.

Bechdel went on to focus on memoir of course with Fun Home and Are You My Mother. That’s always really spoken to me, and is the kind of comic I make myself. Most queer graphic memoirs also explore therapeutic or mental health themes – Marbles and Calling Dr Laura – are other good examples. I also love Lynda Barry who mixes graphic memoir with guides to writing comics and weaves race and class into her work more explicitly than many.

What are your thoughts about queer representation in the indie versus big comics houses like DC, Marvel?

I haven’t read the DC or Marvel comics but I watch most of the movies – which are probably behind the comics in representation I know. To be honest they’re still pretty disappointing on inclusion of women (the first female titular heroes being so recent) and really poor on queerness, race, and disability. The X Men particularly disappoints me given that the whole thing is a meditation on the civil rights and gay rights movements: violent vs peaceful protest, radical vs assimilationist approaches, etc. Mutants clearly have much in common with queers in terms of how they are treated, so why don’t the creators learn from this?

I do find X Men and superheroes and villains useful for my writing on gender though. Lately I’ve been thinking about trans and queer people as time travellers, shapeshifters and shifters of space, holding super powers which could help save the world, which is a pretty useful approach at a time when there is such a rise in queerphobia and transphobia.

I’d recommend my co-author Alex Iantaffi’s podcast Gender Stories where they interview their daughter on gender representation in superhero movies and comics.

Since comics tend to be thought of as an American form what would you want people to know about UK comics?

That they exist. Particularly that we’re maybe at the forefront in creating critical comics about sex, gender and mental health.

The non fiction stuff out of the US and other countries is often fairly accepting of normative understandings of these topics whereas many UK creators are writing on madness in ways that critique cultural messages and mental health systems, as a few of us explored in some special issues of Asylum magazine a few years back. Jules and I are trying to write in similar ways on sex and gender.

What is distinctive about the medium in portraying queerness?

There’s something about the way comics communicate feeling – in a way that words alone can struggle to convey. Reading – and creating – them can be a very embodied experience forging a sense of connection between creator and reader through the experience described. I’m thinking of Hyperbole and a Half and how well that gets across the experience of depression for example.

There’s also something about the history of humour and lightness in comics which can make them a particularly engaging way to take in information. Readers certainly comment that Queer made queer activism and theory accessible and enjoyable to people who had struggled to wrap their heads around it in the past.

What issues are raised about how queerness is made visible (limits of racial representation, femme invisibility) and how have you seen comics engage or perpetrate these issues?

I think a long running series like Dykes to Watch Out For (as with its non-comic counterpart Tales of the City) can address these kinds of issues in a way that doesn’t happen in one-off comics. It’s still wearying that mainstream comic producers baulk at altering main characters to get a better spread of representation.

With Queer and Gender Jules and I had sensitivity readers check out the books particularly for areas we had less expertise or lived experience of ourselves. I also tried to ensure that I spent some time addressing the invisibility of race and class in queer theory and feminism, and bringing in the voices of queer people of colour and women of colour specifically, as well as representing diversity in the imagined readers of the books (who we follow through each book). We were able to tackle femmephobia specifically in the content of both books, and the graphic nature of the medium helped us to visualise this in ways words alone would have struggled to capture.

What queer comics should I read now?

Like I said I haven’t been very up to date on queer graphic books of late so I treated myself to several in my favourite genres at the event, particularly those that had a more intersectional feel. I’m now working my way through and loving them. There are also good lists of new queer comics here and here.

• Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me by Mariko Tamaki who I already loved for This One Summer
• My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness by Kabi Nagata
• The Witch Boy by Molly Knox Ostertag
• Moonstruck by Grace Ellis, Shae Beagle & Kate Leth
• GenderQueer by Maia Kobabe

I also bought Eleanor’s awesome The Times I Knew I Was Gay, and MJ Wallace’s Bi The Way (a rare bi memoir comic which was really good to see).

More on comics

You can read more of my thoughts on comics and mental health in an article here (just scroll down). I’m keynoting the Graphic Medicine conference on comics, queer and mental health soon too.

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Give it a read if you fancy learning more about queer activism and queer ideas, including some of the tensions around Pride marches: Assimilationist &/or radical? Normative &/or challenging the norm? Intersectional or one-dimensional? lG(bt) &/or queer?

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It’s a great interview because it covers a lot of the key ideas in that book pretty simply. There’s also a nice long section about the complexities around bisexuality in relation to queer, which is something that a lot of people have been asking about.

Late last year Icon Books released Queer: A Graphic History by Meg-John Barker and Julia Scheele which looks at queer theory and the ideas and people that shaped this way of examining and thinking about society and individuals. Barker is a therapist, activist, writer and a senior lecturer at the Open University in the UK. They were kind enough to chat about the book and try to lay out some of the core concepts behind queer theory, which Barker admits are complicated.

Alex Dueben: Where did the idea for this book come from? What made you interested in making a graphic novel?

Meg-John Barker: Icon books have this whole series of books called ‘Introducing…’ where they try to make complex academic or political ideas accessible and engaging to everybody using the comic format. When they asked me if I’d be interested in writing one of these books about queer I was so excited. My love of comics goes back to childhood and I’ve been heavily into graphic novels all of my adult life. I also found the Introducing books super helpful myself when I was a student and trying to wrap my head around existentialism, Freud, or Foucault, for example.

At the same time as having a passion for comics, I’ve always been convinced that queer theory and queer activism has a lot to offer everyone, not just academics, activists, or people who identify as queer. So this was my opportunity to get that across.

Dueben: What was the process like? What did you give Julia and how were you initially envisioning the book? Read more…

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I’ve managed to include a few small cartoons in some of my books and zines over the years and I’ve been involved in a few great comic-based projects, notably the year of Asylum Magazine which Caroline Walters, Joseph de Lappe and I edited about comics and mental health, and – of course – Queer: A Graphic History, where I provided the words, and Julia Scheele provided the pictures.

Along with her colleagues, Julia also makes great comic anthologies over at One Beat Zines, and they invited me to contribute something to their latest zine on performance. As readers of queer will know, one of the major theories about gender is Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, so I did my best to explain that idea, and the implications it might have, in 3 pages! Like many of my comics it’s a personal reflection on my own experiences of gender over the years, asking the question of what it’d be like if we moved away from judging people according to a real/fake binary, towards encouraging everyone to find the gender (experience, identity, expression) that feels comfortable and consensual for them.

The anthology includes many beautiful comics around the themes of performance and performativity, many of which relate to gender. Do order a copy if you’re interested.

If you want to read more of my thoughts on gender, check out my book with Alex Iantaffi: How to Understand Your Gender.

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You can listen to the podcast here.

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Mad and Queer studies: interconnections and tensions

With the recent emergence of Mad Studies we thought it timely to explore some connections with Queer studies – another critical field of enquiry. We wanted to examine their similarities and differences; any points of tension; and what each could learn from the other.

Helen has been part of the recent emergence of Mad Studies in the UK and has a long standing interest in critical approaches to gender and sexuality. Meg-John has recently written a book about queer theory as part of the ‘introducing…’ series of Icon press comic books, and has a long standing interest in critical approaches to mental health. This piece arose out of discussions between ourselves on this subject.

Summary of key points

• Mad and Queer Studies have lot of common ground – especially in terms of challenging existing binaries (for example, gay/straight and mad/sane); subverting negative connotations of Queer/Mad; and critiquing prevailing normativities (ways of being ‘normal’).
• However, we have to be careful to think critically about new normativities which develop when we move away from old ones, and who is included and excluded in any movement.
• Therefore, both projects could do more to question the ‘alternative’ norms and binaries they introduce which may have unhelpful effects.
• In addition, madness poses new and significant challenges to Queer activism/studies.
• As a result, Mad / Queer scholars and activists would benefit from greater dialogue with each other – and with other critical fields of inquiry (like critical disability studies).
• Finally, we recommend foregrounding practices of consent and kindness as part of our political strategy to achieve our desire for more liberated social relationships and societies.

We start by briefly outlining a history of the two disciplines.

What is the history of Queer theory and Queer studies?

Read more…

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