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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The first zine explored the meanings of queerness, creativity, and health, and what might be gained by bringing these things together. It invited readers into various queer creative health practices at the level of their bodyminds, their relationships, and their wider ecosystems.

This second zine invites us to consider what it would mean to ‘reasearch ourselves’ alongside – or instead of – external researchers studying queer experience. Many creative, spiritual, activist, and therapeutic traditions encourage such forms of self-exploration, into our gender and sexuality, and our experiences of ourselves beyond this.

Queer Creative Health 2 explores how we might research: how we identify ourselves and name our experiences, how our bodyminds work, what forms of care, creativity, and collectivity work for us, and how we relate to our wider ecosystems. Woven throughout is an exploration of collective and personal trauma, and the value of slowness.

You can download the pdf of the zine here. If you read the zine online you can click on the links to connect to all the resources mentioned.

Zeena Feldman has written a lovely review of the zines over on The Polyphony:

Zeena Feldman reviews Queer Creative Health, a zine series by Meg-John Barker produced for and with London-based LGBTQ+ charity Queercircle.

I am an academic. My professional culture is one of seriousness. It is a culture that asserts authority through empiricism and peer-review. It traffics in the language of objectivity and highly credentialled expertise. It isn’t a scene easily associated with playfulness or accessibility. Which is a shame because I like playfulness. And I don’t think one should need a PhD to lay claim to knowledge. This is why I love zines.

In many ways, zines are everything academia isn’t. They’re democratic. They’re radical. And they most definitely are not interested in respectability. Zines are teenage protest, insistent on liberation here and now, with no fucks to give. They are the antithesis of journal articles, which give middle age vibes, steeped in carefulness and a perennial insistence that more research is needed.

Or so I thought until I read Meg-John Barker’s just-published Queer Creative Health 2: Researching Ourselves (2025) and its predecessor, Queer Creative Health 1 (2023). These zines manage an unexpected hat trick: seamlessly combining emancipatory politics and a DIY ethic with research rigour and care. The zines are fun but they’re also earnest. Barker is a writer and zine maker, a former therapist and a recovering academic (my words, not theirs) who has published extensively on sex, gender and relationships. In other words, someone well-practiced in guiding people along difficult corridors of thought, tenderly.

They created Queer Creative Health (QHC) for and with Queercircle, a Greenwich-based LGBTQ+ charity that “believe(s) in the radical potential of the arts for individual, collective and societal transformation”. Queercircle calls itself an “organisation-in-process”. I like that descriptor a lot. It’s an ambitious and bracingly honest remit that regards change as life’s constant companion. This is an organisation committed to the journey, not one hung up on the destination. Read more…

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