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.
Queercircle’s emphasis on active, iterative becoming is also at the heart of the QCH zines and how they approach the ‘doing’ of health, knowledge and community. There, Barker challenges readers to think expansively about queerness, creativity and wellbeing, and to recalibrate how we understand the relationship between these experiential vectors.
The zines synthesise reflections, activities and themes that emerged from a series of Queercircle community workshops. Through interventions as wide-ranging as portraiture, curating an imaginary museum exhibition and partaking in grief holding rituals, these workshops (and the zine-based exercises they inspire) encourage participants to reimagine identity and health away from binaries like self/other and well/ill. They invite readers to question normativities of all sorts. They also encourage a bottom-up view of expertise, deploying crowdsourcing as a methodology of inclusive, pluralistic knowledge formation.
This shines especially bright in Queer Creative Health 2 (QCH2), where Barker invites us to reclaim ourselves as authorities of our own experience. It seems obvious spelled out like that. After all, who knows me better than me? Why would I defer to traditional knowledge authorities (aka researchers) to tell me about myself? And yet this deferral is vital to academia and academic structures of power. Queer Creative Health wants no part in that racket of alienation or unilateral knowledge imposition.
Such unabashed respect for multiplicity, self-knowledge and diversity sits at the existential core of Queer Creative Health. The zine offers creative prompts and exercises through which you can deepen your understanding of yourself – of your bodymind, your relationships, your ecosystem. But these activities have no preordained outcome. They are invitations devoid of obligations. In fact, Barker asks readers to “move away from any (content and activities) that feel confusing/overwhelming” (2025, p.2).
QCH2 extends the call in Queer Creative Health 1 for readers to integrate the somatic with the cerebral. For me, as a humanities scholar, this call feels almost unbearable. Yet it also feels vital if we are to understand ‘health’ accurately – as something that defies bifurcation into the discreet categories of ‘mind’ and ‘body’. Indeed, QCH exposes the conceptual and operative limitations of didactic labels and demarcated binaries that seek to contain, discipline and moralise.
In so doing, these zines reject totalising, declarative judgements of good/bad as legitimate frameworks for understanding self and other. And they reject a linear model of transformation or ‘progress’. Healing is not a straight line. Instead, we are invited to consider identity, community, health and relationships as always-in-flux articulations – articulations that become much more interesting when we refuse to read them through the lens of right versus wrong. How thrilling and freeing it is to consider manifestations of what is rather than what ‘should’ be.
QCH regards difference as liberating and generative and necessary. It asserts that if we are to take seriously the transformative potential of care – as a project, a politics and a lived practice – then all of us need a seat at the table. And once there, we must look to care not as a privatised resource but as a communal undertaking, as a co-constructed experience of being-in-relation. This is a challenge to mainstream (heteronormative) cultures of (individualised) care, as critiqued in The Care Manifesto (2020).
But what QCH is not is a utopian pipedream. It isn’t advocating for a fixed state of unadulterated queer joy or suggesting we are on the cusp of capitalism’s abolition. Instead, Barker and Queercircle nudge us toward a position that is more real, if less celebratory: they call for us to cultivate a sense of ‘ok-ness’ (p.13). This affective destination may sound modest but for those of us with trauma-informed subjectivities, reaching ok is sometimes nothing short of radical.
On the topic of ok-ness, I want to note the accessible language and imperfect aesthetics of QCH. This isn’t high art. And it isn’t high theory. Through informal language, an amateur-adjacent illustration style, and embedded links to scores of excellent external resources, QCH shows that care – and the knowledge it requires – is a universal right and capacity. To suggest that each of us deserves care, or that feeling good-enough and safe-enough is a universal entitlement seems self-evident. Or it should, were it not for recent legislative attacks on gender minorities or the UK government’s long-standing programme of austerity and neglect.
QCH does not offer an easy roadmap to wellbeing or to self-understanding. But in framing the broader project of queering care as one to be determined, claimed and crafted together and in-relation, Barker calls forth a politics of mutuality grounded in agency, action and dignity. Wellness is not something that happens to us. It is something we make through expression and connection, between bodies and minds, and between bodyminds. And it is something we can make through play.
About the Author
Zeena Feldman is Associate Professor of Digital Culture at King’s College London and Director of the Queer@King’s Research Centre.
References
Barker, Meg-John. 2025. Queer Creative Health 2: Researching Ourselves. Queercircle. Available online: https://queercircle.org/queer-creative-health-zine-two.
Barker, Meg-John. 2023. Queer Creative Health. Queercircle. Available online: https://website-artlogicwebsite0206.artlogic.net/usr/library/documents/main/queer-creative-health-print-zine_web.pdf.
The Care Collective. 2020. The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence. Verso.
