Meg-John Barker closes the QUEERCIRCLE takeover, reflecting on how we might queer research cultures towards more tender and caring ways of working with ourselves, each other, and our communities.
I was so grateful to be invited to conclude this takeover, given that The Polyphony and QUEERCIRCLE have both been important lighthouses for me through a period of deep, disabling turmoil these past five years.
Through avid reading of The Polyphony I’ve been able to stay in touch with resonant ideas, scholars, and communities, during a time when most academic writing and in-person contact was beyond me. Through QUEERCIRCLE I was welcomed into a group which felt safe-enough to engage with while so tender, largely due to its malleability, its emphasis on co-creating or making together, and its queer refusal of separating research from health.
This was exemplified, for me, in how QUEERCIRCLE met me where I was. The open, collaborative way that group meet-ups were held enabled participation wherever I – and others – were at on that particular day. Hearing that I wasn’t able to facilitate workshops – the task she initially approached me for – Research and Health Lead Frances adapted to find something that was a good fit for my current capacity: zine-making. The role of community zine-maker – producing two zines around Queer Creative Health – enabled me to find a voice reflective of where I was in my own non-linear trajectory, collaborating with others to bring together their voices without necessarily participating in person. This fed into the zine’s key aim of making the ideas and practices shared at QUEERCIRCLE available and accessible to a wider audience.
Researching/not-researching
I was struck, at QUEERCIRCLE, that researching often seemed to emerge organically from not-researching. Initially our group meet-ups simply took the form of folk getting together to share with – and learn from – each other. The focus was lightly on creative health, as most attendees had offered some form of creative/health practice through QUEERCIRCLE to diverse groups of queers. Over the years that we met there was increasing recognition of these Queer Creative Health (QCH) offerings as research in their own right, and a burgeoning desire to research these offerings – and QUEERCIRCLE itself – further.
When we allowed these conversations to happen slowly (brown 2017) – outside of the context of formal research institutions, with no particular agenda or goal – it felt like a joyful exuberance for research (Lorde 1984) emerged among the misfit academics, recovering academics, and para-academics present, enabling us to expand our understandings of what might constitute research objects, methods, and outputs.
That exuberance shines through all of the projects touched on in this takeover, but is perhaps best exemplified by Stef Garasto and PJ Annand’s data manifesto research, where we were encouraged to irreverently engage with the demographic forms requested by some of the funders of QUEERCIRCLE’s work, and to tenderly sculpt – with our bodies – the somatic feelings, relational dynamics, and oppressive cultures present when queers are asked to supply data about themselves (Guyan 2022).
I noticed a similar process happening in myself these past years to the one that happened at QUEERCIRCLE. Having stepped away from my previous life within academic institutions (Cardoso 2020) – and the queasy uneasiness which had always accompanied conducting research, for me, in relation to how it meant treating myself and others – I found, to my surprise, that I was still researching, perhaps more so than I ever had before, and that I was increasingly exuberant about doing so, and about sharing this research with others.
By this I mean that all the places I turned to, to make sense of the confusing, overwhelming bodymind experiences of my crisis/collapse, encouraged me to conduct research, whether that was into: how I embodied neurodivergence and the masking of autism; how the internal and external relationships I was entangled with were caught up in traumatised and traumatising dynamics; or how the oppressive forces operating through the external systems I was embedded in were reflected in my internal systems (see Hemphill 2024, McGee and White 2023, and the diagram below).
All the practitioners, activists, teachers and fellow travellers I engaged with during this time encouraged deep, honest, gentle inquiry, and my inner research team were constantly conducting literature reviews (for example about trauma), honing methodological practices (e.g. around slow relating), collecting and analysing data (here on ‘monster feelings’), sharing our conclusions (such as these about self systems), and coming up with new questions to answer (here on plurality): repeating and repeating this cycle.
Researching ourselves…
Perhaps all queers are inevitably already researching at these embodied, entangled, and embedded levels. How else do we find out that normative genders, sexualities, and/or relationships don’t work for us, and, as Ellc put it in yesterday’s post, reach an ‘awareness of political and social histories that shape our understanding of ourselves’? How else do we explore what alternatives might be possible: drawing on the experiences of those we’re in relationship with, and the support and resources available through our communities, to practice different ways of being? Perhaps we can’t separate the processes of queering and researching.
I’ve always been committed to learning from the margins, with a strong sense that those doing gender, sex, and relationships (and more) differently may have the most to teach about how normativities constrict and damage everyone in these areas, and how we might understand and experience them differently. Beyond content (what we study), perhaps the margins also have much to teach us about process: how we might engage in research?
I’ve been struck that the PhD researchers I’ve been alongside during this time have all encountered similar tensions: that the ontologies, epistemologies, and ethics they encounter in academia often conflict with the knowledge, ways of knowing, and ways of treating people encouraged by the communities they’re embedded in (e.g. trans, sex work, erotic fanfic, disability justice, and/or QTI BIPoC communities). H Howitt’s powerful video below illuminates some of these confrontations, and explores the potential for research to be something both far more intimate and far more expansive (Howitt 2023):
…At all levels of experience
For the second QUEERCIRCLE Queer Creative Health zine, the focus became the ways queers might research themselves, drawing on the various kinds of embodied, entangled, and embedded research offered by – and carried out at – QUEERCIRCLE. The zine page at the end of this section summarises the kinds of shifts that were highlighted by reflecting on the research commonly conducted on queers (Hegarty 2018), and the research queers creatively engage in together (Smith 2021).
Returning to Anni Raw’s question of what else is made through making, perhaps when we make time to make together, we are also making possibilities for people to research themselves on embodied, entangled and embedded levels.
For example, in Ellc’s beautiful workshops, participants researched how their voices might enable and regulate feelings (embodied); how they can reach others – and represent themselves to others – in significant ways (entangled); and how they are shaped by cultural contexts and can be decolonised, and liberated from binaries (embedded), perhaps enabling a sense of expansiveness or connectedness that contrasts with the restriction and alienation generally experienced under colonialism and capitalism.
Reporting on the wonderful Transifesto project, Lu Wilson in their post last week highlighted the need for creative/research spaces which: deeply listen to young trans people about their lived experience (embodied); foster intergenerational relationships in order that they can imagine possible futures and engage in mutual learning (entangled); and enable them to experience what it’s like to be met and mirrored in a collective context, as well as drawing out their wisdom towards creating systems which better address their needs (embedded).
Conclusions
Several of the articles in the QUEERCIRCLE takeover highlighted the importance of staying with the trouble, and the challenges of really co/creating spaces which are safe enough and institutions which are malleable enough to enable the kind of personal and relational mutuality needed for this.
It is so tender (as in painful) to realise that our queer bodies, relationships, and communities still regularly reenact past cultural and personal trauma, and that – as Báyò Akómoláfé puts it – ‘just because we are tirelessly against something doesn’t mean we are excused from its operational logic’. It is so tender (as in vulnerable) to acknowledge the limitations of our current capacities to offer and accept care, safety, and malleability, and what we’re up against when we endeavour to be responsive rather than repressive or reactive with ourselves, with each other, and in our collectives.
Through her work, Beth Berila explores how the culture and container of learning spaces might be reshaped to enable and encourage the kinds of embodied practices and relational dynamics we so desperately need if we are to stay with the trouble of reckoning with (interwoven) personal and collective trauma, without repressively distancing from it or reactively reproducing it (Berila 2024). In their work, regular QUEERCIRCLE contributors Gemma Lucas and Chloe Asker explore similar questions in relation to the kinds of embodied and relational practices, and the consent cultures and community spaces, that might enable trauma-informed, shame-sensitive, mindful research/practice (Asker 2024; Lucas 2025). One key role of zines can be to share on valuable research/practice possibilities based on our marginalised lived experience, unshaming this for everyone – see Lea Cooper’s ‘In the Zine House’ series, and Shruti Ghosh’s exploration of zines as alternative infertility narratives in India.
A tender (as in loving) potential of QUEERCIRCLE, The Polyphony, and similar institutions, is to offer the kinds of embodied, relational, and systemic understandings and practices that are so desperately needed at this time, while simultaneously engaging in such understandings and practices in order to continually co-create themselves as the kinds of spaces/institutions which are able do this.
View the full QUEERCIRCLE takeover
About the author
Meg-John (MJ) Barker (they/them, I/we) is a creator, collaborator, contemplative practitioner, and friend. Their books include Graphic Guides to Queer, Gender, and Sexuality (with Jules Scheele) and How To Understand Your Gender, Sexuality and Relationships (with Alex Iantaffi). They publish zines about plurality, trauma, consent, creativity and more on rewriting-the-rules.com.
References
Asker, Chloe. 2024. ‘Towards mindful geographies.’ Emotion, Space and Society 51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2024.101014.
Berila, Beth. 2024. Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy: Social Justice in Higher Education. Routledge.
brown, adrienne maree. 2017. Emergent Strategy. AK Press.
Cardoso, Daniel. 2021. ‘Interview with Meg-John Barker.’ Sexualities 24(8), 1081-1099. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460720957206.
Guyan, Kevin. 2022. Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action. Bloomsbury Academic.
Hegarty, Peter. 2017. A Recent History of Lesbian and Gay Psychology: From Homophobia to LGBT. Routledge.
Howitt, H. 2023. ‘How we fuck: assembling intimacy-as-method to research trans sex practices.’ Gender, Place & Culture 31(4), 523–542. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2023.2182738.
Lorde, Audre. 1984. ‘The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’ in Sister Outsider. Crossing Press. https://uk.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/11881_Chapter_5.pdf
Lucas, Gemma. 2025. A Geography of Shame: Cultural Geographies of Moving Shame through Embodied Creative Practice. PhD Thesis, University of Exeter.
Smith, Sophie. 2021. ‘On bell hooks.’ London Review of Books. https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/december/on-bell-hooks. Accessed 3 September 2025.
