Sanjana Kumar uses her experience of the 2025 Queer Methodologies in Medical Humanities PhD School as a lens through which to re-examine her own research practices as a psychodrama therapist and arts-based researcher in Kerala, India.
As a psychodrama therapist and arts-based researcher, I am drawn to how we express our deepest fears and desires through our bodily gestures and interactions with others. Psychodrama is a therapeutic method developed by Jacob Levy Moreno in the 1940s (Moreno 1989). Clients in this method act out and role-play in a controlled setting to navigate their concerns. Psychodrama has provided me insight into ‘embodied understanding’, the way in which the body carries knowledge, which moves beyond the more conventional dialogical research traditions (Denton and Cain 2023). It is this embodied approach that informs my therapeutic work and my PhD research, which explores the mental health of sexual minorities in my home state of Kerala, India.
Finding Synergy
Earlier this year, I got the opportunity to dig deeper and explore new creative approaches, such as zine making and creative writing, during the Queer Medical Humanities PhD School. A group of researchers working in diverse contexts, we employed various methods to piece together queer knowledges, constantly shifting between the roles of spectator and creator as we explored creative and embodied queer methodologies. It was the perfect opportunity to witness what arts-based approaches do best: accommodate multiple perspectives and imbue hope. A powerful way to expand our current, limited definition of queer knowing, arts-based approaches democratize research by including diverse voices within the community, encouraging a shared exploration through their participatory nature (Shannon-Baker and Martinez 2022).
Such a shared and fluid process is increasingly important for queer mental health research in India. Traditional research methods often fail to understand this community’s lived experience under compounded systems of oppression. Kerala, for example, the southernmost state in India where I live and do my research, is full of contradictions. Although it has the highest literacy and best health indicators in India, it continues to be highly patriarchal and queerphobic. An arts-based approach enables me to explore identity struggles and queer resistance in my work with the sensitivity and reciprocity it requires. Instead of extracting information, I engage creatively in a world-making process while exploring the social and cultural contexts of my participants.
This work invites me, as a researcher, to experience local queer subcultures (Halberstam and Halberstam 2005), moving away from the limits of traditional research structures and embracing a more empowering framework. In practice, this means prioritizing the needs of the community and centering the work on empathy, guided by both my own and the participants’ embodied experiences. The process of reflection further deconstructs the concepts of sexual minority mental health and well-being to include felt and imagined realities, which expands our current understanding. The therapeutic benefits of such research, although not widely studied, are demonstrated in my study through the engagement and centering of participants during moments of intense sharing.
Exploring Arts-Based Methods
Research with queer communities can be emotionally challenging for interviewees. Narrating difficult incidents from their lives can cause periodic shutdowns during the interview process. But these can be counteracted through the use of art, which provides a potential pathway through such shutdowns. In the first part of my PhD study, I asked participants to map out or illustrate aspects of their lives using art materials. This allowed me to tap into the participants’ imaginations while enabling them to give meaning to their experiences (Keifer-Boyd 2011). The visual representation of their artwork provided context and put them at ease throughout the interview. It also facilitated warm conversations about their experience putting pen to paper, which helped overcome the initial disconnection and supported the building of rapport.
Jaran, a 21-year-old pansexual transman who participated in the study, particularly enjoyed the creative nature of the research process. He found it unique compared to the bland and exploitative ‘survey research culture’ he was used to in Kerala. His drawing depicts the restrictive society in Kerala as a box, rigid and non-expansive, with the center controlling everyone’s lives. At the same time, the lines represent his family, school, and friends surrounding him, all connected within this rigid system. He has chosen to step out of the box, embodying the flame. During our interview, he pointed to it and said:
“This is a fire, orange and yellow. It is a small fire that does not cause harm. The fire keeps you alive, and it is the start of a new way of thinking.”
Jaran, 2024
Constructing A Scene
Objects have a quality of absorption that the participant can hold, feel, and visualize. When given the choice to scan and pick an object, the interviewee can select a miniature that ‘seems right’, simulating a sense of play (Chesner 2019). These miniatures can be a powerful way to illustrate interpersonal relationships and aspects of self while also providing the interviewee with a sense of control over the scene.
I used an assortment of objects in my interviews. These included miniatures of animals as well as everyday items used in Indian homes, such as a gas cylinder (which is used to store liquefied petroleum gas under pressure in a liquid state to provide a supply of gas for cooking). A creative projection using objects ascribes meaning to both the nature of the object and its positioning. Like a director, the participant sets the stage and allows the miniatures to take on roles. This provides an aesthetic distance and safety when sharing personal stories of grief, violence, or trauma.
Revisiting Jaran’s script, he picks a die to represent himself and places it centre stage.
He refers to homophobia and transphobia as a pathological entity—“a virus-like object’ represented by the small green item—that follows queer and trans people. His identity disclosure as a transman places him in a precarious position, subject to abuse. The gas cylinder is symbolic of the explosive nature of such an encounter; coming out in an unsafe space can be an emotionally and physically vulnerable period.
While constructing the scene, Jaran rummaged through the box of objects to find one that best represented his mother. Unsatisfied with the curated objects, he asked if he could use my inhaler. This element of spontaneity was a moment of shared experience between me and him, researcher and participant, which deepened the experience of cocreation.
“The inhaler represents my mom. Hahaha, it is good, but it can also be akin to breathlessness or suffocation.”
Jaran, 2024
The inhaler is a metaphorical representation of his troubled relationship with his mother, one of abandonment and control. It is a plea to breathe more freely. A plush toy frog stands tall on the board, representative of the friends with whom he can be ‘vulnerable.’ They are the only source of support for Jaran amid elements that violate, suffocate, and stalk.
Creatively Queering Research
Both the arts and object-based prompts helped me further understand and explore Jaran’s perspective. Each method revealed different facets of his inner psyche. The art allowed him to create an ideal image of his role in society and his quiet, gentle strength, while the objects in his life staged a contrasting story. Like Jaran, others in the study described their struggles and resistance against systems that continue to fail them seven years after same-sex relationships were decriminalized in India and ten years since the Supreme Court of India recognized transgender individuals as a third gender in 2014. For Jaran, his community friendships manage to outweigh the negative and emotionally distant familial relationships, forming a gentle yet powerful source of support.
Such an embodied and interpretive account of the lived experience of the community is novel in the context of Kerala. It attempts to transcend the binaries of gender and emotions, and brings depth to our understanding of a relational approach to queer experiences of mental health and well-being.
Bearing witness to the unique, immersive, and imaginal exploration allowed by arts-based approaches linked my experience of my own research to the PhD School in a striking way. Looking back, I can see the ways that both situations encompassed discrete processes of gathering and sorting thoughts, emotions, and feelings through an variety of arts-based tools. These experiences, as both researcher and participant, pushed me as to expand my perspective, marinate in my discomfort, and examine my own biases, allowing ‘all queer emotions to flow’, not just the ‘acceptable’ ones (Barker 2023).
About the author
Sanjana Kumar (she/her) is a researcher and practitioner currently exploring the mental health of sexual minorities in Kerala, India through applied theatre, arts-based, and phenomenological approaches. She has extensive experience co-creating understandings of mental health literacy with diverse communities across the state.
About the 2025 Medical Humanities PhD School
This post is part of a collection of contributions from attendees of the Queer Methodologies in Medical Humanities PhD School which took place in Durham in March 2025. The PhD school was funded by Wellcome, as part of the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities at Durham University, and the Centre for Medical Humanities and Bioethics (CMHB) at Linköping University.
All articles in this collection can be found on this page: 2025 Queer Methodologies in Medical Humanities PhD School.
References
Barker, Meg-John. 2023. Queer Creative Health. Queercircle. Available online:https://websiteartlogicwebsite0206.artlogic.net/usr/library/documents/main/queer-creative-health-print-zine_web.pdf.
Bauer, Greta R., and Linda D. Wayne. 2005. “Cultural Sensitivity and Research Involving Sexual Minorities.” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 37 (01): 45–47.
Chesner, A. 2019. One-to-One Psychodrama Psychotherapy: Applications and Technique. London, England: Routledge.
Denton, J. Michael, and Leia K. Cain. 2023. “Creating Queer Epistemologies and Embodied Knowledge Through Narrative and Arts-Based Research.” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 12 (4): 133–57.
Finley, S. 2005. “Arts-Based Inquiry: Performing Revolutionary Pedagogy.” The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=HAgtJVsAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra.
Gerber, Nancy, Elizabeth Templeton, Gioia Chilton, Marcia Cohen Liebman, Elizabeth Manders, and Minjung Shim. 2012. “Art-Based Research as a Pedagogical Approach to Studying Intersubjectivity in the Creative Arts Therapies.” Journal of Applied Arts and Health 3 (1): 39–48.
Halberstam, J. J., and J. Halberstam. 2005. “In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives” 3. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=EzYS_V6s1CAC&oi=fnd&pg=IA2&dq=halberstam+2005&ots=-WSI1C69KG&sig=Bw1bLySGonWSv9l9mUX-bDgHNvg.
Keifer-Boyd, Karen. 2011. “A Social Justice Approach to Arts-Based Research.” Vol. 4.
Moreno, Z. 1989. “Psychodrama, Role Theory, and the Concept of the Social Atom.” Journal of Group Psychotherapy, Psychodrama, & Sociometry 42: 178–86.
Shannon-Baker, Peggy, and Claudia Martinez. 2022. “Integrating Arts-Based Approaches in Mixed Methods Research with Diverse Stakeholders.” In The Routledge Handbook for Advancing Integration in Mixed Methods Research, 372–87. London: Routledge.
