June Jordan teaches that: “Love is lifeforce.” And the healing power of love has saved my life more than once. In the name of this truth I affirm the arrival of Freeing Ourselves: A Guide to Health and Self Love for Brown Bois, a recent resource published by the Brown Boi Leadership project and written by masculine of center queer people of color and their allies.
I think of this resource guide as a chapter that should have been, but never would have been in Our Bodies Ourselves or even in Jambalaya. A resource that my partner, who identifies as a Black feminist boi and a gender queer artist, and our children one day will probably not read cover to cover chronologically like I did, but will flip through, looking at affirming and beautiful photography, reading stories of how people we know and strangers survived trauma, transformation and the oppression of the medical industrial complex. They will browse it for a list of self-advocating questions before finding a health care provider. We will look at for options of how we want to get pregnant, what health issues we should look out for at different ages, how one gender affirming surgery differs from another one. Freeing Ourselves is a non-linear invocation of a community of people with different needs, at different stages of life, with different approaches to their own wellness and wholeness who will interact with this book from where they are at, and then differently again at another moment. It is a tiny, audience-specific, audience-accountable encyclopedia.
“We are working towards profound social change, knowing that there are no disposable people or communities. We all need to be here.”– Brown Boi Health Manifesto by Prentis Hemphill (119)
Read the entire review here: http://thefeministwire.com/2011/1
No comments:
Post a Comment