
By Sarah Race, http://www.sarahrace.com
For this episode I sat down with the brilliant and luminous Zena Sharman to talk about her work as an LGBTQ+ health advocate (seriously click on that link and look at that website, it is a testimony to femme web design and I am in love). We talk about thinking strategically, changing systems, editing anthologies, and casting spells, plus what it means to be one small person working on great big problems. Talking to Zena always makes me feel better, and I hope some of that comes through in this episode. Here are some links!
- First, go buy Zena’s books, The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Health Care and Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. Buy two copies and give them away as gifts!
- Zena mentions so many great resources in this episode, and here they are:
- Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
- Histories of the Transgender Child by Julian Gill-Peterson
- Kelli Dunham‘s ‘zine, You Don’t Have to Love Your Body to Take Care of It
- Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
- The Healing Justice Podcast
- Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure by Eli Clare
- Using Story to Change Systems by Ella Saltmarshe
- Also I mentioned some things! One of them was the wonderful blog post “Everything Is Awful and I’m Not Okay: questions to ask before giving up” (which inspired this poem, which I love so so much)
- This is a good piece on Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller”
- And I enthusiastically recommend Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here. Zena’s theme song is “We Are Circling” by Buffy Sainte-Marie.
Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.
I listen to SFA every week and realized looking at the show notes today that 5(ish?) years ago I was hunched over, crying before a yoga class because I had just been broken up with and Zena came over and asked if I wanted a hug. I had never met her and haven’t seen her since but I recognize her picture. I affirm that she embodies care 🙂
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What a beautiful story! I’m going to share this with Zena, who I can confirm is a person full of love and light.
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