Living in Queer Cancer World
This project brings together and amplifies the voices of a diverse group of people living with and beyond cancer from the LGBTQIA+ community, at the intersections of class, race, religion, age, and disability. The aim of the project is to help increase the visibility of LGBTQIA+ experiences of living with and beyond cancer. The project identifies some of the common themes of our lived experience and the range of creative and critical ways participants have responded to a cancer diagnosis. Living in Queer Cancer World: Our Stories celebrates our creativity, criticality, and achievements despite and sometimes even because of our cancer.
The project features eight storytellers who in different ways are using their experiences of living with and through a cancer diagnosis to explore, unsettle, and transform normative narratives of health and illness. Some are creative practitioners and artists who give voice to LGBTQIA+ experiences of cancer care and treatment, using different forms of writing, artistic and creative practice, performance, and photography. Many are also involved in cancer advocacy, activism, and community-organising, as well as academic research, media work and public speaking. The storytellers give voice to LGBTQIA+ experiences of cancer care and treatment, exploring in different ways what queer cancer narratives might look and feel like, rejecting sanitized narratives. Telling our stories through different creative mediums and practices highlight issues that still need attention and urgent change if we are to improve health disparities and social inequalities.
As part of the wider project, we also ran a digital storytelling workshop. This was primarily aimed at LGBTQIA+ people living with and beyond cancer who were new to storytelling, or who were interested in exploring how they might tell their stories. The aim of the workshop was to explore how we might use different creative mediums and formats and to provide some starting points. The workshop was run by Ceiren Bell, an animator and educator at Goldsmiths, in conjunction with Steve Wybourn, a mental health educator, currently completing a PhD in digital storytelling at Kingston University. All participants were recruited via OUTpatients website. We have included an overview of the session plan, which can be adapted for your own use if you also want to explore queer cancer storytelling. We have also included some of the contributions from participants who have given their permission for the work to be shared on the website.
The team was led by Project Director, Professor Lisa Blackman, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in August 2021. Like the storytellers featured in the project, living with and beyond cancer as a queer person presents lots of challenges. These experiences informed the co-production of the stories, the scope of the project, and the research/interviewing/editing of the stories.
