It’s hard to soar like an eagle when you’re flying with a bunch of turkeys

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Mary Jo Klinker is an associate professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Winona State University. Engaging activism in the classroom is central to Mary Jo’s pedagogy and also fuels her participatory action research, which focuses on the relation of queer activism and theory to feminist antimilitarist organizing and anti-imperialist critique. She has created and implemented a course on “Queering Prison Abolition,” in which students organize a book drive and educate community members about the experiences of LGBTQ+ prisoners. 

“I am trying to understand how we internalize the myths of our society even as we resist them. I have felt a powerful temptation to write about my family as a kind of morality tale, with us as the heroes and middle and upper classes as the villains. It would be within the romantic myth, for example, to pretend that we were the kind of noble Southern whites portrayed in the movies, mill workers for generations until driven out by alcoholism and a family propensity for rebellion and union talk. But that would be a lie. The truth is that no one in my family ever joined a union.” —Dorothy Allison, “A Question of Class”

The first time I was invited to a wine and cheese party, I took a box of wine. 

On another evening, I was the youngest guest and the only graduate student, in my early socialization to academia. During a round of storytelling at the holiday party, I shared a favorite family memory with my colleagues – the year my father, hungover, with us children in the car, pulled a Christmas tree out of the dumpster behind an American Legion. My parents had been on the brink of another separation, and my mother was livid.  When my father recounts the story, he always exclaims, “It already had tinsel on it.” I laughed. The silence following this retelling is one I remember. It’s one of many silences that I learned indicated listeners’ discomfort and concern. Was it the alcoholism or the social class differences? Were they more uncomfortable with the content of the story or with the fact that I hadn’t known not to hide it from them? 

I teach Dorothy Allison’s “A Question of Class,” a feminist truth-telling of her life as a white, working-poor lesbian, which captures the shame and the distance from her family that she felt after leaving for college. Many of my Minnesota State students – white, working-class, first-generation – feel connected to this essay. They feel seen, heard by the commonalities between their lives and Allison’s. Her words rang true to me as a working-class white undergraduate too. Of course, her story, like everyone’s, is different than my own; my family were union members.  

I can’t tell if academia has trained the stories out of me, or if I’ve buried them out of shame. When I started teaching at Winona State, in a small Midwestern town, I was in closer proximity to my family, so close, one of my prom date’s cousins was enrolled in my course. I was confronted for the first time in years with facing myself, my family, and my community—the students I was now tasked with teaching.  

Not even a month into my new job, I got the call that my brother had been arrested again. There was alcohol involved, but this time the police officer followed him into a grocery store where he was buying cigarettes, confronted him, accused him of a crime he had not committed, and physically assaulted him. It was all caught on camera, and the cashier called my mom. He was back in jail.  

I was far away in graduate school when he was first arrested and jailed. When he finally got Huber job release privileges to work at the stainless-steel factory, I felt a strange cognitive dissonance between teaching Angela Davis’ “Are Prisons Obsolete?” and hearing my brother complain about the lack of book access in the County jail. I feel like both an insider and an outsider to my family. 

Some of my students have similar stories. Many of my colleagues do not. 

If the “personal is political,” my feminist pedagogy needed to evolve. I am not objectively outside of this subject; for this reason, now, when I teach abolition studies, I say “we all likely know someone dehumanized by the system of mass incarceration.” Solidarity projects I’ve conducted with students for people who are incarcerated, like book drives and letter writing, aren’t about “helping.” They are about praxis, the bridging of our course theories to activism. Activism that impacts the communities they come from. Perhaps we’re also making bridges to share our stories, to make the work more materially grounded.  

Once he’s out, I finally get to see my brother, who frequently calls me “college girl.” It’s a Friday night after teaching. I help my dad back a tractor into the shed. Then my family all meets up on the interstate at a truck stop Chinese buffet. My brother was his usual sardonic self, but more reserved, perhaps ashamed. Annoyed, I asked: “Why do you keep doing this?” More brilliant and quicker in his words than most folks I know, he explained: “It’s hard to soar like an eagle when you’re flying with a bunch of turkeys.” 

The first time I went to teach in a rural county jail setting, I had to report my brother’s and cousin’s incarceration. After all, I could be trying to aid them in illegal prison activity. But I was working with women. We were all roughly the same age, mostly white and from similar rural origins. They all told the same story—when you get out with drug charges, where do you go? Back to your families and friends. The cycle continues.   

It struck me when I went home that on my ride to the jail, I travelled through the bluffs and a Wisconsin township called “Eagle Valley.” One nearly bare oak tree filled with eagles. I wish this was some story with hopeful symbolism. It’s not. The white supremacist carceral logics of cages remain. Maybe like Allison, I’m just learning to straddle multiple worlds and tell these stories. Like my brother, I feel like a turkey in academia. My hope is, these stories make the university feel just a littlemore open to fellow turkeys. 

When Life Hands You Lemons, Write a Journal Article: An Exploration into Navigating Trauma as a Academic

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In this post, a researcher studying the experiences of, reactions to, and management of trauma reflects on the ways these topics intertwine in their life and work over time. 

 

It was my turn to visit you. I canceled the day before and said finals were killing me. You said you would see me next time. Finals didn’t kill me. I made the Dean’s list that semester.

Finals didn’t kill me. I made the Dean’s list that semester.

Finals didn’t kill me. I made the Dean’s list that semester.

Finals didn’t kill me. I made the Dean’s list that semester.

This phrase rang through my head abruptly at 4:21 a.m. on a breezy, Wednesday morning in April. I can’t sleep. I can’t hold down my food. My thoughts are scattered. I need to sleep. I have a paper – which I haven’t started yet – and a presentation I have to finish by tomorrow. I have to maintain the “front stage” I cultivated over the years. It’s the role I feel like I have to play. Good thing I am comparing Goffman’s “presentation of the self” to other theoretical concepts in this paper – that I haven’t started on. Why can’t I sleep? Why can’t I shut everything off? Unfortunately, trauma management and recovery both fail to function in that regard.

They said your death was a freak accident. It was raining. There was ice. You all were in a hurry to go shopping. I would have taken my time. I drive so slow now that everyone passes me. I recently went shopping like we used to. I didn’t buy anything. Only watched the people there. I haven’t done that in years since you dragged me in that fancy Macy’s.

There is no on or off switch for trauma. Just flickering lights. The kind you see at an abandoned warehouse filled with empty crates. I am feeling like an empty crate. I do have the capability to hold heavy cargo, but my trauma memories stop the assembly line of my mind from growing and thriving as full human feelings. For me, it always starts at the end of a semester. The sharp pain in my stomach. The cold, night sweats. The high-pitched screaming. The flashbacks. Seeing your hands reaching out for help in my dreams. For some reason, I was pushing away from you. I can’t count the number of people I pushed away since your death. Your face covered in blood. It’s not every day your best friend passes away, days before you were supposed to visit. It’s not every day you get a phone call with that horrific news, while you are sobbing for hours late at night along a surprisingly calm river outside of a run-down apartment.

I recently went back to that river to reprocess my trauma with the support of a close friend. I stood in the exact same spot for 20 minutes on the dot. I couldn’t cry at first. Frustrated, I went back into the car where my friend was staring at me. Just watching me. Like they had the nerve to stare at me after all that effort I put into processing trauma. All of sudden, the floodgates opened in my eyes and I found myself sobbing in their lap while drowning in their t-shirt with my salty tears. That trigger unexpectedly became the beginning point of my trauma recovery.

We always took the back roads because you knew all the shortcuts. I heard later that your driver was going 80 mph. There are tons of potholes I recall. I almost killed myself and someone else while driving on those back roads. You told me not to scare you again. I apologized. Every day, I wish I would have driven that night.  

Trauma recovery is brutally and painfully messy. There is no one-size-fits-all framework in managing trauma or even studying trauma. Literature on trauma is limited, especially trauma research aside from PTSD treatment and veterans. I remember one week where I spent 15 hours in the library trying to educate myself on trauma management and recovery. I quickly became frustrated with the substantial gaps in the literature, so I attempted to find trauma researchers other disciplines. I only found one university with a doctoral program that had two faculty members who were considered to be trauma researchers. Since we all seem to have some variation of big ‘T’ and little ‘t’ traumas, how is this possible? Trauma has been normalized throughout American media and culture from the trauma of gun violence to the trauma of rape and sexual assault. However, the literature is limited. So how can we grow the body of trauma research and scholarship?

Everyone apparently asked you where I was the night before you died. You told them not to worry and that I was coming home soon.

We start by studying vulnerable populations that have been previously ignored in trauma research, alongside researched populations. For example, we could study the experiences of transgender and non-binary folks. Specifically, what about the issues transwomen and transwomen of color face managing trauma? We could also study other populations who consistently face traumatic events, like racial and ethnic minority populations, sexual minority populations, people of low socioeconomic status, rape survivors, people with chronic illnesses, and people with disabilities. By expanding our array of knowledge on diverse populations outside of traditional trauma narratives, such as veterans and military personnel with PTSD, we can then start to understand how trauma operates on a broader level.

The definition of trauma also must be unrestrained and inclusive, since individuals have a wide range of responses to traumatic experiences. Less noticeable responses do not equate to a given circumstance being less traumatic. We all develop and process trauma in very distinctive ways. Researchers must capture the full fluidity of trauma by understanding trauma survivors through their experiences and daily management.

Strangers kept hugging me at your funeral and told me how great you were. I already knew this.

I am not a trauma expert by any means. But I am a trauma survivor. Much like others before me. I have heard numerous stories of students, faculty, and other academics over the years discuss how their trauma has influenced their research and careers. To my understanding, this desire to fully understand one’s self through emotionally-based research can be both healing and therapeutic throughout the trauma recovery process.

I started writing and opening myself up again. I am now forming intimate and meaningful relationships with those who are supportive in my healing. I began to see my passion for this limited area of literature blossom and flourish. Walls keep crashing down around me as I recover. Somehow, I managed to finish that paper on time, while rocking my presentation. Researching trauma is weirdly comforting for me. I actually decided that night when I broke down, if life hands me lemons, then I will write a journal article. I know I won’t get any sleep tonight. I know today will be hard. But I now know I’m not alone anymore through research and sharing experiences with others.

Opening Up About CF Kidney Disease

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In this post, Xan Nowakowski shares and reflects on a new article they’ve published concerning their experiences navigating cystic fibrosis (CF) and complications related to kidney disease and healthcare delivery. 

People with the same chronic disease often have very different experiences. When you live with a condition that affects your whole body, you can be different from other people with your condition in a huge variety of ways. A disease that impacts a particular organ or system badly in one person may leave it relatively untouched in another. As a result, it can be hard for people without that condition—and sometimes even people who live with it themselves—to understand the full scope of experiences that are possible for patients.

Yet this understanding is critical to developing and improving health care resources, both in clinical settings and in the general community, for people with chronic conditions. My own experiences as a medical educator and health care advocate have shown me this important truth almost constantly over the years. Likewise, my own journey with cystic fibrosis (CF) has demonstrated where a lot of the gaps in health care lie—and how they could be improved by amplifying the voices of patients with diverse experiences.

CF can be a tricky disease to describe because it affects almost every part of the body in some way. The basic gist of this condition is that instead of making a thin liquid that lubricates your tissue, your body instead makes something more like rubber cement. This happens because you either can’t make, can’t transport, or can’t use a specific protein that helps electrolytes move into and out of your cells. Because so many different tissues in the body require mucus to stay healthy, CF can do a lot of damage to different organs over time.

Treatment for CF has improved a lot in recent decades. As a result, many people with the disease are now living long lives. However, as of right now there is no cure and no reasonable promise of one, meaning the disease still does a lot of damage as people grow older. Health care providers are thus seeing many more CF patients surviving to develop complications like kidney disease, which used to occur in only a small fraction of people with the condition because respiratory failure ended their lives first.

As someone who has lived with CF related kidney disease since my earliest adult years, I have learned a lot about what clinicians do and don’t know concerning my health care needs. I’ve also met other people with CF who didn’t know the disease could impact the kidneys! Like any other adult with CF, I have a unique cluster of complications that don’t match up exactly with those of most other patients. Unlike some adults with the disease, I don’t have clinical diabetes or liver problems. On the other hand, I have kidney disease and heart issues.

Working with clinicians and advocates who really understand the diversity of the CF population has opened my eyes to important opportunities for improving care for people with complex health conditions. When I got connected with a specialized CF team after moving to Orlando, I quickly learned a lot about how to keep my kidneys healthy and improve some of the symptoms I was experiencing. Over time, I began to feel much better physically and more empowered cognitively about managing my kidney issues. Because of this, I also changed my thinking about whether or not I would be willing to consider a kidney transplant in the future.

I wrote about the lessons I learned from this journey in a manuscript called “Original Parts: Aging and Reckoning with Cystic Fibrosis Related Kidney Disease”. Last week, this paper was published in Patient Experience Journal. It’s a good example of how “writing where it hurts” can enrich academic literature as surely as it can expand general knowledge about improving care for people with health challenges. Likewise, open access journals like PXJ play an important role in making new information about patient experiences available far beyond university campuses!

I feel excited about amplifying the voices of other people aging with CF using some of these new tools for writing, sharing, and learning. If you’d like to read the manuscript, it’s available here free of charge. As usual, let us know if you have any problems accessing the text—we will happily send you a PDF copy instead.

TRANSforming Sociology

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This post seeks feedback on transgender experience in the academy and sociology specifically, and comes from the Sociologists for Trans Justice subcommittee regarding the creation of interdisciplinary best practices for departments, chairs, faculty, and staff.

As an undergraduate student, I sat down in my sociology department’s Deviance & Society class, exhausted from a rough semester. This wasn’t my first sociology course, and I had grown tired of the ubiquitous cissexism in class after class – be it theory, gender, or any other topic. I always expected the worst, but did not anticipate what would happen this fall morning. The professor began excited and full of energy, ready to discuss rape, sexual violence, and sexual harassment. To begin, she stated that one in three women in Utah (the state we were in) experienced sexual assault. “I want us to realize how many people in this room this affects,” she remarked, and began counting those she assumed to be women in the room. “One, two, three; okay, you raise your hand.” She went around the hundred-seat auditorium repeating this until she reached the final seat. I felt my body clench, and my legs began shaking anxiously. I didn’t know what to do. Would she count me? Would she ignore me?

I know that people rarely see me as a woman. As a nonbinary trans femme, even when I am presenting in a stereotypical feminine manner, people too often only see me as a very flamboyant gay man, but she knew, from prior conversation, that I wasn’t; yet she still ignored my presence in the count. Trans people experience high levels of sexual assault, with 47% of respondents in the most recent National Transgender Discrimination Survey (2015)[i] reporting sexual assault at least once in their life. These rates are even higher for nonbinary folks (55%) and people of color (65% American Indian, 53% Black, 48% Latinx, 58% Middle Eastern, and 59% multiracial), and even higher for nonbinary people of color (74% American Indian, 65% Black, 55% Latinx, 62% Middle Eastern, 67% multiracial). I have never been assaulted, but I have experienced sexual harassment and unwanted touching that I had little recourse to escape. When my experience and the experience of people like me was ignored in class, I had no idea how to feel other than to realize that violence against trans/nonbinary people would continue to go unnoticed.

Experiences like these, as I already stated, are not isolated to one sociology professor or one class or even sociology as a field. Cissexism pervades academic discourse, pedagogy, and methodology, and it is critical that academics begin to tackle it. Sociologists for Trans Justice (S4TJ) officially formed in 2016 with a mission “to support trans, non-binary, and intersex scholars in sociology; to advance trans and intersex studies; [and] to increase public understanding.”[ii] As part of this group, two other scholars and I comprise a sub-committee regarding the creation of an interdisciplinary best practices guide for departments, chairs, faculty, and staff.

Part of this work has involved pouring over the literature regarding the experiences of trans/nonbinary students, staff, and faculty, as well as recommendations for change. This expanding literature includes whether to ask pronouns or not; whether professor’s should state their own pronouns; altering syllabi to include trans/nonbinary scholars and scholarship; reframing analyses and discussions outside of a cissexist frame; the need for mentorship of students, staff, and faculty; the transformation of institutional policies regarding name/gender marker changes, bathrooms, and housing; and the role of faculty in facilitating justice. Despite the growth of this literature, it remains limited in topic, scope, and focus.

Thus, as members of S4TJ, we are seeking feedback from sociologists. We seek comments and responses from trans/nonbinary and intersex scholars regarding your experiences in sociology and academia, and recommendations you have for transforming the field and higher education. We also seek comments and responses from cisgender scholars, department chairs, and other administrators. In what ways does your department facilitate cissexism, and what information do you need to challenge this?

It is critical as scholars that we work to ensure not merely the inclusion of trans/nonbinary and intersex folks in higher education, but to foster a critical trans politics. Critical trans politics “demands more than…recognition and inclusion, seeking instead to transform current logics of state, civil society security, and social equality” (Spade 2011: 19)[iii]. Inclusion remains limited in ensuring that students have access to an equitable and representative education and that faculty and staff are ensured equity, agency, and legitimacy within their respective departments. Individuals can be included into any space without its actual transformation. However, trans/nonbinary and intersex scholars deserve more than entrance into a bed of thorns. We deserve programs in which we can collaborate, connect, and think, bringing our whole selves into our work in order to facilitate critical knowledge production.

Additionally, the harm and violence produced within academia must recognize the stolen land we occupy, the Indigenous lives lost in the settlement of these so-called United States (and elsewhere), and the ways in which inclusionary politics and “multiculturalist” politics often delink sexual and gender violence from racism and white supremacy. “The protection of sexual orientation [and gender]…is narrated as racially neutral” (Ellison 2015: 332)[iv] although the actual harm never is. Thus, our work must ensure that the lived experiences of trans/nonbinary and intersex individuals of color are centered, that trans/nonbinary and intersex people are afforded agency, leadership, and power within academia, and that our work remains vigilantly intersectional.

Justice work and its production is never an isolated event or an individual project. It is a collaborative and coalitional process, and we need your help to ensure that the information we are providing actually meets the needs of trans/nonbinary and intersex scholars. Please, comment on this article and tell us what you need as a trans/nonbinary and/or intersex student, staff, or faculty member to see trans justice manifest within academia. Cisgender staff and faculty, please, comment and let us know what information you are lacking and what challenges you need assistance in facing. If you wish to provide feedback, you can send an email response to wewritewhereithurts@gmail.com (these will be forwarded to the committee and trans justice organization), titling the subject, “Best Practices.”

[i] James, Sandy E., Jody L. Herman, Susan Rankin, Mara Keisling, Lisa Mottet, and Ma’ayan Anafi. (2016). “The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey.” National Center for Transgender Equality. Retrieved December 3, 2016 from http://www.transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/usts/USTS%20Full%20Report%20-%20FINAL%201.6.17.pdf.

[ii] Sociologists for Trans Justice. 2017. “Our Mission.” Retrieved December 3, 2016 from http://www.transjusticesyllabus.com/s4tj/.

[iii] Spade, Dean. 2011. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of the Law. New York City: South End Press.

[iv] Ellison, Treva. 2016. “The strangeness of progress.” In E. Patrick Johnson (ed.) No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies (pp. 323-345). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Lessons from insured underemployment

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In this post, Erika G Abad discusses lessons learned at intersections of race, class, and generation in the course of an interdisciplinary career. Erika G Abad, PhD is a full-time non-tenure track assistant professor in residence in the southwest. She first contributed to Write Where it Hurts reflecting on the contradiction of her income and social status. You can find her work on Latinx (formerly Mujeres) Talk, Centro Voices among other blogs. Her Oscar Lopez Rivera research is trying to make the case to write about him without a prisoner studies lens. Follow her @lionwanderer531. 

A professional mentor tells me to not talk about the call center. He insists because PhDs working two years at a call center right after their degree makes no sense. But I talked about the call center before receiving this advice, and in spite of it, because I wouldn’t want to work anywhere that didn’t understand the call center. A first-generation college student, the first PhD on both sides of my extended family, a queer Latina not ashamed of the struggle, a university would not be worthy of me if underemployment were a value statement.

Why do I care about the call center?

I got that job like I got others. Through social networks. Someone who vouched for me. Overqualified, they were worried that I was not going to last. And this white ally who saw me struggle said I would stay, and he stuck out his neck for me. I was frustrated then, PhD pride, that the moral obligation was placed on me. In hindsight, I needed that job. Car payments. Rent. My online summer class did not have enough students to afford those, let alone a trip back to Chicago. After three months picking up shifts to supplement the income my weekend part-time slot, a second-shift full-time post appeared. Because I needed dental work, because nothing else was biting, because the state of references for academic jobs was stale, I took it.

Within months they let me compost, a 64 oz old coffee can turned into a five-gallon bucket. The custodial worker hooked the car poolers up with free parking. White accomplice and I potlucked with others. In my off time, I spent Saturday mornings and Sunday afternoons helping Latina immigrant women raise funds to buy Latino-centric food for the food pantry.  Those two years echoed the interdependent ethic of the Latino community of my childhood. People who took care of each other. People who had to figure it out with others’ help because pride was too expensive to deny need; assets were too plenty to deny support. Social networks built and born into were my Latino Chicago norms.

This is not a story of romanticizing the poor. They were far better than me. This is not a story that seeks to ignore that I left because the call center was being outsourced like most global companies that found less expensive labor abroad. The call center years forced me to think critically about the purpose of academia and the sites of learning, practices our degrees require us to privilege. The few years I embodied economic instability and uncertainty were largely due to my inability to explain how I did Gender and Ethnic Studies with my American Studies degree, given committee members’ disclosure after I graduated. Much like that call center job, I relied on friends and chosen family to take care of me. I wrote extensively on that interdependency for Women in Higher Education thanks to Liana Silva.  That interdependency I learned from the Puerto Rican & other Latina women educator-practitioners who mentored me over the years, and something which they, along with my work dad (the mentor who told me to not talk about the call center) modeled for me to pay forward in whichever way I found possible.

Latino Community Capital

While the job market for the past two years appears to have recovered from the economic recession. It has done so only slightly. With more part-time instructors than full-time instructors, we are competing with colleagues and friends to obtain our positions. Little has changed in interdisciplinary studies that articulates that those of us with those degrees can be as flexibly employed as those within traditionally defined disciplines. The instability of the field and the field’s necessity to rely on the complexity and contradictions of practitioners sparks this meditation. I have wavered on writing this, however, as a first generation college student who spent four years on the market, I worry for the future generation of scholars who need to learn early on how to apply their skills to other markets. Despite the status of the field, the caste system within higher education has marked select alum from specific universities as more likely to evade underemployment, discrimination, respectability politics performance, some of whom have benefited from citizenist, ableist skin color, class, and/or repronormative privilege.

Chicago born, trained by leading scholars in Latino and Puerto Rican Studies since my first year in undergrad, I was groomed for this. Latino intellectual community capital was my norm. The majority of my undergraduate faculty were Latina. As I wrote in my homage to Judith Ortiz Cofer, I’ve met Latino writers, Puerto Rican and Latinx activists as a result of choosing a school based on the wealth of Latino knowledge that my alma mater has. Pursuing that logic didn’t necessarily make social networking sense, but I had yet shaken off ethno-centrism and, more importantly, I knew the struggle I wanted to have was not about centering, gaining or sustaining white validation. I took for granted that having a job meant that the struggle against internalized oppression or imposter syndrome was over; I took for granted that publishing and prospering did not mean leaders in the field knew how to extend, how to do it.

As a mentor once said, not all faculty teaching you know how to write, let alone teach writing.

Pursuing that meant coming to terms with the stories that needed to be told and the way I needed to tell them. Once I regained my voice, as a result of letting customer service turn off the pomp and circumstance and self-righteousness, I learned in my white-collar identity-based politics struggles, then came to consider where to embody what the intellectual shoulders I stood on had modeled for me. Not because they asked, no, more because I knew what it meant to have faculty who looked like me tell me I could be like them, they who were running departments and bringing award-winning Latinx writers into my life. I needed to write from that place of fulfilled yet growing hunger for greater voices. That also meant coming to terms with the “race for theory” and where I wanted to run (Christian 1987). Also meant gauging how fast I was willing to run so that I could use white scholarly voices to more critically bring to light the black, Caribbean, Latin American ones with whom I find home and decolonial reason.

And talking Foucault, composting and food sharing with the fellow customer service associates echoed the exchanges that inform all the reasons I wanted to write and teach. The debates about which books to save from displaced cultural centers; the joking exchanged during the late nights of protest sign making, and the questions answered during my childhood afternoons talking with priests about scripture, women priests, and the call to serve the poor. Following the advice of former Puerto Rican political prisoner Oscar Lopez Rivera provided in his letters to me, I rolled up my sleeves and got to work during those call center years (2008). While brief, and some would argue, minimal in comparison to the time I spent in the ivory tower, their relation to those years make them more profound.

The American Dream I embodied till graduation failed. It only resurrected because my sister insisted on bringing my exhausted heartbroken and proud behind home. It only resurrected because undocumented immigrant women gave me more to fight for in letting me partake in the work they were leading. It resurrected because activist leaders I critiqued allowed me to work through our disagreements when I returned to work with them in Chicago. Willingness to swallow my pride, work and serve across difference and work towards reconciliation continue to shape how I write, how I teach and continued efforts to sustain meaningful intellectual dialog beyond my own scholarly training.

The call center years remind me that intersectional, interdisciplinary professional communities have the potential to disrupt neoliberalism by being an exercising practicality in its intergenerational dialog. As contradictory, as distanced as we are—the we between disciplines, the we between junior and senior scholars—when we are willing and able to name where our intellectual and political forebears are, in spite of where we aim to be, we can create the opportunity to break bread together. The Catholic imagery I evoke functions analogously to intellectual ideas leading to traditional, creative works and or, if applicable, policy reform. Whether the border crossed us, our families, or they/we cross borders, we can still be a bridge for who’s and what’s to come.

Works Cited

Lopez Rivera, Oscar. Letters to author. 2008

Christian, Barbara. “A Race for Theory.” Cultural Critique: The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse. 6 (1987) 51-63.

 

Revisiting Trauma as a Graduate Student

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In this post, a graduate student in a social sciences program reflects on some ways graduate experience may involve revisiting and managing past trauma.  

Yesterday, I woke up to someone wailing at the top of their lungs. It was the type of noise you would hear when people grieve uncontrollably. When I quickly scrambled out of my bed to look out of the window, I discovered nothing unusual other than maintenance fixing the community gate. No one else was outside of my apartment. As I unlocked my bedroom door to peek around the corner of the hallway, I overheard the television playing in the living room. I then realized that my roommate was watching a movie and the person screaming was Angelina Jolie. Nevertheless, this horrific wail triggered me unexpectedly and brought me back to a dark place that I had avoided for most of my adult life.

I immediately retreated to my room and threw myself onto the bed out of desperation. Memories of previous traumatic events began to flood back in my mind. My body began to tremble, while I was sweating bullets. My eyes glazed over and my breathing was tremendously heavy. My limbs became temporarily immobile. I ultimately went into a state of panic and anxiousness, while spiraling out of control with my thoughts. All those years of therapy felt completely worthless during that moment and nothing else seemed to matter. Trauma memories were stored in mind and my body quickly remembered and reacted consequently.

What seemed like hours lying motionless in bed was only about ten minutes. My body slowly began to recover as I realized that I was in a safe environment. I crawled to my yellow bathroom and eventually managed to take a shower, which always seemed to be therapeutic to me oddly enough. As my face became flushed by the scalding, hot water, I was reassured that I was very much alive.

During my panic attack, I initially thought that my body had ‘betrayed’ me by releasing trauma that I had buried for years. But after reading literature on trauma management and previously discussing trauma with mentors, I knew that the human body contributes physiological responses in triggering events to protect itself from potentially hazardous situations. My body was releasing the indescribable grief I held for so long. This unpleasant incident, surprisingly, gave me clearer insight regarding my recent traumas within the academy as a graduate student.

Since starting graduate school, I had unexpectedly relived my ‘big T’ traumas and experienced multiple ‘little t’ traumas. From discussing my horrific experiences with students related to gender, sexuality, and religion to discussing rape culture during lecture, I had to confront these fears for the sake of my health and activism. I murmur the words ‘me too’ underneath my breath as students disclose their trauma memories of sexual assault. I cry tears of joy whenever I successfully provide support and resources to students exploring their sexualities and gender, while reflecting on my personal discoveries. These moments have assisted me in my own trauma management by making me more comfortable discussing these sensitive topics in the classroom and activism.

Practicing self-care outside of graduate school has significantly helped me cope with my trauma. I now go on long walks during the evenings and watch the sunset. I call friends and mentors for advice. I recently rekindled my old love of vinyl records and dusted off my record player to play Pat Benatar’s Crimes of Passion. I distance myself from the academic world sometimes to keep my individuality, relationships, and passions intact. I force myself every day to not give into ‘graduate school guilt’ and to enjoy all the moments that bring meaning to my human experience. As a social scientist in training and as an activist, I must continue to practice self-care and know my limitations, so I can best help those I am assisting without being a ‘wounded warrior’ during the process.

Despite my successful attempts to recharge, I still see and revisit trauma every day in graduate school. This could be partly due to my unique experiences and understandings of the social world while performing multiple roles as a researcher, teaching assistant, graduate student, and activist. Nevertheless, in the social sciences, we do have the unique opportunity to change these all too familiar struggles within the academy, by maintaining interactive dialogues regarding trauma management and actively supporting members of marginalized groups.

Why is it that the academy often fails to tackle or even acknowledge the experiences of trauma among students and faculty, especially those who are women, LGBTQ people, and people of color? Surely academics recognize the crucial need of providing a safe, empathetic space to share their experiences of trauma, harassment, and microaggressions within the academy without the fear of negative consequence? Trauma should not be stigmatized in the academy nor should academics attempt to silence those who express their trauma memories. Leaders must drastically change how we train, support, and treat survivors of trauma. I hope this essay can be insightful and reflective to members of the academy, especially to those who are graduate students learning how to navigate revisiting experiences of trauma.

Creating Homecoming Queens – a southern gothic bi+, poly, and trans love story

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In this post, J. Sumerau reflects on the process of composing and publishing Homecoming Queens, a southern gothic bi+, poly, and trans love story set in the south and based on their experiences as a bi+ poly trans person and researcher collecting stories of other sexual and gender minorities throughout the past couple decades.

Earlier this month, my third novel and second book in the Social Fictions Series of sociological based novels – Homecoming Queens – was officially released. The novel is a southern gothic bi+, poly, and trans love story based on hundreds of formal and informal interviews with sexual and gender minorities throughout the southeast I’ve collected over the past couple decades as, first, a curious bi+ trans and poly kid and later, as a researcher focused on sexualities, gender, religion, and health in the lives of sexual, gender, and religious minorities. In this post, I elaborate on the background and creation of the novel after doing so with Cigarettes & Wine, my first research based novel, has been useful both for readers interested in my work and fellow teachers using my stories to teach sexualities, sociology, gender, LGBTQIA studies, and Southern studies in classrooms to date. For more information about the novel or to purchase it, see here.

Background

Like many aspiring novelists I have met in my life, I dreamed of writing the next great American novel around the same time I was finishing college a decade ago. The seeds for Homecoming Queens emerged in early failed attempts to do this back then, and in fact, the scene in the diner between four of the main characters near the end of the book comes from an experience between four people I witnessed – including being in the diner scene of real life I recreated in the novel – over a decade ago. Like many other writers across genres, I have my favorites, and the southern gothic traditions of the likes of Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, and William Faulkner have always spoken to me via the use of real world complexities, the ways the past shapes and becomes active in the present, and the fine lines between the darkest and brightest moments of love, pain, and life itself. Homecoming Queens began as an entire handwritten journal in 2007 wherein I sought to translate small town life in Georgia through the eyes of a brilliant, older African American neighbor I had who told me so many stories about the world at the time in what was, in hindsight, a poor attempt at writing like other southern gothic writers – especially Toni Morrison – I worshiped then and now without the skills to do it myself in my own voice at the time. It was a learning experience that got put in the background of so many other failed novel attempts in my life at the time.

Fast forward to the year 2016, and the completion of my first novel, Cigarettes & Wine, and I found myself thirsty for trying to write more novels without any clue if I could do that well or publish the first one. I was celebrating the legalization of my primary life partnership, and began asking about the idea of Homecoming Queens in conversations with my spouse and my best friend. For some reason I still can’t explain though I’m beginning to agree with now, neither of them had any questions or doubts about my ability to write more novels, and both thought I should try it out since I had just resurrected my first novel from an earlier failed attempt in college and was well enough situated in academic and public writing credits to have the time and space to commit some time to fictional endeavors without other parts of my career falling behind. This led to priceless patience on both of their parts as I talked and ran through scenarios and data I had for the next novel relentlessly on late night walks, phone conversations, and over lunches and dinners for a while. I was more than a little fixated and obsessed in hindsight, and I was lucky enough that they were okay with that and supportive of it at the same time.

I was also repeatedly listening to the newest album by one of my favorite – and in my opinion, one of the most talented ever – songwriters. The entire album, Brandy Clark’s Big Day in a Small Town, was about small town adventures and experiences with a mixture of humor and heart. I kept coming back to the song “Homecoming Queen” and the memory of the former homecoming queen friend who moved back to her small town with her two spouses, and things that happened to them, good, bad and in between, in the process. I also kept talking about this one story, and how it related to so many other stories from my own life and the lives of others I had spoken to in the south with my patient supporters. I also thought about what it would look like to illustrate my own primary romantic relationship structure in terms of how it worked, how our rules were set up for each of us to always get what we want together and individually, and how other mono, poly, and fluid (sometimes mono, sometimes poly) unions operated. Finally, I started thinking about both how many things from the past are prevalent in the nation today, and my experiences (on both sides of mentor / mentee relationships over time now) of the different ways trans and other queer kids find community, support, rejection, and / or struggle in the world as they try to be themselves. These were the threads that I would weave together to create the novel.

Data and Methods

I began crafting character profiles and a small town that could be any southern small town, and looking at all these things as homecomings of a sort that happen in between the various connections and disconnections we each experience throughout our lives. I followed the same process I do in many qualitative and quantitative studies and outlined in relation to Cigarettes & Wine in a previous blog post. The data points from real people’s lives and stories – and my own lives and stories to date – became the ingredients for the town, the characters, the conflicts, the tensions, and the narrative arcs of the story itself. Even more than in Cigarettes & Wine – or my independently published novel Essence – I crafted a tale that could be anyone or anywhere in the places I have seen, lived in, and visited in the south over the years, and created a story where, as friends have said about each of my books, I was both everywhere and nowhere in the book at the same time. As I’ve done in other works, maybe it’s the researcher inside me, I once again also only used events and experiences that had happened to a wide variety of people in different ways, at different times, and in different settings to capture an overall set of common – or as we say in scholarship, generic – experiences anyone could potentially relate to, experience, or know of in the lives of other people to demonstrate both possibilities and probabilities in the world.

Results

As I’ve noted with the first two novels in conversations individually, in classrooms or at conferences where I’ve been invited to talk about such things, or otherwise, I do not believe it is ever up to the writer to gauge the results of the composition. I feel the same way – as many people know from other speeches related to my academic, journalistic, public, and other writing – about everything I write. It is up to the audience to decide what the book means in terms of messages, merits, and ideas, and I leave it up to audiences to figure such things out. I know what I sought to do. I sought to, as always, offer a realistic portrait of some of the many ways – good, bad, and everywhere in between – queer life takes place in the south, thrives and continues in the face of support and opposition, and speaks to broader norms and patterns in cultural notions of sexualities, romance, gender, family, history, relationships, and lives. I don’t know or want to decide what others will think of the work, but I feel confident that I accomplished what I wanted to do with the book and early responses to it (both good and bad) have suggested as much.

Instead of trying to ascertain any concrete result or metric, when I think about Homecoming Queens as a now published work available for purchase by anyone, I think about the stories that have and continue to inspire me, that others have kindly shared with me so many times over the past couple decades, that resonate with me in cases of both similarity and difference, and that speak to a much wider, more complex, and more varied Queer existence then I can usually find in academic or mainstream media portraits and publications.

If those last couple of lines sound familiar, it is because they are copied directly from my thoughts on Cigarettes & Wine right as it was published, and you could continue down that set of paragraphs in that blog with Homecoming Queens as well because, for me, the goal is the same. For me, these stories I write – like any other research or art or writing that blurs (or Queers) such distinctions – is about the same thing, revealing the beauty, complexity, pleasure, pain, and wonder of Queer experience in its many forms, places, and continuations for as many of us and as many others as possible in ways people can relate to, think about, and consider as they navigate the complexity and possibility of the world in their own lives and their treatment of others they may encounter.

Roman Historians: Unreliable Narrators? Part 2 of 2

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Cheryl Morgan is a trans woman, a writer, publisher and broadcaster. She is co-chair of OutStories Bristol, an LGBT local history organisation. She has delivered papers on many aspects of trans history and trans characters in literature, and is a regular speaker at LGBT History Month events. She tweets from @CherylMorgan.

In Part 1 of this essay I looked at how historians, both Roman and modern, treat the suggestion that Emperor Elagabalus might have been a trans woman. In this section I will be focusing on another really interesting trans character from Rome. Sporus was a young person who, for one and a half years, was Nero’s wife and effectively Empress of Rome. Suetonius tells us (Suetonius Nero:28):

“He castrated the boy Sporus and actually tried to make a woman of him; and he married him with all the usual ceremonies, including a dowry and a bridal veil, took him to his house attended by a great throng, and treated him as his wife.”

Nero, in one of his periodic fits of rage, had viciously kicked his pregnant wife, Poppea. She had a miscarriage and died. Whether Nero intended to kill her or not is uncertain, and it is not clear whether he loved her, but he did miss having her around and he wanted to have her back. Sporus was the solution that his courtiers came up with, because of a physical resemblance to the dead Poppea.

To read Suetonius, and also Cassius Dio, tell the story, this is yet another of Nero’s depravities. Some poor lad is plucked from obscurity because of his resemblance to the dead empress, is forcibly castrated, and required to play the role of Nero’s wife.

Reading between the lines, however, Sporus appears to have taken to femininity like a duck to water. Nero named her Sabina, and I shall continue to use female pronouns for her because her actions, and her treatment by other Romans, demand them.

Here’s Cassius Dio (Dio 63:12):

Calvia had been entrusted with the care of the boy and with the oversight of the wardrobe, though a woman and of high rank;

And this (Dio 63:13):

“[Sporus], in addition to other forms of address, was termed “lady,” “queen,” and “mistress.”

Another contemporary historian, Dio Chrysostom, notes (Chrysostom 21:7)

“… that youth of Nero’s actually wore his hair parted, young women attended him whenever he went for a walk, he wore women’s clothes, and was forced to do everything else a woman does in the same way.”

Chysostom goes on to suggest that Nero, in anticipation of Elagabalus, offered a reward for anyone who could make Sabina fully female.

Because it was necessary to keep the senate happy, Nero married a noblewoman called Statilia Mesalina. The two don’t seem to have spent much time together, and knowing what happened to her predecessor she doubtless wanted to keep well clear of her husband. Nero and Sabina, in contrast, took themselves off to Greece, got married very publicly, and reportedly had a fabulous honeymoon together. Cassius Dio notes (Dio 63:13):

“All the Greeks held a celebration in honour of their marriage, uttering all the customary good wishes, even to the extent of praying that legitimate children might be born to them.”

When Nero’s behaviour finally became too much for the Romans and he had to flee for his life, Sabina was one of the few loyal courtiers to accompany him. Nero’s secretary, Epaphoroditus, was later executed for the crime of helping the emperor take his own life. One might have expected an eunuch to have just been quietly disposed of. Nothing of the sort happened.

Instead Sabina became a pawn in Rome’s dynastic struggles. This was the Year of the Four Emperors, and many more pretenders to the throne. One unsuccessful claimant was Nymphidius Sabinus who, according to Plutarch (Plutarch Galba:9), sought to solidify his claim by marrying Sabina. As it turned out, Galba took the throne, but Sabina survived.

Galba didn’t last long, and was succeeded by Otho. He too fell quickly, and Cassius Dio reports (Dio 64:8) that one of the causes of his unpopularity was, “his intimacy with Sporus.” It was not until the reign of the next emperor, Vitellius, that Sabina’s political career came unstuck (Dio 64:10). She took her own life rather than be forced to become an actress (and inevitably a sex worker). Any other noble Roman matron would have done the same.

What are we to make of all this? To a cisgender historian, cross-dressing men might seem all the same. To someone familiar with the trans community, however, differences are obvious. There is a critical difference between someone who cross-dresses occasionally, and someone who commits wholeheartedly to life as a woman.

Sabina’s actions do not appear to me to be those of someone who was being forced to play a role. Nor does she sound like what we would now call a gay or bi man[i], acting out femininity to attract male suitors. She might have been in it for the money, but how many men would do that just to get rich? Sabina went all-in on being a woman, and for two years did very well in difficult circumstances. Had she been assigned female at birth she might now be famed as a shrewd political operator.

But, of course, she was assigned male at birth, and modern historians therefore look no further than the surface story of a forcibly castrated boy. In his biography, Nero, Edward Champlin finds the whole story utterly incredible. He says (Champlin p146):

“Nero died within a year and a half of their marriage, but – astonishingly – Sporus was compelled to go on playing the role of Sabina.”

Compelled: that’s a loaded word right there, one he gets from taking the contemporary historians at face value. Champlin also can’t believe Sabina’s loyalty to Nero (Champlin p 147).

“Did he for his part grow to love the man who had castrated him, who forced him to dress and act like a woman, and who longed to transform him surgically from male to female, an operation which would undoubtedly have killed him? No one thought to record his feelings.”

There are a number of points to note here. Firstly, Champlin continues with the narrative that Sabina was an unwilling victim in all that occurred. After all, why would any man want to be made to play the role of a woman?

Secondly, there is the assumption that further surgery would have killed Sabina. This sort of statement tends to be made about ancient trans women by modern men who find the idea of having your genitals removed deeply disturbing. In fact, the Romans were very practiced at castration. Normally only the testicles were removed, and patients usually survived. For full castration, the survival rate was much lower, around 25%, but Sabina would have had the best surgeon and care available. It is only the construction of a vagina that the Romans didn’t know how to do.

And finally, Champlin says that no one thought to record Sabina’s feelings. Strangely, however, he is convinced that, at almost two millennia removed, he knows exactly how she must have felt. I have a rather different take on that.

The reason for Champlin’s attitude becomes very clear when he goes on to say (Champlin p149):

“When readers first encounter the story of Sporus, usually in the pages of Suetonius, they react with a mixture of emotions: shock, disgust, perhaps even horror, but inevitably, also, laughter – it is just too outrageous.”

It is pretty clear that the feelings of shock, disgust, horror and derision that Champlin reports are, in fact, his own. They are a product of his transphobic view of the world. To anyone who would have leapt at the opportunity to simply live as a woman, never mind becoming the wife of the emperor, the way you interpret the historical sources is very different.

What we have seen here are two opposite reactions to the ancient sources. Icks has elected to ignore suggestions of Elagabalus having a trans identity because he doesn’t think people really do that. Champlin, on the other hand, wants to point and laugh at Sabina because he finds trans women risible. On the one hand Icks chooses to dismiss his sources, and on the other, Champlin takes their disgust and doubles down on it.

If a narrator is unreliable, however, many interpretations are possible. All it takes to have a trans-positive reading is to believe that trans identities are real, and worthy of respect.

[i] The Romans had no concept of being gay or bi as we understand the terms. Powerful men were entirely comfortable slaking their lust on anyone they took a fancy to. Julius Caesar was celebrated by his troops as, “Every woman’s husband and every man’s wife.” A Roman wanting sex with men had no need to act overtly effeminate, and would be thought less of for doing so.

Roman Historians: Unreliable Narrators? Part 1 of 2

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Cheryl Morgan is a trans woman, a writer, publisher and broadcaster. She is co-chair of OutStories Bristol, an LGBT local history organisation. She has delivered papers on many aspects of trans history and trans characters in literature, and is a regular speaker at LGBT History Month events. She tweets from @CherylMorgan. In this two part entry, she examines Roman history through a trans inclusive lens presenting one case below and another in part two coming next week. 

The Roman period has a great deal of attraction for historians because we have so much written history. It was one of the more popular literary forms of the period. However, almost all of the history produced by Rome was written by well-to-do, middle-class men. That needs to be taken into account when evaluating what was written. Rome was a very patriarchal society. Indeed, words like patriarch and virile derive directly from Latin. Roman historians are therefore particularly unreliable when discussing matters of gender. How we, as modern historians, interpret what they wrote is critically important.

From a trans history point of view, one of the most important Roman figures is the boy emperor, Elagabalus, of whom it is said:

“He carried his lewdness to such a point that he asked the physicians to contrive a woman’s vagina in his body by means of an incision, promising them large sums for doing so.”

Was Elagabalus, therefore, an early trans woman, or is this simply a lie made up to discredit him?

Martijn Icks, author of the most recent biography of the emperor, The Crimes of Elagabalus[i], favours the latter explanation. The quote above comes from Cassius Dio (Dio 80:16), who was a contemporary writer. However, Dio’s work was not written during Elagabalus’s lifetime. It was, instead, written during the reign of Severus Alexander, a man who was probably responsible for ordering Elagabalus’s murder.

Icks argues that both Cassius Dio, and Herodian who wrote at the same time, would have been obliged to discredit Elagabalus in their work. Herodian makes no mention of the transgender story, whereas Cassius Dio goes all-in on the effeminacy theme, invoking the legendary Last King of Assyria, Sardanapalus.

The idea that people from the East were dissolute and effeminate was very popular in Rome. The fall of the Assyrian empire was put down to the degeneracy of its last monarch. This story was believed true at least as far as 1821 when Lord Byron published a play about Sardanapalus, and 1827 when Delacroix used the king as the subject for an oil painting. Thanks to modern archaeology we now know that the whole story was a nasty piece of Greek propaganda, and that Sardanapalus never existed, but the proudly virile Romans doubtless lapped it up.

Icks, then, concludes that Cassius Dio is using the fact that Elagabalus was born in Emessa – modern day Homs in Syria – to tar him with the suspicion of effeminacy. The whole transgender thing is just gossip. How could such a story be true?

What Icks doesn’t consider is that the East really wasn’t as misogynistic as Rome. It was home to the cult of Cybele and her castrated trans-feminine followers, the Galli. Many other similar cults existed, and there are suggestions that the practice can be traced all the way back to the worship of Inanna in Sumer.

In Emessa the equivalent goddess was Atargatis. Elagabalus was known for his devotion to the gods of his childhood home. As emperor he was known as Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus. The name Elagabalus was given to him after his death because of his fondness for the Syrian god, Elagabal. The idea of a man being transformed into a woman would have been more familiar and acceptable to Elagabalus than to most Romans.

So is Icks perhaps too suspicious of his source? It is impossible to say. What I can say is that, as a trans woman myself, I am rather more likely to believe that Elagabalus was questioning his (her?) gender. Icks, who is presumably a cisgender man, might be too willing to dismiss such a possibility.

While historians these days might be inclined to dismiss the lurid stories about Elagabalus as mere gossip intended to discredit, much less leeway is granted to Nero. He may not have done all of the terrible things attributed to him, but he was certainly a very strange man. Members of his court, understandably, get tarred by association. This, inevitably, allows historians from both Roman and modern times to vent their disgust of anyone who transgresses gender norms, as we shall see in Part 2.

[i] The title of the book comes from a line in the Major General’s song in The Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert & Sullivan

Building the Literature on Aging Partners Managing Chronic Illness Together

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In this post, Xan and J announce an upcoming and rolling special issue of Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine focused on managing illness in relationships over the life course, and invite scholars interested in health, aging, relationships of all times, caregiving, and chronic conditions to consider submitting works for this issue and emerging area of research in social, physical, and medical sciences. 

Hello readers!

Xan and J here with a teaser for our newest project. In our home communities of Orlando and Tampa, we’ve been spending some time recovering from Hurricane Irma and helping our fellow Floridians do the same, as well as supporting friends in Texas and Puerto Rico in their own recovery efforts. As things calm down more here in central Florida, we’re pleased to roll out our latest effort to amplify voices from lived experience in research.

Earlier this year, we pitched a special collection proposal to Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine. We suggested a content collection focusing on “Aging Partners Managing Chronic Illness Together”. The collection would highlight opportunities for inquiry, evidence-based perspectives, case studies, and new primary research on collaborative illness management among older intimate partners.

Right now there is very little literature on this topic—most published research on caregiving in intimate relationships uses a “sick partner/well partner” model. But our own lived experiences as well as what we have both seen in our work suggested that many people are living a very different reality! We also found no literature whatsoever in conducting our own preliminary review on collaborative illness management that delves deeply into the experiences of marginalized older adults and relationships between people occupying varied genders, sexualities, and relationship types. We very much want to change that!

Our introductory editorial for the content collection at GGM will be up soon (we’ll share on the blog and social media sites when it is), meaning we are ready to accept original submissions from other scholars doing work on this important topic. Unlike traditional “special issues”, this content collection will remain open indefinitely for new submissions. We intend to use the Aging Partners Managing Chronic Illness Together collection as a springboard for both highlighting inspiring innovative research on older adult health that champions people’s unique lives, biographies, and needs.

If your research includes a focus on chronic disease management, older adults, and intimate relationships, we hope that we’ll be able to showcase some of your work in our special collection in the future!