Reviews
The Care We Dream Of: Liberatory and Transformative Approaches to LGBTQ+ Health, by Zena Sharman
atypewritersings1969's review
4.0
This anthology vacillated from enthralling to confounding. I greatly enjoyed the essays by practitioners working at the intersections of healthcare and migrant justice, disability justice, intersex justice, fat liberation, and trans liberation. I enjoyed hearing their first-person perspectives on what it would take to actually have healthcare that is liberatory and leaves no one behind.
What detracted from this anthology was the sheer number of Sharman's essays throughout the entire volume. It's one thing for an editor to write the introduction and an essay of their own. It's another thing for an editor to have 6 essays in an anthology they're editing. It lacks hubris, and quite frankly the subjects Sharman's essays cover could have been written by literally anyone else. It's almost contradictory to name how discussions of LGBTQ healthcare are dominated by cis white people of certain class privileges, and then be an editor of relatively the same composition that then occupies so much discursive space in an anthology. All six of Sharman's essays make reference to various scholars and activists who inform her thinking. Any one of those people could have written a contributing essay to take the place of one of Sharman's extra essays.
If other multiply marginalized people didn't want to submit essays to her anthology, maybe that says something about the potential reluctance of people to trust a cis white woman who is perpetually trying to drive more radical conversations on LGBTQ healthcare while centering her own voice.
Moreover, one that that stood out to me as missing was a perspective on madness and healthcare. I know Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's was supposed to be the de-facto "crip/mad" essay. But, for lack of a better term, it's just getting lazy at this point for editors to continually default to them, to the exclusion of other voices who have something to say about disability justice and/or madness. There is a whole world of mad studies thinkers, and a whole world of mad movements where LGBTQ are holding it down. Include their voices alongside Leah's. There's more than enough room.
I was also surprised to see things like asexuality mentioned in Sharman's essay, but never actually given the scope of articulating what asexual justice or asexual affirming healthcare could look like via an essay by an asexual person. I'm not asexual, but I want to understand what it's like to navigate a healthcare system where sexual normativity is pervasive.
I know the common excuse for anthology editing is that "everything can't be included", but it sure can't when the editor takes up 6 essays worth of space for themselves.
If Sharman really feels the need to write 6 essays in an anthology, she should just write a stand-alone book that doesn't solicit other submissions. That would be more intellectually honest than the organization of this anthology.
What detracted from this anthology was the sheer number of Sharman's essays throughout the entire volume. It's one thing for an editor to write the introduction and an essay of their own. It's another thing for an editor to have 6 essays in an anthology they're editing. It lacks hubris, and quite frankly the subjects Sharman's essays cover could have been written by literally anyone else. It's almost contradictory to name how discussions of LGBTQ healthcare are dominated by cis white people of certain class privileges, and then be an editor of relatively the same composition that then occupies so much discursive space in an anthology. All six of Sharman's essays make reference to various scholars and activists who inform her thinking. Any one of those people could have written a contributing essay to take the place of one of Sharman's extra essays.
If other multiply marginalized people didn't want to submit essays to her anthology, maybe that says something about the potential reluctance of people to trust a cis white woman who is perpetually trying to drive more radical conversations on LGBTQ healthcare while centering her own voice.
Moreover, one that that stood out to me as missing was a perspective on madness and healthcare. I know Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's was supposed to be the de-facto "crip/mad" essay. But, for lack of a better term, it's just getting lazy at this point for editors to continually default to them, to the exclusion of other voices who have something to say about disability justice and/or madness. There is a whole world of mad studies thinkers, and a whole world of mad movements where LGBTQ are holding it down. Include their voices alongside Leah's. There's more than enough room.
I was also surprised to see things like asexuality mentioned in Sharman's essay, but never actually given the scope of articulating what asexual justice or asexual affirming healthcare could look like via an essay by an asexual person. I'm not asexual, but I want to understand what it's like to navigate a healthcare system where sexual normativity is pervasive.
I know the common excuse for anthology editing is that "everything can't be included", but it sure can't when the editor takes up 6 essays worth of space for themselves.
If Sharman really feels the need to write 6 essays in an anthology, she should just write a stand-alone book that doesn't solicit other submissions. That would be more intellectually honest than the organization of this anthology.
squid_ears's review
I will most likely return to this book as a reference, reading the sections out of order based on what I'm looking into at the time.
gummistovlar's review
5.0
This was such a beautiful and transformative book. I truly did not anticipate how seen & held I would feel by it, and how much it would account for feelings that I have had but never been able to put into words.
It took me almost a year to read because when I started, I had recently become disabled by Long COVID and the ideas here of embodied, community based, queer focused care were so far from my everyday lived experience at that time that they were too raw to touch.
Even now, while this book is a wonderful celebration of possibility, it is also a painful reminder of how the pandemic has severed me from queer community, and the kind of care that I desperately need, and my friends desperately want to offer.
I already know I will revisit this so many times - for encouragement, for comfort, for fire and rage. For all of it.
It took me almost a year to read because when I started, I had recently become disabled by Long COVID and the ideas here of embodied, community based, queer focused care were so far from my everyday lived experience at that time that they were too raw to touch.
Even now, while this book is a wonderful celebration of possibility, it is also a painful reminder of how the pandemic has severed me from queer community, and the kind of care that I desperately need, and my friends desperately want to offer.
I already know I will revisit this so many times - for encouragement, for comfort, for fire and rage. For all of it.
sarahbuckley's review
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
5.0
this book was beautiful. It gave me so many new things to think about and showed so many different perspectives on what affirmative health care can look like.
solenodon's review
challenging
hopeful
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Medical content, Medical trauma, and Death