This guidebook is part of the International Institute for Environment and Development’s

(IIED’s) project ‘What does queer have to do with it? Making space for LGBTQI+ contributions
to sustainable development and climate action’ and with additional support from IIED’s
Gender Justice Network. IIED is a policy and action research organisation. We promote
sustainable development, linking local priorities to global challenges.

For more information, visit www.iied.org/what-does-queer-have-do-it

Text by Tucker Landesman

Illustrated by Jules Scheele (julesscheele.com)

Production team: Morgan Jennings, May Thazin Aung, Jodie Frosdick, Anna Carthy and
Anna Walnycki.

ISBN: 978-1-83759-089-6

IIED publications may be shared and republished in accordance with the Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License
(CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Get more information via www.iied.org/about-publications
What’s all this? A creative writing workbook to explore gender and sexuality in the
sustainable development sector. You’ll find over 20 prompts and exercises using different
creative writing techniques to probe the under-explored dimensions of gender and sexuality
in our working life.

Who’s it for? Anyone working, advocating, or agitating in the sustainable development

sector who wants to do some deep thinking and creative writing about how their gender
identity and expression and their sexuality shapes their working life. The writing prompts
were especially (but not exclusively) designed to centre and celebrate the queer experience,
those who identify as LGBTQI+ and queer-feminist allies.

Why creative writing? Creative writing is both imaginative and analytical, allowing the
author to bring inspiration and experimentation to ‘normal’ research outputs or break the
bounds of traditional programme language and formats. Doing so can create opportunities
to embrace complexity and the messiness of overlapping experience and intersecting
identities.

How does it work? Explore this guidebook at your own pace and see our tips below. There
are over 20 structured exercises and writing prompts. Some of the later prompts build
on the earlier prompts; but there are no rules about completing them in order. Many of
the exercises draw from established themes in queer and intersectional feminist debates,
briefly summarised or referenced for a general audience.

When and where? Today! Yesterday! Tomorrow! Each prompt is completable within
30–45 minutes. You can write directly in this book (there are additional blank pages in the
back) or use your own notebook.

Our tips:

• Develop a writing practice: carve out 30–60 minutes every week (or every day!) for
creative writing. Make it a ritual with a nice cup of tea, silencing your phone, closing
your inbox and starting with a few calming breaths. If possible, block this time in
your calendar and feel good saying ‘no’ to meeting requests.
• Start with a free write (see the first prompt). This can help jumpstart your creative
thinking and just get words on the page. You can always come back to the practice
of free-writing and see where it takes you.
• Find a comrade or small group of colleagues to form a ‘writing club’. Encourage each
other to write regularly, discuss or even share your writing with each other on a
weekly or monthly basis.
• Use a dedicated notebook if you aren’t writing directly in these pages.
Self-care and boundaries

This guidebook is meant to facilitate individual explorations of gender and sexuality in our
working lives. We aren’t dealing in the abstract or ‘target audiences’ here. None of the
exercises or writing prompts are designed to trigger childhood trauma or encourage you
to dwell on especially painful or dark experiences; but we know that gender and sexuality
can be sensitive and uncomfortable. Many people interested in this work might belong to a
group that disproportionately experiences violence and discrimination — women, LGBTQI+
and gender and sexual minorities, people of colour, migrants and people with disabilities.
Please practice self-care; set and respect your own boundaries while using this guidebook.
And reach out to someone you know and trust for support if you need it.

If you find yourself in a mental health crisis you can visit https://findahelpline.com and
search for resources in your country.
We encourage you to do a short free write before you begin any of the following exercises.
You can find blank pages at the back of this book if you are writing directly in the guidebook.

Before you begin...

Take some time to do whatever you need to settle in and write: maybe you close your email,
switch off your internet, take a couple deep breaths, stretch or put some nice music on. It’s
your time. It’s your process.

Set a timer for five minutes and write whatever is at the front of your mind. There are no
rules. If you don’t know what to write, start by describing what you ate for breakfast or
continue the phrase:

Today I woke up and felt...

After the free write, we get into the content. Each creative writing exercise starts with a bit
of context, usually drawing from queer or feminist theory or practice to explore gender and
sexuality. The writing prompts vary in structure and try to mix different kinds of creative
writing.

As a reminder, do what works for you. If today you’d rather continue your free write, that’s
fine. If you feel the burning need to respond to each writing prompt with a limerick or a
graphic story, awesome! Just don’t write a five-paragraph essay.

Let’s go...
One of the biggest myths about both gender and sexuality is that our behaviour and
identities are inherent and fixed throughout our lives. We know this isn’t true based on
our own experiences as well as decades of social science documenting gender and sexual
fluidity over time and between cultures. The behaviours and desires we hold as pivotal to
our authentic self-expression change over time and are shaped by social context.

In our first creative writing exercise, you’re invited to do a bit of stocktaking in terms of
considering your gender and sexuality over the years. We ask you to consider gender and
sexuality together, without getting bogged down in definitions or concepts as defined by
academic literature. Rely on your own experiences and understandings.

The first prompt is a timeline of your personal journey with gender and sexuality. Many
LGBTQI+ people spend a lot of time remembering sexual development during childhood
and adolescence. A good number of us spend considerable amounts of time and money
on therapy doing the same! Some of us might remember when we first realised we were
a girl, Black or Jewish (to use a few examples of other groups) and how this made us feel
different, or how others have treated us differently.

Thinking about the early development of gender and sexuality can be an enriching (and
triggering) process, but that’s not what we are focusing on here. Rather, we invite you to
start the timeline from when you began your career, or during or towards the end of your
schooling. This doesn’t mean you should ignore everything that happened before then. But
our emphasis is on our adult lives, and we want to draw attention to our experiences at work.

We prefer to use a pen and paper for this exercise, but you can also find free software
online to make a timeline. For example: www.adobe.com/express/create/timeline/express
Draw a line and start to mark it up with dates or periods of times that you can associate
with an aspect of your gender or sexuality. This is an exercise you might come back to over
the course of a couple days or weeks and add to. You can put anything you want on your
timeline, including:

• The dates when you completed a degree, started a job or worked on an important
project
• How you used to dress or wear your hair and makeup
• Romantic or sexual events that affected your professional life
• A specific piece of work dealing with gender or sexuality
• When you came out as LGBTQI+, polyamorous or HIV positive to colleagues (multiple
times, maybe, in multiple workplaces)
• Moments or periods of time you felt safe, proud and supported
• When you experienced specific micro-aggressions or felt lonely, unwelcome or unsafe
• When you realised there was a gender pay gap at your workplace
• When you took parental leave
• When you felt like you could celebrate or fully express yourself
• Experiences during fieldwork that felt particularly important because of your
gender or sexuality
• Anything else you think of...

Don’t feel pressure to ‘finish’ this prompt. This is an exercise that does not have a clear end:
it’s likely you might continue to come back to this timeline in the coming weeks. Take as much
or as little time as you need for now.
Did you have a hard time filling your timeline or is it crowded with events and observations?
Have you noticed any patterns? Has your experience of gender/sexuality changed over the
course of your professional timeline? And if yes, how so? Take a few moments to reflect and
jot down any thoughts. You might want to elaborate on a few events that seem particularly
important. Pick a couple and flesh out some of the details, memories and associated
emotions. Maybe an event caused you to stop dressing a certain way or to change the way
you speak. Maybe you became more of an advocate for LGBTQI+ rights or decided to keep
your head down.
The gender binary is pervasive. It relies on a linear understanding of two opposite (and in
many ways opposing) genders: woman/man, based on the following logic:

Generally, the above logic assumes that [masculine] men are attracted to [feminine] women
and vice versa. In some geographic and social contexts, same-sex attraction is an accepted
exception to the rule. The gender binary structures sexual orientation as an opposing
dualism as well: gay or straight.

The gender/sex binary assumes that these identities are inherent, fixed and permanent
throughout a person’s life.

This linear and binary understanding of sex, gender and desire isn’t universal. Plenty of
cultures celebrate gender fluidity and have (or had) recognised gender categories outside
of the man-woman binary. However, western colonial governments introduced penal codes,
religious teachings and cultural institutions that aggressively and violently enforced the
gender binary and compulsory heterosexuality. This colonial history has a legacy stretching
into the present.

We’re here to explore gender in our professional lives, so let’s personalise this a bit...
Think of a professional work scenario — a space and time where there are dynamic social
interactions. It could be in your workplace, or in a space where you engage with experts
and decision makers in your field (like a big conference). It could also be related to a social
movement, community-based organisation or a place you visited for your work.

Take a couple minutes to describe the above scenario in a few sentences or short paragraphs.
This is to activate your memory and freshen the details of the scene. Where was it? Who
else was there? What sorts of activities were you a part of? How did you feel being there?
If helpful, set a timer for five minutes and just start writing whatever comes to mind first.
You can write in full sentences, use bullet points, draw a mind map or sketch a picture.

Describe the scenario briefly here…

Gender norms can differ greatly between cultures as well as between different social
spaces within them and we sometimes discover this through work. For example, those of
us working or advocating across international sustainable development sectors will often
find ourselves in countries with different cultures and languages, working with diverse
sets of people: in settings such as super-formal government offices, social movements and
grassroots NGOs, cosmopolitan conferences and rural agricultural communities. Many of
us are migrants already living and working in a foreign culture.
Take the scenario you described above and consider the gender norms typical of that
social space. Think about what characteristics, roles, patterns and behaviours are typically
considered masculine and feminine in that context and note them in the table below.

Don’t get bogged down. This is a brainstorming exercise of approximately 10 minutes. If you
have trouble getting started, zoom out from your professional life and start more generally.
Think about how women and men are presented in popular media (movies, TV or social
media) and politics.

Take a moment to reflect on the table above. Do you fit neatly into one of the columns? Do
you fit imperfectly, but more one column than the other? Are certain traits more obvious
and clear-cut than others? Are some nuanced and subtle? How about your colleagues,
partners and project participants?
If you find you’re feeling frustrated or upset at the end of the last exercise on the gender
binary, you’re not alone! Binaries are reductive, exclusionary and oppressive. Indeed, the
gender binary makes most people (whether transgender, gender-nonconforming, queer or
cisgender) feel uncomfortable either much or some of the time. Take a moment to breathe!
Feel free to use the space below for some break-the-binary cathartic expression. Some
examples of this include:
• Draw a picture of you smashing hegemonic gender roles
• Take a few different coloured pencils or markers and playfully scribble lines curving
and intersecting in every which way
• Describe in a few words what it feels like when you express yourself freely and
without fear of being gender scolded.
Gender is intersectional. Norms about appropriate gendered behaviour vary according
to geographic region, religion and socioeconomic class. Our experiences of gender and
our gendered social relations also depend on race, age, body shape and size, (dis)ability,
immigration status and sexuality.
Now take 15–20 minutes for a guided free write. Below are a series of questions you can
choose to use as prompts, or you can just start writing and see where you end up.

Pick one or more of the identities that intersect with our experience of gender — for example,
race, age, religion, sexuality, socioeconomic class or disability — and reflect on what it means
in your professional life and/or research activities.
Create a mind map of your identities — as many as you can think of. Include the ‘big identities’
we talk about in queer feminist discussion, international development and social justice work:
age, sex, gender, sexuality, race, religion, class and (dis)ability... And be sure to include other
identities that are important to you. Maybe you’re left-handed. Perhaps you’re HIV positive.
You could be a Swiftie, captain of a softball team, BeyHive influencer, opera lover, gardener,
stamp collector, Drag Race fan, techno-loving raver or sex worker... Map these out on a blank
piece of paper. When you’ve populated the page, start drawing connecting lines between
some of the identities you’ve listed, based on your own experience and understanding. How
do they relate to each other?

Some senior managers and human resource leaders talk about an “inclusive and diverse”
work culture as a space where you can bring your whole self to work. But this can be
truer for some than for others. Consider your mapped identities. Which are the ones you
showcase at work? Are there any identities that rarely come up in your professional life?
Do you protect some parts of yourself as private at work? Consider if any of the ‘private
parts’ of your identity are connected to some of those ‘big identities’ that are often targeted
and marginalised.
Heteronormativity is a key factor in the erasure of gender and sexual minorities from
development and humanitarian programmes. Hetero-professionalism — heteronormativity
in the workplace and professional culture — results in the exclusion of LGBTQI+ workers
from government agencies, along with the international and civil society organisations that
grant and receive international aid and development research funding.

The concept and practice of being queer is often thought of as anti-normative and to be
subverting socio-cultural assumptions based on a person’s perceived gender and sex.

This creative writing exercise encourages you to reflect on how various forms of sexual
normativity show up in your work and research, how you bump up against or subvert
expectations concerning gender and sexuality, or how you struggle for queer visibility. Your
experiences might be subtle or explicit; you can also reflect on how your work reproduces
heteronormativity. Sometimes we end up conforming by simply ‘following the norm’ to
protect ourselves from stigma. Remember, your reflective journal is a judgement-free space!

There are other forms of sexual normativity that we should consider, especially when moving
beyond the gender binary, accounting for the lived experience of sexuality and considering
non-western understandings of sexual behaviour and identity. Sexual Configurations
Theory is a recent advancement in sexuality studies that embraces the messy nuances of
identity (labels associated with community and politics), orientation (attraction, desire and
sexual interests) and status (behaviors and activities). What’s important about this work is
that it theorises a universal understanding of sexuality based on people’s lived experiences
from the [queer] margins. We won’t go into the ins and outs of Sexual Configurations Theory
here, but you can read more about it in this very helpful zine if you’re interested:
We invite you to reflect on how you navigate normative expectations of sexuality in your work
and to explore how your workplace — or your field in general — reproduces various forms of
sexual normativity. We will use the ‘wheel of normativity,’ which was created by Alex Iantaff
and Meg-John Barker, based on Sara van Anders’ work on sexual configurations, and is
illustrated here by Jules Scheele. There is a glossary of terms included.

Take some time and consider the wheel of normativity. Focus on the concepts that
immediately jump out to you as relatable, based on your experience and work. It might be
useful to refer to your gender and sexuality timeline from the previous prompt.
Using the method of self-reflective journaling, write about how you have experienced
sexual normativity in your professional life and/or how you’ve seen it reproduced in
sustainable development research or programming. You may find other forms of creative
writing helpful as well, such as a short poem, mind map or annotated doodle. Go with it. You
can refer to the glossary below, if helpful.

Glossary

Heteronormativity is based on the assumption that people are sexually and romantically
attracted to people of the ‘opposite’ sex/gender (binary thinking) and that all forms of
sexuality and sexual activity should follow stereotypical heterosexual scripts.

Homonormativity refers to i) when LGBTQI+ people reproduce and strive to live up to

cis-heteronormative expectations; and/or ii) assumptions that people with same-sex desires
should follow stereotypical scripts of gay and lesbian intimacy.

Cisnormativity holds that gender is inherent from birth, and that individuals should maintain
that gender identity and expression throughout their lives.

Hetero-professionalism relates to heteronormativity in workplace culture, such as the

making of policies, rules and professional expectations based on the traditional heterosexual
lifestyle family configuration. This results in discriminatory behaviour and policies that work
to exclude or erase LGBTQI+ people and any others who fail to live up to heteronormative
expectations.

Shame normativity occurs when sexual activity is expected to be hidden or repressed

because it is viewed as embarrassing or shameful, especially when it contradicts traditional
social norms.

Fixedness normativity refers to the belief that sexualities are or should remain constant
rather than fluid.

Mononormativity is the assumption that people should have one, and only one, partner for
sexual and emotional needs.

Alignment normativity is the expectation that one’s sexual interests/desires and emotional
needs coincide and match one’s sexual and gender identities (for example, a lesbian woman
only sexually desires other women and has her romantic/emotional needs met by her sexual
partner/s).

Sexual normativity holds that people should be and are allosexual: sexually attracted to
other people and wanting sexual connections with them.
If you have the time and interest, write an imaginary dialogue. Imagine that a project,
initiative or institution were a sentient being who could talk to someone on the outer
circle of the wheel of normativity. For example, the dialogue could be between you and an
international project or initiative that excludes LGBTQI+ people, or it could be between a
research participant (imagined or real) and a researcher who has gone to great lengths to
be supportive of gender justice and inclusive of queer people. (Try not to overthink this.)
Women and feminist scholars reclaimed the body as a theme of academic inquiry in the
latter half of the twentieth century. Black feminists and critical race theory importantly
named our bodies as sites of intersectional experience. More recently, disabilities studies,
migration studies, trans studies and queer studies have also theorised embodied knowledge
and experience as critical to our understanding of how power and inequalities operate in
everyday life.

Embodiment is a hard-to-define concept in social sciences that discusses how material,

social and psychological processes and relations are expressed and experienced through
the body.

Well before social scientists started talking about ‘embodiment’, the body was and still is
a fundamental subject of art. It feels overly obvious to point out how bodies are painted,
sculpted, photographed and choreographed, or how breakdancers, opera singers, drag
queens, trapeze artists and mime artists rely on their bodies as the primary instrument of
artistic practice and performance.

For example, on the periphery of international development studies, some scholars have
considered the embodied experiences of development workers and volunteers, especially
to consider how complex gendered and global power dynamics play out at the interpersonal
and everyday institutional scale.

This exercise on embodied creative writing borrows from a workshop led by hugo x tibiriçá, a
queer interdisciplinary artist. It starts with some speed writing: set a timer for five minutes
and write ten complete sentences that start with the phrase...

My body is...

Each sentence should be on a new line.

After you have written ten sentences, read through them. Which ones resonate most with
you? Which ones fall flat? Cross out three sentences you don’t like: your least favourite.

Consider the seven sentences remaining. Underline the three you like most.

Choose one of those three sentences and work on it. Rewrite it. Maybe combine it with
another.

You can work on your chosen sentence until you are happy with it. Read it aloud. Take note
of what and where you feel in your body. Breathe into that space.
Take the final sentence you worked on in the previous prompt and see where it takes you.
Expand that sentence to a paragraph or two. Or perhaps it’s a drawing, rather than a
paragraph. Or maybe it leads to a ‘prose poem’. It’s up to you.
Next time you are at a work event that falls outside your day-to-day routine , such as a
conference, big meeting or training, take some time to move about the space. Have a stroll.
Be conscious of the environment and your body in it. What are your shoulders doing? Your
arms? How quickly or slowly do you move through space? Do your hips sway? Are your
wrists firm? Is there a bounce in your step? A limp? A sway? Notice the other bodies in the
space. (Be careful not to stare or glare and make your colleagues feel uncomfortable!) After
some time, come back and write about your observations.

Where did you see and feel gender?

A note before you begin: this exercise might take longer than the normal 45 minutes or so.
Consider breaking it up into two sessions or come back to it when your schedule allows.

Poetry can be a form of writing to express feelings, thoughts and experiences that otherwise
don’t ‘fit’ in more traditional forms of writing. Because poetry and verse operate with very
different standards from academic and professional prose, it’s easier to break the rules
that confine our thinking or ignore our feelings. The form is better at holding contradictions,
connecting with readers at an emotional level rather than convincing a ‘target audience’
through well-reasoned arguments and data.

Audrey Lorde famously wrote that “Poetry

is not a luxury” but rather a “vital necessity”
and “the revelation or distillation of
experience” of black women.

In addition to expressing the lived

experiences of activists and scholars,
poetry has been used in medical and social
sciences to generate, analyse and present
data. A method called poetic inquiry has
been used in natural resource management,
for example, to disrupt hierarchies and
centre the lived experience of research
participants. This can add new dimensions
of reflexivity and open new pathways to
engaging with stakeholders.

The poetic inquirer Monica Prendergast identified five general objectives (or “poetic voices”)
that researchers have used poetry to achieve:

• To explore self, writing and poetry as methods (poetic voice)

• To investigate inequalities and social justice (justice voice)
• To consider self and/or other aspects of participants’ identities, such as gender,
race and sexual orientation (identity voice)
• To examine patients’ and/or caregivers’ experiences of care and nursing (care voice)
• To study parenting, family and/or religion (procreator voice).
Poetry isn’t for everyone, and it can feel like a daunting task for lots of people. To ease
you into it, we are offering a few different exercises for poets of all levels of experience
(including none!).

We invite you to craft a ‘found poem’ selected from a piece of writing or interview transcript:

1. Select a piece of writing that speaks to some dimension of gender or sexuality. It can be a
research paper (or part of a paper), a blog entry, a news story or a report. It can be published
or a draft, and it doesn’t need to be a piece that you have authored yourself. Alternatively,
you may choose to work with an interview transcript for a relevant piece of research you
completed or have access to.

You might find it helpful to print out the piece of writing so you can mark it up by hand.

2. Select a relatively short section (500–1,000 words to begin with). This should be packed
with information and descriptions, with references to thoughts, feelings, opinions and
maybe even some controversy.

3. Read the text again, this time highlighting any powerful language, words or phrases that
spark your imagination, reveal powerful experiences, hint at a compelling story or speak to
emotional truths. Lift those words, phrases or sentences from the text and write them on a
piece of paper or insert them into a new document. Consider why you chose them. Begin to
rearrange them into lines and stanzas. Don’t worry about the technical ‘quality’ of the poem
and focus on the content and feeling.

Try to craft at least a few lines or stanzas that communicate a key theme of the piece
you chose.

You’re done whenever you want to be.

Continuing our exploration with poetic inquiry, this exercise is similar to the previous one in
that you start with a text written in prose. But this time, it’s more personal: you choose one
of the reflective journaling exercises you’ve done as part of this guidebook. For example,
this could be your entry on the gender binary, the one you wrote in consideration of sexual
normativities or any of the free writes. If you don’t like anything you’ve written before, skip
ahead a couple pages and pick a prompt from the list of free writes and spend 10–15 minutes
journaling. Don’t shy away from writing about your feelings and emotions. Be descriptive
and feel free to use as many metaphors and similes as you like.

After you’ve selected the writing piece or written something new, sit with it a bit. Underline
or highlight the parts that you like best, and take note of where you describe your feelings
and how. Maybe certain phrases or clauses sound more ‘poetic’ than others. Take all these
bits and put them into a new document. Begin to rearrange them into lines and stanzas.
Don’t worry about the technical ‘quality’ of the poem and focus on the content and feeling.

Try to craft at least a few lines or stanzas that communicate a key theme that came up for
you in the reflective journaling.

You’re done whenever you want to be.

This is a cut-out exercise of DIY ‘magnetic poetry’.

Find an easy-to-cut list of words to cut out at the back of this workbook.
Prompt: how does the gender binary play out in your work? Tell a story that happened
to you or that you witnessed. Alternatively, start by brainstorming a list of ways that the
gender binary plays out in the professional spaces you inhabit and then expand on one or
two that stand out to you.
Prompt: describe a time when you became aware that your gender behaviour or experience
fell outside of the strict gender binary. How did you feel? What did you do?
Prompt: what do you think about your voice? Does it change at work?
Prompt: when was the last time you were acutely aware of your own gender or sexuality at
work or when conducting research or some professional activity?
Prompt: complete the following phrases:

I witness exclusion when...

I experience exclusion when...

I challenge exclusion when...

Prompt: write a letter to your younger professional self and talk about what you’ve learned
through existing in the world and the workplace in your body and with your identities.
Prompt: draw and/or describe a queer-feminist superhero fighting inequality, climate
change and poverty all over the world.
Prompt: look at any photos of yourself you use on social media or professional websites
(such as LinkedIn, Twitter, your NGO website or your personal homepage). Describe and
‘read’ them through the lens of gender and sexuality.
If you liked this guidebook and want to read more, here is an incomplete list of resources we
love and encourage you to check out:

For a deep dive into gender that is accessible,

funny and transformative, see My Gender
Workbook by the legendary Kate Bornstein
(1998), published by Routledge. ADDENDUM:
Gasp! We just found out there is an updated
version: My New Gender Workbook: A
step-by-step guide to achieving world peace
through gender anarchy and sex positivity,
also published by Routledge (2013).

We love pretty much anything by MJ Barker

and friends, including books, blogs and zines
(plenty of free downloads):
www.rewriting-the-rules.com

For the creative and arts-based researchers

out there: you might enjoy the book Creative
Writing for Social Research: a practical guide,
by Richard Phillips and Helen Kara (2021),
published by Policy Press.
Here are some topical zines from the sustainable development and humanitarian sector:

Climate Zine: Feminist Journeys (Oxfam)

www.oxfam.org/en/take-action/campaigns/climate/climate-zine-feminist-journeys

Climate Change is an LGBTQ Issue, by Madison Humphrey:

https://nmu.edu/gender/sites/gender/files/2021-01/Humphrey-GC.GN495-Zine.pdf

“Struggling for Equality” by The Inclusivity Collective:

https://protect-eu.mimecast.com/s/xrk2Ck8vMCOM3YzixCAaY?domain=uct.ac.za

For a wide range of queer zines from the UK, check out: www.queerzinelibrary.com
Join this experiment to use creative writing to explore the margins of traditional research
and professional activities. We will use different creative writing techniques to probe the
under-explored dimensions of gender and sexuality in our research fields and working life. A
queer-feminist approach to creative writing is aligned with gender and sexual liberation. We
embrace ‘queer’ for its queerness — its searching questions seeking to unsettle dichotomies
and insistence on time, space and attention for sex and subversion — for its playfulness,
fuzziness, and unpolished politics and practices. We will follow feminist traditions of
understanding the personal as political, examining how our identities influence our
analyses and shape our relationships to research and practice, writing in the first person,
insisting that our lived experience is valid, and embracing the objective of using our work to
challenge patriarchal domination and other forms of oppression based on race, class, sexual
orientation, ability and place of origin.