Samantha Macrae
LGBTQ students’ support staff
Healing won’t look like spending money and thinking positive. It won’t be an individual task. We heal through communities of care. This requires a commitment to trust and care, a path to resili-ence. Building that resilient network will allow communities to address harm and take steps to-ward ending oppression. We all benefit.
“Radical self-love demands that we see ourselves and others in the fullness of our complexities and intersections and that we work to create space for those intersections.”
Sonya Renee Taylor’s “The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self Love” explores the ways we can work toward a model of care. A model that centers ourselves and our commu-nities and challenges systems intended to harm and isolate. It demands that we ditch narratives of self care and body acceptance.
Too often body positivity gets co-opted and uncontested by colonialism to consumer culture’s benefit. Instead, where we can get critical of dominant well-ness speak, we can make way for a model of radical self love.
George Brown is a microcosm of our society, we represent a multitude of worldviews. Within this institution disabled, racialized, poor, queer, trans, international, mature and indigenous stu-dents try to navigate a system not designed for their success.
In and outside the classroom George Brown students can feel forced to accept the ways others classify our bodies. And these classifications determine our positions in the world; they deter-mine which systems will harm and which will help us. Where we aren’t easily classified we are dismissed and erased. The survival of ourselves and our communities is determined by how fre-quently we are classified as worthy or useful.
Care work looks like putting an end to methods of confining bodies within lives that are unlivea-ble. It creates healing. It creates futures where identity is a language of creativity and care, not fear, discomfort, and control.
Care work is multi-dimensional. It will continue to shift and grow. It will support healing. It will support self love. It will forever recognize those who have been excluded. It will be radical.
