Re-storied and Restored: Queer Family Conundrums across the Generations by Manja Visschedijk and Gipsy Hosking
In this Friday afternoon video we (Manja and Gipsy) share some snapshots from our 28 years of loving, living and working together in the intersections of age, sexuality and illness as non-biological mother and daughter in a Lesbian family.
In fighting for our rights as a ‘same sex’ family, we recognise that we do this within a complex, everchanging interplay of privilege and marginalisation. For us, intersectionality means we can’t talk about our struggle for recognition and equal rights as a queer family in Australia, without also talking about the broader colonial, social and political context in which the struggles of our family and our communities take place.
We consider some Narrative ideas that might assist practitioners when working across intersections of power and privilege; as well as some of the implications which the politics of lived experience can have for our Narrative practice.
Manja currently works as a Narrative Therapist in private practice, and is a member of the Dulwich Centre faculty. She first trained in Narrative approaches in 1997 and has worked with individuals, couples, groups and communities who have experienced violence and/or discrimination related traumas in a range of different roles including counselling, group work, training and senior management.
Gipsy was one of the first children born through donor insemination to lesbian parents in Australia. Identifying as queer herself, she is passionate about challenging homophobia and heteronormativity in all its forms. For the past 10 years she has also been living with a debilitating, invisible, incurable illness. Drawing on her honest lived experience she works to generate conversations and challenge the silences that surround lives lived outside the bounds of what is considered ‘normal’. She is currently working on a PhD that explores young people’s experience of invisible chronic illness through storytelling. You can read her blog here: https://gipsyh.wordpress.com
