This paper is on what ways queer mad poetry critiques the current dominant biomedical model and how can queer mad poetry offer an alternative practise of queer mental health and well-being. In Mulubinba-Newcastle, Queer folks gather together under the patronage of “queer poetry”. Poetry as a catalyst and empirical and onto-epistemological anchor for our research praxis.
We articulated concepts from queerist Foucault, Delueze and Guattari to read poetry for a speaking of truth to power and turned to decolonial feminisms including Audre Lorde and Sara C. Motta since western thought is placed, and parochial in terms of racialisation and exteriority of modernity (Motta 2018; Motta et al. 2023).
We engaged in observant participation, dialogical interviews, and a workshop as a group as the core techniques for gathering information and co-creating meaning and/as transformation. The conceptual framework of concepts from Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and Motta and Lorde had been operationalised within the distinct methods to be employed and result in a collectively constructed cartography of i) speaking truth to power as critique of the biomedical model and ii) other-worldings as a counter politics of queer mad well-being.
Speaking truth to power by participants revealed key themes: biomedical dominance as experienced by us, infrastructure of care, gaze of toxicity, dispossession, arresting growth, repression, and othering. Our poetics of life is revealing the truth through the process of speaking truth to power. We, mad Queer poets, are our own co-warriors to politics of wellbeing.
