Self-portraiture as ‘research findings’

Discussion

Decolonising self, decolonising self-care

Self-care has been integrated into pedagogy as necessary for enduring and managing the challenges of training as an art therapist. Noticing my own personal internalisations, specific to my South Asian culture and Queer identity, while navigating this field as a trainee, activist and ‘consumer’, I had to contest the Western imperialistic capitalisation of self-care and ‘wellness’ itself, and acknowledge the difficult and hurtful feelings that emerged in me when ‘mindfulness’ practices were encouraged and disseminated (Hsu, 2016) (see Figure 4). 

There is a pervasive neoliberal logic that is hard to escape, when Western mindfulness practices become increasingly popular in the broader commercial domain and, more closely, in the expressive therapies and pedagogies in which I operate. Mindfulness introduced the West to ancient knowledge systems, encouraging one to pay attention to breath and deep observation. However, this secular mindfulness, as it frequently operates as, feels like something beyond a celebration of outlying knowledges, instead becoming a Western co-opting of ancient Eastern practices, often being applied by white practitioners, students and teachers using mandalas and sacred rituals in classrooms and sessions without context and without acknowledging history (Hsu, 2016). 

While for some, sharing instead of protecting something useful found in ancient knowledges contributes to individual, collective and structural transformation, for many in the South or Eastern Asian diaspora this ‘sharing’ has very real material consequences that are complicit in the racial conditioning of white superiority (Hsu, 2016), where whiteness is positioned as standing separate from culture and is the collective archetype of human (Bakshi, 2020; Taylor, 2018). 

Particular to my experience, I would observe people in the dominant culture freely extracting from my culture, for ‘universal’ gain and ‘self-care’ (Hsu, 2016) and, in many cases, profiting from it financially or academically. I witnessed an omission of bodies like mine from ‘mindfulness’ discourse, which often centred the white experience only. Students and teachers would oscillate with curiosity between being intoxicated by my embodiment of Brownness to being triggered by it.

What is being risked is not only the erasure of the enduring labours of Hindus and Buddhists in sustaining cultural legacies and Dharma teachings to feed the appetite of an awakening global North, but also the loss of an opportunity to invest in a non-white imaginary.

I needed to find a way to navigate self-care that acknowledged this difficult space in my body. I needed to address the inequities I embodied that were symptoms of the inequities found in the larger systems in which I operated.

My burnout was – and is – a response to racial trauma

As a QPOC, seeing messages that reinforced white centrality affected how I would think, feel, view and treat myself as racially inferior (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Taylor, 2018). I chose to use art as a research methodology and a tool for healing and retaliation (see Figure 2). This would reveal not only how I responded to encounters with ‘power hoarding’ – a term used by Tema Okun in her examination of white supremacy in institutions (Okun, 2000). Okun emphasises that power hoarding is a central feature of white supremacist culture, which involves the amassing of power, resources and opportunities. My use of art also revealed how I confronted this divergence in my mind and body. 

Just showing up as I am – in all my Brownness and Queerness – elicited many complex and confusing responses from my peers and teachers. This affected my consciousness by making me feel guilty about my joy, and by creating a sense that prioritising myself was somehow selfish, that I must earn my ‘usefulness’ through bodily sacrifices. My responses revealed how I put pressure on myself to prove my own worth, that I must work ten times as hard for only half as much. I found myself pushing through enormous personal adversity during my studies; indeed, I worked so hard that I became sick. I overextended my emotional, physical and spiritual capacities. I found myself minimising the microaggressions and racism that I was experiencing, almost surrendering to the idea that my worth was inextricably linked to my productivity only. 

When an entire community has been historically dehumanised, that community becomes easier to exploit and to excavate from our own mind, body and spirit (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Taylor, 2018). Because of pervasive colonial legacies over epochs, many Black and Brown people have been hardened to assume that our value is derived only from our labour (Comas-Díaz et al., 2019). In reality, those harmful ideas are a part of me, because of acculturative pressures, the strain of intersecting identities, and the internalising of systems of oppression (Comas-Díaz et al., 2019; Taylor, 2018) (see Figure 2). This is a symptom of racial trauma.

I reflected on this internal ‘maintenance’ of pervasive systems and became curious about the paradigms of restructuring and emotional reclaiming (Taylor, 2018). I began to think about radical self-care and ontological rifts such as human/nature or subject/object, entanglements, new materialism, and the entrapment of the Anthropocene (Geerts & van der Tuin, 2021; Taylor, 2018). How could I then recentre my Queer Brown body in my own experience?

When a Queer Brown woman nurtures and loves herself, it is emphatically revolutionary (Lorde, 2018). Such nurturing and love subvert the power of the white cis-heteropatriarchy, which is largely dependent on the subjugated person harbouring shame about who we are, interrogating the experiences of our bodies, taking up less space, venerating whiteness, disengaging from our own desires and pleasures, doubting our capacity, and even justifying the enduring or tolerating of harm that racism and colonialism have imposed (Carter et al., 2017; Comas-Díaz et al., 2019; Franklin et al., 2006; Fredericks & Bargallie, 2020; Taylor, 2018). This is why returning to my bursting magical self as a QPOC is a gorgeous act of defiance, contesting the toxic ideologies that were never really mine to embrace.

Decolonising through proclamation

Figure 1 is from a series of responses to a particularly painful seminar in ‘ethics and diversity in research’ during my Master of Art Therapy course. The subject matter centred around ‘cultural competency’ training involving racism, postcolonialism, systemic power imbalances and subsequent oppressions as a result of the colonial system. 

What was revealed in this seminar was how discourse on diversity or cultural competency often reinforces rather than dismantles whiteness, championing diversity without actually undoing institutional racism (Hage, 2000; Kunstman, 2017). I often received hostile and defensive responses from teachers and students when I embarked on a critical act of enunciation, meaning speaking up, holding to account and naming whiteness (Bakshi, 2020). I would hear fellow white students and teachers say to me:

“I’m colour blind.”
“What about my trauma?”
“PC culture is getting out of hand.”
“Use strengths-based language.”
“I don’t see race.”
“Saying white is racist.”
“All people matter.”
“Not all white people have white privilege; some are more disadvantaged than you.”
“I was othered being Italian, and moved on.”
“Here we go again.”
“I feel like you’re being aggressive.”
“I’m from a different generation, where we didn’t make excuses.”

Being an art therapy trainee, I reflected on how pedagogy and training would often underscore the overtly violent nature of racism, but rarely interrogate the more covert nature of white supremacy (Hage, 2000; Puwar, 2004; Taylor, 2018). Such covertness was often circulated through coded semantics such as those expressed above.

I saw that, in this seminar and related literature, the only way that my body would be seen, read, empathised with or realised was through visibilities of marginalised bodies constructed in relation to what they meant to whiteness. What emerged was an appeal for white people to bond, or negotiate, with diversity discourse without the actual labour of dismantling bodily hierarchies (Hage, 2000; Puwar, 2004). This meant that I witnessed those holding power, such as academics or teachers, inserting seminar lectures on ‘postcolonialism’ without adequately holding space for robust – and, more importantly, safe – conversations between students. The result of this for POC and First Nations students was the witnessing of triggering and problematic language, and for white students a lack of an informed example of how to deal with such painful subject matter in the first place. By the teacher not properly holding this space, it became a lost opportunity for real growth, ‘unlearning’ and transformation.

The burden then falls onto those who are marginalised to hold this space while also trying to manage their own painful triggers. My attempts to negotiate between these states of feeling – unseen, yet also focused on so closely – created anger and resistance in me. I faced students who saw me as being ‘derogatory’ because I was not being passive. Another layer of friction and disconnect, a schism, emerged, isolating me from those who were my friends. It took away a sense of community that I thought I had. It was not my job as a Queer, Brown student to be the representative of a ‘colonised body’; nor was it my responsibility to put my identity under the microscope for white examination. It became my perceived obligation in the absence of meaningful, self-reflexive discourse.

This dynamic reveals whose cultural norms, values and perspectives the institution and society consider to be ‘natural’ or legitimate, and whose voices, experiences and truths are suppressed and delegitimised. Expressions from students such as “getting aggressive isn’t helpful” not only invalidate the very real experience of POC through tone policing, but can also be weaponised to reinforce white governance, by subjugating, gaslighting and pathologising POC lived experience (Bakshi, 2020; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Taylor, 2018). The task then shifts to the Black or Brown body, who must make a performance of collegiality and remaining ‘calm’ so as to be palatable, even with the additional endangerment of microaggressions and veiled – or even unveiled – racism (Puwar, 2004; Taylor, 2018; Vaccaro & Koob, 2019). 

How can white cis-het (cisgendered-heterosexual) art therapy trainees and teachers become more enlightened, and more critically and socially aware (Kuntsman, 2017)? How can they become healers navigating diverse identities and cultural backgrounds, when a large portion of white students and teachers of art therapy do not see, or are unwilling to see, the continuing oppression of QPOC as enduring and persistent trauma? How can they properly accept the challenge of undoing systemic racism, when they are unable to locate themselves in the project of Western imperialism?

Heteronormativity in art therapy pedagogy

Absolute truths, biological essentialisms and naturalisms located in psychoanalytic language offer nothing to the Queer (being Queer was once considered a pathology), the stateless, the marginalised, and the oppressed (Devitt, 2008; Talwar, 2003, 2010; Zappa, 2017). Misgendering and presuming sexuality are symptoms of a heteronormative structure, because they continue to declare what is ‘natural’ and what is ‘other’ (Zappa, 2017). The rhetoric of art therapy pedagogies often proclaims the importance of dismantling systems of power (Savneet, 2003; Talwar, 2010). But what happens when power continues to be enacted through white heteropatriarchy? How many Queer, Brown/Black practitioners work in art therapy practices compared to their white counterparts? How many Queer Brown/Black academics teach art therapy in Eora? Is there pedagogy for the oppressed? Why is heteronormative language still being used, punctuated by the dyadic mother and father in clinical language and training, the assumption of pronouns, the binaristic understandings of being a ‘woman’, a ‘man’, of relationship structures and family genograms (Zappa, 2017)? What happens when these Queer, decolonial, critical knowledges that pedagogy claims to espouse are not applied laterally in curriculum and practice? 

There is a clear incongruence between the resistant and disruptive theories that are being advocated for in art therapy education and the bodies in the room, the bodies in the executive branch, the bodies that disseminate the knowledges, the bodies that are thriving and the bodies that are being excavated from. As a Brown person, I am continually positioned to ‘learn’ about empires, marginalised bodies and colonialism through a white positionality. This needs to change.

Noticing my own personal internalisations – which are specific to my South Asian culture and Queer identity – while navigating this field as a trainee, activist, ‘consumer’, I found myself yearning for a white allyship, which often fell flat. In truth, I did not want my body to become something to be extracted from for the education of others. I did not want to feel that my body only mattered when it aligned with the self-interest of a white person. I not only wanted to see representations of Queer, Brown leadership; I also wanted to imagine a different future for myself. Rather than being relegated to becoming the rich subject matter of someone who sits in the dominant culture, I wanted to write my own bodily history.

How can I make my body a refuge that stimulates my complete humanity? By creating new knowledge systems through art: feeling, sensing as systems of knowledge, subverting Eurocentric epistemological constructs

I chose to use art as a research methodology, but also as an apparatus for healing and resistance. I created art not only to reveal how I responded to these encounters with racism and power hierarchies, but also to notice how I confronted this divergence in my mind and body (see Figure 2). I chose to explore a decolonial practice, located in my South Asian culture of intuiting. This led to knowing, which then led to believing (see Figure 4). Embracing acuity and perception, I was in search of marginalised and historically relegated modes of knowledge production (Bakshi, 2020; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018). Moving beyond the ostensibly objective analytic lens, I integrated and embodied illustrations of knowledge creation that occupied a space of meaningful consciousness, forming an archival practice that venerated the collective, personal and cultural, a narrative that sat outside white governance (Gopinath, 2018). 

Queering normative materiality

As a QPOC I have always turned to making art as a way to archive my feelings and work through trauma. Ever since I came to realise that I was not part of the dominant narrative, my work has been entrenched in the Queer imaginary and in the knowledge that the intuitive has something critically valuable to offer me. 

In this research project I wanted to find a way towards Queer materiality, attempting to locate and disrupt cis-heteropatriarchal assemblages, to re-emerge by subverting normative materiality. This intentionality was not as a performance of making my body legible and didactic for another, but for my own empowerment and knowing. I began using materials in ‘non-natural’ ways, against their design. For instance, I experimented with sewing into playdough, and with painting by moving the substrate around a tube of paint, so that the substrate is leading, rather than receiving, the paint. I dipped my fingers into crushed turmeric and stained public white walls, in honour of the rich ochres of my culture and the enduring Ayurvedic knowledges of healing with turmeric. I found images of myself that I took after crying from a racial slur, and chopped them up to create new assemblages – a new citizenship (Kuntsman, 2017), a decolonisation. This was all part of my wish to reclaim agency, to recontextualise and rematerialise for my ancestors and for those who will come after me (Bakshi, 2020). I became curious about approaching my own racial trauma by using these techniques of queering materiality and decolonising self-care, ultimately giving myself permission to pursue a radical self-care and radical self-love. 

Conclusion

Is art therapy – through my experiences in its pedagogy and spaces – really a more enlightened, equitable place? Living in a constantly traumatising environment means living in a set of enduring conditions (Fredericks & Bargallie, 2020). While this kind of racial and heteronormative trauma is recognised in some literature and studies, there is no clear framework or model for properly dealing with issues of racism and homophobia as they intersect (Carter et al., 2017; Comas-Díaz et al., 2019; Franklin et al., 2006; Fredericks & Bargallie, 2020; Taylor, 2018). Rather, these issues seem to operate as liminal spaces in pedagogy and practice. No one appears to really talk in depth and at length in training spaces about how racism is a traumatic experience that endures beyond an explicit incident or an obvious signifier. 

My research revealed that, even though I can take steps to begin a decolonisation of my body, it becomes exceedingly difficult to do so while operating in white cis-heteropatriarchy, which urges a strange logic of existence (Carter et al., 2017; Comas-Díaz et al., 2019; Franklin et al., 2006; Fredericks & Bargallie, 2020; Taylor, 2018). Even in writing this paper I found myself adopting abstracted, sometimes inaccessible, language to just be part of the discourse. Will this make me more credible? Will I finally be seen in this space?

I wonder if this research process would have felt more healing if my survival wasn’t contingent on the goodwill of the dominant culture – if I was not required to struggle to assume my entire humanity in the face of an inhumane system of governance. 

Decolonising and liberating marginalised bodies is not just about a collective acceptance; it is also about collective consciousness, self-examination and unlearning. Challenging internalisations of racism and heteronormativity means more than disseminating anti-racism and anti-heteronormativity through pedagogy and practice, and going beyond the over-indexing and performative allyship that tends to take place (Kendi, 2019; Kluttz, Walker & Walter, 2020; Taylor, 2018). It is not enough to posit the urgency of ‘self-care’ when facing this system. An unexamined discourse of ‘self-care’ can become complicit with ‘othering’, and self-care practices may become the privileged province of already privileged subjects (Bakshi, 2020; Taylor, 2018). For instance, I have seen white cis-het students encouraged to ‘forgive themselves’ for making ‘mistakes’ such as misgendering, or for their ‘accidental’ microaggressions towards culturally diverse people, instead of being reminded of how these ‘mistakes’ have very real and material consequences, and are felt as actual violence by oppressed groups and individuals. In such environments, my appropriation of and research into self-care as a Queer Brown art therapy trainee has become a radical act.

My research, while drawing on my own personal, embodied experiences, challenges the implication that it is the responsibility of already marginalised subjects to adapt to oppressive systems. Here, the critical examination of art therapy training institutions and practices is essential. A real interrogation of dominant cultures, positionality and unconscious biases must take place, filling gaps in the curriculum and intentionally designing courses in which whiteness is decentred and solid social justice pedagogy strategies are implemented (Okun, 2000; Sajnani, 2017; Talwar, 2010). Otherwise, it is like sewing gold thread into white tissue paper: the structure itself cannot hold the weight of the threads, if it has not been fortified with knowledge of how to do so.