Queer Life:Moving takes inspiration from the original project www.lifemoving.org and focuses on research that suggests LGBTQIA+ members encounter barriers to accessing services. These films aim to create understanding, reflection and change.
Background
In 2017, a series of short films co-created by individuals with a terminal illness countered the misrepresentation of dying in mainstream culture and provided instead honest and illuminating stories of lived experience at End of Life. The research underpinning it, advanced understandings of the ethical potential of film to connect us to others’ feelings and concerns and to be altered by that connection. Public Health Palliative Care UK now host these ‘Life:Moving’ films with the clinical and creative training resources that were developed alongside them.
Aims
This study builds on this original work but responds explicitly to research by Age UK and Marie Curie that suggests that LGBTQIA+ members of the EoL community encounter obstacles to accessing services. Prioritising co-design, this project applies and extends the ethical praxis developed through Life:Moving.
Methods
A live action and participatory project, it uses film – as creative practice, cathartic expression and generative viewing experience – to better understand how end-of-life experience, and care, are impacted by questions of gender identity and sexuality.
A showing of the films is combined with reflective learning workshops to enable practitioners involved in end of life care to consider how their practice needs to adapt.
Results
The emerging films reflect the heteronormativity of end-of-life discourse and services, though the degrees to which this is experienced as problematic varies across participants.
Insights
From fear of homophobia to micro-aggressions, from involuntary closeted-ness to real and imagined violations of trans identity, the project reveals a range of issues of concern to those committed to equitable practice. But it also shares with us rarely seen stories of long-term gay and lesbian couples’ relationships and love. Queering end of life, the project offers important insights into the benefits of thinking more expansively, more queerly, about death and dying.
Additional films are in the process of being produced – if you are interested in a film showing or a reflective workshop, please get in touch with either M.Aaron@warwick.ac.uk or emmahodges@phpcuk.org