In this premiere episode of “Bellies Out!” Joe Baez interviews Mx. André Terrel Jackson. André talks about their childhood, their current relationship with their body, what it’s like dating in the bear scene, and their visions for fat politics.

You can find Joe on Instagram as @thejoebaez. You can connect with André on Twitter, Hive Social, TikTok and Instagram at @TrickiVisaj. You can also connect with André on their personal Instagram which is @andreterreljackson. You can find all of André’s work on their website AndreTerrelJackson.com.

In this second episode of “Bellies Out!” Joe Baez interviews Dr. Caleb Luna. Caleb talks about their childhood, their disability, their health and movement practices, chub/chaser dynamics, and the state of fat politics today. You can find Joe on Instagram at @thejoebaez. You can follow Caleb on Instagram and Twitter at @dr_chairbreaker. You can also get in touch with them at their website, Caleb-luna.com.

This audio will take you through the life of a one Black, nonbinary, queer, disabled person. You will be exposed to the mundane everyday tasks associated with a bodymind that is mine. Have you ever woken up and forgot to put on your ears?! I hope that you gain a little perspective outside of the idea that Blackness begins at struggle, that disability is always sad, and queerness is unwanted. Each of these facets of my identity is infused in all of the others. Come with me into a world of the ordinary joys.

Call and response has an important history in traditional West African music, especially in spiritual music and protest movements. Although the specific expression of this practice varies across the diaspora depending on the geographic location and musical lineage of practitioners, there are striking similarities in seemingly disparate locations, like the southern United States, Cuba, and northern Brazil. The preservation of call and response practices within these locations (and many others) suggests the importance of collectivity when healing from systemic oppression.

With this interest in mind, David Diaz invites students to join into this call and response by listening to and producing sounds and/or movements as they are comfortable. In joining a collective, there is also space for individuality, and even dissonance. In that interest, students can recognize the shared histories and practices that the music reveals, as well as the particularities of specific cultures and historical actors.

Oftentimes, when we engage with the framework of decolonization, it comes from a very specific theoretical strand within the academy and does not include or interconnect with the lives of Indigenous Peoples, especially those who have survived and continue to survive genocide. This OER engages with the idea of decolonization through a short narrative that highlights a conversation from a grandchild and their grandmother. The story does not adhere to a linear format of time, yet goes back and forth between the past and present, an almost cyclical reflections as one plans and figures out their future. The work of decolonization requires an entire epistemological, ontological, axiological, and methodological shift internally and externally. This is simply the beginning of a lifetime commitment.

Glossary
ahéhee’ – thank you
k’ad – phrase used to end a conversation or start a new one
kinaaldá – women becoming ceremony
nahjee’ – phrase used for expressing that I’m finished and/or go away.
shídeezhí – my little sister
shimásaní – my grandma
shiyazhí – my little one
yadilah – phrase used in frustration

References
Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples. Zed Books.
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, 1(1), 1-40.

“‘I would have just lived’: Surviving Japanese internment during WWII” (Part 1) is the first of a two part series that features the oral history testimony of Mitsue Salador and was written, researched, and recorded by Tatiana Bryant, with the support of the Pedagogy Lab at the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies. Listeners should note in advance that this audio Open Educational Resource includes themes of grief, xenophobia, racism, and war.

In the early 1940s, Japanese American teenager Mitsue Salador was directed to go to college for nursing because Japanese women weren’t hired as teachers at white schools. Dismayed, she entered college in Portland, OR to study nursing briefly, before she was forced into an urban detention center for people of Japanese heritage after Pearl Harbor. Mitsue organized a loophole escape from the detention center by applying to a college in the Midwest where she would be deemed as less of a potential threat away from active war theaters. Isolated from her family, she continued her education while her parents and youngest sibling survived an internment camp and older siblings navigated college and active military service. In Part 1, Mitsue Salador of Long Island, NY via Hood River, OR, talks about her lived experience as a college student and daughter of Japanese immigrants before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

“‘I would have just lived’: Surviving Japanese internment during WWII (Part 2)” is the second of a two part series that features the oral history testimony of Mitsue Salador and was written, researched, and recorded by Tatiana Bryant, with the support of the Pedagogy Lab at the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies. Listeners should note in advance that this audio Open Educational Resource includes themes of grief, xenophobia, racism, and war.

In the early 1940s, Japanese American teenager Mitsue Salador was directed to go to college for nursing because Japanese women weren’t hired as teachers at white schools. Dismayed, she entered college in Portland, OR to study nursing briefly, before she was forced into an urban detention center for people of Japanese heritage after Pearl Harbor. Mitsue organized a loophole escape from the detention center by applying to a college in the Midwest where she would be deemed as less of a potential threat away from active war theaters. Isolated from her family, she continued her education while her parents and youngest sibling survived an internment camp and older siblings navigated college and active military service.

In Part 2, Mitsue Salador of Long Island, NY via Hood River, OR, talks about her lived experience as a college student and daughter of Japanese immigrants forced to relocate to a detention center after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The history of Indigenous Peoples within the US Empire is a tale of both violence and survivance, which can be difficult to engage and work through for many. This OER uses the process of a body scan, a mindfulness technique, to really get folks comfortable with their body and notice what is happening internally while using poetry as a medium to talk about the history of the Diné, or the Navajo, my community. Yet, this violence is not only unique to many Indigenous communities, but is something that many other marginalized communities have something in common as we all survive and navigate systems of exploitation and oppression in a world that denies us love and freedom. This OER ends with a reminder of how beautiful, brilliant and powerful we are and that our stories of resistance need to be shared and celebrated.

What is disability justice and how is it connected to everyday lived experiences? This piece was conceptualized through a disabled lens. Listeners are taken through each of my diagnoses as a way to exercise vulnerability, knowledge sharing, and connectivity. Disability justice is a political and social stance that intricately weaves together social identities and liberation with disability at the core. This work is important because all too often disabled people are pushed out of the spotlight and discouraged from acknowledging who we are. There was an intentional choice here to highlight the “unruly” body and mind that I have because it makes some people uncomfortable. I want folks to lean into the discomfort they might feel when discussing (or not discussing) disability.

This offering is an approximately ten-minute audio introduction to Afrofuturism. Approachable and digestible, this audio short guides students to engage with Afrofuturism not only as an analytic tool but as a conceptual approach to community organizing and creative work. At the end, students are invited into two different writing prompts. The short concludes with approximately 1 minute of instrumental music, no voice-over.

There continues to be a lack of health sex education that is queer and trans inclusive. Many of us are not exposed to our resources until later in life yet must learn everything regarding heterosexual sex practices and resources. This feels extremely homophobic and transphobic given the health induced epidemic we as a community experienced 40 years ago during the HIV/AIDS crisis. Now, in the midst of another global pandemic, reminiscent of survival’s guilt and potential recollections of the past and feelings of “we’ve been here before," we must educate and provide adequate resources around health education. In this short I engage in a reflective platíca where I revisit the first date with my partner where I learn about his status of being HIV+. The aim is to understand how we can move towards destigmatizing sex in our communities that are impacted by HIV and provide current resources, practices, and ultimately share how I am positively in love.

Queer and trans* Texans have faced scrutiny and precariousness for decades. But in 2022, a series of sweeping legal decisions, increasing economic inequality, and state-level political attacks very publicly threaten the safety and stability of many in Texas’s queer communities. This audio short explores how artists and activists across the state are making and using stages at pride celebrations to draw attention to the histories of and possible futures for queer and trans* people in Texas and beyond.

Archival audio of Sylvia Rivera speaking at the Gay Pride Rally June 24, 1973 at Washington Square Park, NYC courtesy of the LoveTapesCollective, with special thanks to the Lesbian Herstory Archives.

By using the death of Sarah Hegazi, a queer Egyptian woman who died in exile after being imprisoned and tortured in 2017, this audio brings into question the place that queer women occupy within the heteronormative carceral state and the tension that arises when these same nation states claim to support women. Furthermore, it interrogates the limit of state feminism in Egypt and questions how gender is mobilized to further carceral logics and institutions.

Queerness, Race, and Reproduction: Exploring the Politics of Childcare Through and Beyond Lee Edelman and José Muñoz
This open-access education resource explores the political, social, and theoretical issues surrounding children, childcare, and reproduction. It begins with a personal reflection on how my queer friends and I would speculate about the possibility of having children as undergraduate students. I observe that our queerness made these questions so salient to us as we recognized the unique challenges that we had as queer children. I then explore a tension within queer theory between scholars Lee Edelman, who characterizes childrearing as a necessarily heteronormative endeavor, and José Muñoz, who critiques Edelman’s argument for ignoring the fact that society does not value Black and brown children in the same way as it does white children. Despite Muñoz’s influential critique, I caution against assuming that critiques of the imperative to reproduce necessarily exclude racial analysis by drawing on the work of Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe, who calls attention to the ways that racist institutions have forced Black people to reproduce in certain contexts. By putting these scholars in conversation, the audio reflects on the wide-reaching practical and theoretical consequences of reproductive politics.

In this audio short, Joe Baez gives an intimate portrayal of living in a fat body.

Queer Chisme is a cultural intuitive way of knowing rooted in survival by womxn, queer, trans, and those at the margins to survive cisheteropatriarchal structures (Gonzalez, 2021; Gutierrez, 2017; Trujillo, 2020). The chisme exposes power imbalances and cultivates community and safety with those who we can build kinship with to resist and exist in collective spaces. I use chisme as a way to share care, to mobilize towards advocacy, and expose inequities in higher education (Gonzalez, 2021). I invite you to listen and use this queer chisme sensory audio experience to reflect, move towards healing, and learn more about the power within you.

In “Puerto Rico Obituary,” poet and activist Pedro Pietri calls upon colonized folks to “kill, kill, kill the landlord of their cracked skull” by celebrating their identities, using “…their white supremacy bibles for toilet paper…”

Meditation is a practice that can teach us how to “see what is” beyond the messages we receive and, in that way, can be a pathway to internal decolonization and liberation. A radically accessible care praxis, mindfulness pushes us to question if we are unruly, unworthy, or if that is a message we have been sent by capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacy.

In this audio short, Caitlin invites us to fake it ‘til we make it, breathe into bell hooks’ teacher-healer ideal, and to kill, kill, kill the landlord that tells us we are less worthy of peace and joy; that ease is not our birthright.

Or, as Caitlin so charmingly says, call bullshit and step away.

If it sounds fun or supportive, start or deepen your meditation practice for free with Caitlin on Insight Timer.

Special thanks to Caitlin’s big brother Jon Wubbena (jonthefunkymonk.com) for creating the intro song and sound support.

Thanks, also, to the Smithsonian. "Puerto Rico Obituary" by Pedro Pietri from the recording entitled Loose Joints: Poetry by Pedro Pietri, FW09722, courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. (p) 1979. Used by permission.

This offering is for those who find themselves grief-ridden as they become more aware of how their lives and those around them are structured historically and presently by oppression. It is an approximately ten-minute guided meditation to acknowledge and honor the grief that inhabits the listeners’ bodies. The meditation also invites listeners to self-affirm their presence and survival. Warsan Shire’s “What They Did Yesterday Afternoon” and Destiny Hemphill’s poem “mapmaking” serve as anchor texts. Instructors, students, and organizers might find this meditation supportive while learning/teaching about oppression or reckoning with the near aftermath of an oppression-rooted tragedy.
References
“What They Did Yesterday Afternoon” (poem) by Warsan Shire: https://verse.press/poem/what-they-did-yesterday-afternoon-6524900794187889060
“mapmaking” (poem) by Destiny Hemphill: https://www.frontierpoetry.com/2019/05/03/poetry-destiny-hemphill/

This audio examines how cases of femicide in Egypt are mobilized to further empower carceral logics and institutions. By examining recent femicide cases in Egypt and the states unequal response to them, this audio highlights how the Egyptian carceral state uses the murder of women to mark certain masculine subjectivities as predatory and to further enforce a paternalistic relationship where the security state always emerges as the (masculine) savior of the murdered victim.