Many of the frameworks, modalities, and tools we deploy in clinical practice were developed by white cis men in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at the height of settler colonial projects that sought to impose European and US sexual values systems and violently displace indigenous cultures and their values systems. This plenary address takes up the challenge of the conference's theme: what would a queered approach to mental health look—and feel!—like? And how can we imagine into un-settling our practices, re-visioning healing, and freedom dreaming (pace Tourmaline) the radical possibilities of our clients' lives and the client-provider relationship? How might we move away from solving problems (which, in a western idiom, often tend to be located in the individual) and toward practices that envision nothing less than liberation drawn from the intergenerational wisdom of community.

About Lucie (she/they)

Lucie Fielding (she/they) is a white, queer, non-binary trans femme, and a therapist practicing in Charlottesville, VA and Seattle, WA. She received her MA in Counseling Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute (2018). Lucie also holds a PhD in French from Northwestern University (2008), where she specialized in histories of sexualities, and erotic literature. Their background in literature and history attunes them to the many ways that image, metaphor, and cultural scripts shape and inform the narratives we carry with us as we move through the world as well as how these narratives inscribe themselves on our bodies. She is an Adjunct Professor in the Sex Therapy Certificate Program at Antioch University-Seattle as well as a sex educator and workshop facilitator. They are the author of Trans Sex: Clinical Approaches to Trans Sexualities and Erotic Embodiments (Routledge, May 2021). 

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@sexbeyondbinaries

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