Sore Loser: a chronic pain and illness zine on queer disabled grief

Sore Loser is made from four pieces of A4 paper folded in half. It has a bright yellow piece of A4 card for the cover, and is stapled together. San dipped their finger into black ink to write the title of the zine in all caps. The ink has set with various tones, darker where their finger first made contact when I replenished the ink. Underneath the title we pasted the subtitle, "a chronic pain and illness zine on queer disabled grief", printed in Arial 22-point font. Beneath that are our names, hand-written by both of us in all caps, and pasted diagonally upwards to the right. The back cover has text that is replicated in the description of the zine.

Order Info

Description

  • co-created by Sandra Alland and Etzali Hernández
  • recipient of a Disability Arts Online digital commission 2021
  • poetry written together and separately, plus quotes from other writers and an excerpt from our podcast on memorialisation and grief
  • 16 pages; in 4th printing
  • also available free online as a flip-book with audio-description and alt-text

As disabled and ill LGBTQIA+ people, have we been mourning a new loss of queer community because of lockdowns and caution – or is it an old loss based on the ongoing inaccessibility of most queer events and spaces? Do we want to make work while so much of the world is still on fire? (How) can we (re)connect with a culture that has learned so little in almost two years of devastation? Or do we create a new one?

How do we envision an ideal qrip funeral? How do we ensure we’re memorialised in the ways we want? How do we document our grief, our resistance – and our joy?

Reviews

“The technique speaks not just to the changes in practices necessitated by Covid-19, but the alternative ways of working that sick and disabled people were already using… As well as reckoning with the grief for those people being killed or disabled by Covid-19 (and a public health policy that prioritises profit), (Alland and Hernández) explore the grief of inaccessibility, of being treated as disposable, of the loss of places and practices. The zine itself is an act of mourning, resistance and joy. ”
– “Quaranzines” (Wellcome Collection), Lea Cooper, June 2023

“Poetry, conversations, visual art, mash-ups, and prose quotes are present throughout the multi-genre, multi-modal, accessibly-produced zine. The creative duo’s unapologetic critique of denial, and their underscoring of the ways in which grief and loss are uneasy, necessary facets of life are met in equal measure by a strong attention to how and why queer disabled grief and the power of living with chronic pain and illness must be discussed overtly, boldly, and with love—during Covid-19 and beyond.”
– Wordgathering, Diane R. Wiener, July 2022

Content Notes

Overall there’s nothing graphic. Throughout, there are examinations of death, loss, white supremacy and ableism.