In this episode, I’m joined by Spiritual Healer, Body Positivity Advocate, poet and artist, Jade Elouise (Bodiposipoet). Her activism, creative outlets and spiritual work all centre around advocating for social justice, equality and equity for marginalised bodies on a systemic level, while also promoting self-healing and self-acceptance on a personal one.

We chat about Jade’s work to reclaim the co-opted body positivity movement, how spirituality and activism can work so well together, speaking out about spiritual bypassing, queering psychology, the power of creativity for self-expression and lots more!

If you haven't already, be sure to join our Facebook community to connect with other like-minded queer folks and allies.

Find out more about Gem Kennedy and Queers & Co. 

Podcast Artwork by Gemma D’Souza

Resources

You can find out more about Jade’s work by following these accounts on Instagram: @bodiposipoet, @reclaimingbopo and @asafespacetogrow

 Head to Jade’s Etsy shop to buy some beautiful art!

Full Transcription

Gem: Welcome to Queers & Co., the podcast on self-empowerment, body liberation and activism for queer folx and allies. I'm your host, Gem Kennedy, my pronouns are they/them and I'm a transformational practitioner and coach living in the UK.

Gem: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 2. I hope you've all had a good week despite lockdown. I'm currently snuggled in my dressing gown, because it's absolutely freezing here and I don't want to go outside and get wood so I can light a fire so I thought I'd record the intro instead. And something keeping me nice and warm at the moment, this sounds like such a segue, are the feelings that I got from having this interview with my guest today. I'm sure that you're going to get a lot out of our conversation. I know I definitely did. And yeah, without further ado, I'll introduce her to you. So her name is Jade: Elouise, also known as bodiposipoet. She is a spiritual healer, body positivity advocate, poet and artist. Her activism, creative outlets and spiritual work all centre around advocating for social justice, equality and equity for marginalised bodies on a systemic level, while also promoting self-healing and self-acceptance on a personal one. I hope you enjoy the episode. And I'd love to hear your thoughts afterwards so do head over to the Facebook group to join in the conversation. So now over to the wonderful Jade Elouise.

Gem: Hi Jade. How are you?

Jade: Good thank you. How are you?

Gem: I'm good, thank you. Thanks so much for joining me, I'm really excited to talk to you.

Jade: Oh, thank you for having me.

Gem: Not at all. It would be great if you're happy to just introduce yourself for anyone who hasn't come across your work before.

Jade: Yeah, sure. So my name is Jade Elouise, but I go by Bodiposipoet. I am a spiritual healer and life coach. I'm an artist and I am a body positivity and self-love advocate and activist. So most of my work online focuses around learning to love your body, but also advocating for all bodies and equality for all bodies.

Gem: Thank you. And there's so much to unpack there. I know we talked before about kind of digging into all the different aspects of your work so maybe if you're happy to let's start off with how you kind of got into body positivity because I know that's a huge part of what you do.

Jade: Yeah. So I think like most people, I struggled with body image growing up. My weight, and the way I looked was always made quite a big deal. And so I didn't really have a great relationship with myself and my body. And then when I was in my teens, I kind of came across self-love movements online and I slowly started to learn to love myself more, and just advocate for my right to exist in my body without fear or anxiety or pressure. And when I was in those self-love communities, I slowly came across body positivity. And I realised that I resonated with body positivity just as much, if not more than, self-love because not only was it saying I deserve to love myself, but it was also saying actually, I deserve to live in the world without fear and I deserve to be able to have the same experiences as everyone else. Equally and equitably. So I think body positivity was sort of a saviour for me in a lot of senses in just being at home in myself.

Gem: Yeah, and how did that change your relationship with your body?

Jade: Oh, massively not just my body, but it changed who I was as a person because I wasn't afraid anymore to just exist. I think so many of us are fearful of rejection and of humiliation and of people not accepting who we are. And I was so afraid of that for so much of my life. But with body positivity, I reached a point where I thought not only now do I have the power to stand within my convictions and be a representative of who I am and my body but also I have the power to uplift other people. And to explain to them why all bodies matter.

Gem: Yeah, I love that and did your work come before that or during it or afterwards?

Jade: I think for the most part online, I was just trying to find a way to express myself. I'd always been quite, well not always, I think the more that I learnt to hide away because of my body, the more I became introverted, so for me being online and advocating for my body was mostly just a celebration and exploration of myself. I wasn't really trying to advocate for anyone other than myself when I started out. I just wanted a space where I could explore my relationship with my body and to see other people doing the same. And then the more that time went on, the more I realised that actually this was bigger than just me, it's about how we treat bodies in our society, and I wanted to be a part of making changes towards that. So it slowly went from me being just about me and about my body to being about all bodies and caring about how all bodies are treated.

Gem: Yeah and your work kind of, I don't want to say tackles, that doesn't sound like the right word. Your work kind of covers that from lots of different angles. So in terms of like creativity and spirituality, and that healing element, and community, obviously as well. But before we dig into all the other things, I wondered about your hashtag that you use, #reclaimingbopo and if you could just tell us a bit more about how that came about?

Jade: Yeah, so #reclaimingbopo I think, mostly came from frustration, if I'm honest. It was more... I was just seeing body positive spaces online being co-opted and claimed by bodies that weren't at the forefront of pushing the body positive movement. Body positivity historically was centred in Black women, Black fat women, and people in the most marginalised bodies and yet, if you scroll through body positive hashtags online, what you'll mostly see is white cisgender women who are straight-sized. And often they're promoting diet culture, which obviously body positivity is not the complete opposite of but it does try to tackle. And I just find it so frustrating, because when I started in self-love and body positivity communities, there was that diversity, there was that representation of everybody. And these body positivity spaces had just lost their meaning. And I was just looking through all of these hashtags and I just thought, you know, what can we do about this? Have we lost body positivity forever? Or is there some way that we can reclaim it? And so it was almost born overnight, just out of frustration, I set up the hashtag and I wrote a post about I wanted to start advocating for reclaiming bopo. And I set up a Facebook page, and I just thought, I'm going to try and make a safe space for marginalised bodies, where they can advocate for themselves again, and where they can centre themselves in the movement that was always meant to centre them.

Gem: Yeah and what has that been like, kind of reclaiming that and seeing how people may have started using the hashtag in ways that maybe you didn't imagine and in ways that you did imagine or hoped for?

Jade: Yeah, I wasn't really sure what the response would be to it to be honest. And the profile on Instagram and Facebook is still quite small, in terms of kind of comparative body positivity pages and things like that, but the community there is very strong in its conviction that body positivity should be reclaimed. And I love when I see people use the hashtag. And I love when people tag the #reclaimingbopo page in their posts, because it just shows me that there are people who still care about what body positivity represents,