MJ Barker is a British activist-academic, counsellor and psychologist who was voted 53 on DIVA’s Power List 2016 for their work in promoting greater understanding and acceptance of bi and non-binary identities. They were recently invited to speak in an advisory capacity at the White House during President Obama’s Bisexual Awareness Week.
DIVA: Your new book is a delight and you’ve managed to make a complex academic and political term accessible. What inspired you to create Queer: A Graphic History with artist Julia Scheele?
MJ BARKER: I was asked to write a book on queer theory for part of Icon books’ Introducing... series of comic guides. Those books basically got me through my own undergraduate and postgraduate years but I also wondered: “Can I do this? I’m not a proper queer theorist.” I decided that “not a proper queer theorist” was probably the best person to write this book because it is such a complex subject and so hard to write about accessibly. Hopefully I could explain things in an easy enough way because I could pull out the bits that seemed most useful to me.