This hybrid-genre manuscript is a critical creative examination of my own meditations with, of, and on my queer, ill body alongside teaching and teacher education. Throughout this manuscript, I posit and explore questions like: During a time where all people, but especially queer people, chronically ill and disabled people, and people of color are experiencing new waves of violence perpetrated against their bodies, their rights, and their bodily rights, how are we prioritizing care, caretaking, and connection? How are we finding and making tenderness for ourselves and one another? Academics, poets, and artists Ross Gay and Shayla Lawson asked a similar set of questions at a not dissimilar time, following the 2016 presidential election in the United States of America: what is tenderness? What does it take to make it (through/with) in America today? (London, Gay, & Lawson, 2019). Gay and Lawson came to The Tenderness Project because they observed a scarcity of writing both from and on softness and tenderness. Similarly, I have observed a scarcity around our own tendering of bodies in and around education spaces. Through research creation via essay and poetry and playwriting, I situate my relationship with tendering [and the lack thereof] with myself, my loved ones, my fellow artists and researchers and teachers, and my students. I ask us to return to the roots of tender—to stretch, to hold forth (Rosado, 2018; Brewer, 2025a). I share my experiences with tendering, which poet and academic Michelle Brittan Rosado compares to poetry, identifying both as a celebration of the in-between. Through my engagement in research creation, a process of making and remaking my relationship with tendering, I seek to cultivate an invitation to (re)imagine (education) spaces where we don’t need to leave ourselves at the door, to (re)imagine tendering interactions and tender offerings.
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