Raising Xenas Warriors of Love in a time of Hate
A multigenerational, emergent play space for queer childrearers, young people, and family systems across Philadelphia to creatively validate our practices of building kin.
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Registration is now open! See below for more info, including program dates, fees, and content.
PROGRAM OVERVIEW
Raising Xenas: Warriors of Love in a Time of Hate is a multigenerational, play space for reflection, exploration, and growth that centers radical possibility, queerness, and family-building as an engaged, off-script practice. We invite young people, parents, and childrearers (i.e. aunties, teachers, youth workers) from queer backgrounds to explore the tools of art and movement therapy, creative fellowship, ritual and ancestral magic towards building a robust and supportive queer community that validates our *magical* practices of building kin. This program aims to celebrate our diverse practices of caring for our families, share in our struggles to find accessible, multigenerational queer spaces, and consciously create a network of support to build the systems we know are possible through our shared, yet distinct, experiences of queer kinship.
Why Xena? For many, the queer representation in Xena is a cornerstone of their queer journey, the moment when they first saw the possibility of their own desires reflected back. The main love story in the Xena lore is one of chosen family, kinship, and fostering a love that gives us the strength to turn towards our light and continue bravely fighting for more justice and joy for all. This example of queer relationship building is a shared experience we (the facilitators) hold dear to our hearts in the radical relationships we’ve formed along our personal paths. Inspired by both the hopeful, affirming beacons we experience and the contrasting experience of increased attacks and visible hate directed at trans people, immigrant communities, and Black and Brown people, we are moved to conjure the archetype of hopeful warriors like Xena. Specifically, we aim to validate how our practices of childrearing and family-building are both creative and political acts.
Throughout our time together, we will explore how to engage in healthy adult-child relationships, acknowledge the systems we are currently operating in and imagine what’s possible in terms of building more equitable systems for care, validate the rituals we construct to honor the important milestones along our own, and our children’s, queer journeys, and creatively express the magic that is queer kinship through fine arts practices like collage, story telling, sculpture building, and movement. Each gathering will inherently provide childcare, as your kids are seen as equal participants! Our three, skilled facilitators will rotate roles each week, offering a more structured, facilitated space as well as a self-directed, creative breakout space, with participants free to roam between spaces to honor what their bodies need in order to make the most of our time together.
You can register as a family unit, or an individual, with sliding scale payment options. We use the term family loosely here, as we recognize and honor the magical ways that queer folks build unique systems of kinship!
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PROGRAM SCHEDULE + FEES
Schedule
Raising Xenas will host two sessions, each with six consecutive gatherings on Sundays from 2-4:30pm at The Dandelion Project.
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Session 1:
March 8, 15, 22
April 12, 19, 26
Session 2:
October 4, 11, 18
November 1, 8, 15
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Fees
One of our goals with Raising Xenas is to build community and in doing so to honor the labor of all the stewards: caregivers and facilitators and all the crossing over. We are offering Raising Xenas registration on a sliding scale. The actual cost of this program is $1150 per family unit and $500 per individual participant. We are applying for funding for Raising Xenas to reduce the participation cost and any related barriers as much as possible. Please pay what you can. That said, if you have the funds to cover the total cost and subsidize other's participation, we ask that you do so in the spirit of generosity!
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Sliding scale for individuals is $250-850
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Sliding scale for family units is $350-1650
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Our intent in offering a sliding-scale is to ensure equitable access and for everyone to pay what they can. A sliding scale allows those who are able to pay above the actual cost of the workshop to subsidize those who can't afford it. It is a process of paying it forward and acknowledging what your financial means are at the present time. It is also intended to balance the need to compensate facilitators and childcare efforts and the need to resource caregivers and parents, both under resourced roles. So let's resource ourselves and catch the spirit together!
**Here are two helpful links for considering how much to pay: from Blackhound Clay Studio and from Radical History Club.
MEET YOUR c0-Facilitators
Skilled artists and educators with a passion for community care.
Meg Foley
Meg Foley(she/he/they) is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, and parent. For 20+ years Meg has made work concerned with illuminating the experiential and transformative potential of our bodily selves as a tangle of corporeal and social realities. Meg uses movement, visual & environmental design, and choreographic thinking to create containers for bodily engagement and reflection on a somatic present, on the power and location of the body itself as participant. Meg’s current project, Blood Baby(2021-present)—emerging from her experience as a queer gestational parent—explores queer and trans family building and lineage, gender, sexuality, and geology. Since 2016, Meg has facilitated gatherings intended to foster access to and awareness of a somatic presence for all bodies, outside traditional dance presentation frames and employing the languages of movement improvisation, social therapy, and queer club and drag culture. As part of Blood Baby, Meg initiated and co-facilitated Queer Parent Convenings, creative fellowship groups for queer and trans caregivers to explore queer child-rearing through art and somatics, from 2021-2024. Meg is an educator, curator, and unschooling parent. She grew up in the DC area, was a creative movement baby who grew up to do a lot of club dancing, studied visual art and dance, and now is a queerdo mama of two children, based in Philadelphia.
emma fox
Emma Fox (they/them) is a queer, multidimensional artist, play specialist, and emergent facilitator with over 15 years experience in childrearing. They are particularly drawn to the ways in which adult-child relationships are evolving within the communities they serve, and celebrate more reciprocal relational practices across generations. They are a (maybe too) proud Greek-American, with a deep reverence for the historical and present ways that kinship and family function in Greek culture. Emma is also a ritualist with a knack for inviting magic, play, and creative confidence into their group facilitation work.​
FAQ
Is there an age limit?
No! We welcome folks of all ages to join this space, and encourage young people to actively participate alongside their caregivers. As an emergent space with three, highly skilled facilitators, we will adapt each gathering according to the particular needs of the group as we spend more time together. We welcome all bodies, big and small, to access what they need to make to most of our time together!
DO I need to do both sessions?
Registration assumes your participation in both sessions of Raising Xenas, as we strive to foster an ongoing relationship with everyone participating. You cannot register for only session of our program.