With Sigrid, we talked about ways of getting involved with activism, about being very intentional about the politics and materiality of care, about Burnout by Hannah Proctor, and about ideas of solidarity. I’m so lucky to know you, Sigrid, thank you for speaking with me and for being my friend!
If you're getting this as a newsletter, read the properly formatted post here: https://jiaqikang.mataroa.blog/blog/questions-for-my-friends-2-sigrid/
The idea for this project is that I’m interviewing my friends and people I feel close to, who inspire me. There’s obviously a difference between this ‘on the record’ discussion, which will be published online for anyone to read, and the normal ‘off the record’ conversations we’d have as friends. I’m interested in the ways I might get to know you more through this slightly more ‘formal’ format and the choices you make in representing yourself. I’m also interested in oral history as a form, and in ways to preserve and archive intimacies and relationships in time and space.
Please come up with how you want to be called: name, initial, or pseudonym. I’ll be “Jiaqi Kang.”
The questions below are the 6 main questions I’ll ask you, but your answers will probably prompt some follow-up questions. Your answers can be as long or short as you want. The interview will be conducted orally, then transcribed using Loom and edited for length and clarity. You’ll get to take a final look at it before it goes up, and of course I can take it down anytime you like in the future (although it’s on my blog+newsletter which means that it will also exist in people’s email inboxes).
1. Please introduce yourself and your background, in any way you’d like.
2. How did you become politically engaged?
3. How did you and I meet?
4. What does the word ‘care’ mean for you?
5. What are some things you’re currently looking to learn, or learn about?
6. Is there anything else you’d like to say, or to ask me?
Thank you <3
With thanks to CM for helping me plug the audio files into Loom!
This interview took place in March 2025 and has been edited for length and clarity, including edits contributed by Sigrid. Unlike my paraphrasings, Sigrid’s edits have not been indicated with square brackets.
Jiaqi Kang: Do you have anything that you want to talk about before we start?
Sigrid: I think that being asked some of these questions directly was helpful for me, to clarify them to myself.
JK: I'm really glad to hear that. Please introduce yourself and your background in any way that you would like.
S: I'm Sigrid. I think that's it, really.
JK: How did you become politically engaged?
S: I became meaningfully politically engaged in 2024 through the Palestine solidarity encampments.
I have been quote unquote ‘politically engaged’ since I was a young teenager, but I would describe myself as primarily a consumer of politics, really, until about a year ago. I’m not saying I didn't go to rallies or participate in some student politics during my time at different universities, but I would not describe myself as truly involved in activism until last year. I became physically involved in activism when I joined a Palestine solidarity encampment, and since then I've done a few other things besides, and have spent a lot of my time doing that in the year and a half since then.
JK: I'm interested in you saying you were a consumer of politics. Do you want to elaborate on that?
S: I read politics, I followed political news, and I brought that into my university work where it was relevant. But that was basically it. I would follow elections and international politics with some kind of critical framework, and I watched Novara Media, those kinds of things. I consumed a lot of left-wing political content online. I would go to rallies: for BLM, for Palestine, antifascist rallies; and I did some student politics. Thinking back now, I was a political consumer, first and foremost. I think that describes a lot of people.
JK: I think it really does describe a lot of people. Why do you think that changed in 2024, or how do you think that change occurred for you?
S: I don't have a good explanation. I think that any litany of circumstances that I could provide aren't really sufficient to explain it. Some of it was chance, as far as my own person was concerned, and being near and linked into a Palestine encampment as it was being set up.
I can’t chalk up getting involved entirely to specific personal circumstances. But I could say that being trans has something to do with it, i.e. that I've become more politicised through my own experience of being transgender. I don't know if that's sufficient as an explanation. Other things that I could say about my own experiences of discrimination and oppression, or my identity, aren’t sufficient either.
JK: The reason why I ask is because it feels as though, for you right now, the way you’re telling it, there's kind of a ‘before’ and ‘after.’
S: Yeah, I think that's right, I do think of it that way. In practical terms, I often reflect upon some of the riskier things that I've done recently, things that require the small amount of experience I didn’t have a year ago. A certain amount of being around other people with more knowledge has allowed me to become involved. The Palestine encampment was a good entry point. I didn't need much experience to participate and it wasn't gate-kept. I learnt a lot in a short amount of time. Now, some of the organising I find myself doing presumes a certain level of competency, and if I had tried to be involved in them—for example, being involved in some activism around squatting and homelessness—I just wouldn't have been prepared to do it. I don't think that I would have been helpful. In fact, I think I would have annoyed the people around me. So there's a before and after in that sense.
I feel very grateful to have had the opportunity to become involved through the encampment. It's not lost on me, obviously, that the reason why [the conditions I’m talking about] existed at all was because of the genocide and also resistance in Palestine. But I suppose there were other things too, I’m just not sure what.
JK: How did you and I meet? I know that because of anonymity, it's not going to be a complete picture…
S: It's funny how we met. We have a mutual friend and for that reason we chatted from time to time in the past couple of years. You have to tell me if I'm misremembering. Up until the spring of 2024 when we were both involved in the encampment, we’d spoken perhaps four or five times.
JK: I feel like we met twice. First in passing, I think we spoke 10 times or something. And then I met you again in this new context. It was obviously like such a different context, but I felt so happy to see you, and really reassured, because in that space there were so many new people, and it was so nice to see someone that I recognized. I wasn't surprised at all to see you. I was just like, “Of course she's here.” I was really happy about it. We grew really close after that. I remember thinking, “I wish I could go back in time and shake myself and be like, ‘Talk to her when you knew her casually!’”
S: It’s a funny thing to look back on. I was also reassured. I didn't know many people at the encampment beforehand, maybe three or four. And it was that simultaneous thing—I was not surprised to see you, but it was also a pleasant surprise at the same time.
I'm just reflecting on the very distinct thing that is getting to know someone through activism, where we were both in a context where there were a lot of other people present, and a lot going on from hour to hour. We would also talk a lot and take breather breaks together and chat. But of course a lot of that chat was quite centered around what was immediately happening at the encampment. And so there was also something further than that, which is getting to know each other outside of the immediate exigencies of activism.
JK: So maybe three times. During that middle period… I want to shout out my girlfriend. The two of you were hanging out a lot physically [at] that time, on smoke breaks and stuff, and it was really nice because it just felt so natural. It was one of the most easy and pleasant relationships that I developed, or it didn't even feel like it was a relationship. It just felt very inevitable or matter-of-fact.
S: Yeah. I agree.
JK: What does the word ‘care’ mean to you?
S: This was a good [question] for me. I don't think that I have necessarily a good framework to talk about care. I think it means a few things… It's something for me that I think I define in relation to family and to friendship, but almost negatively so. I think about care and I think about something that is done not because you're following certain schemas of affiliation, like family and friendship…
I think I've flippantly said that friendship is a tyranny. I think about the failures of friendship a lot and how choosing who you care for in terms of who your friends are is insufficient. Who you’re friends with is a political thing. Of course there are trans people who mostly cultivate friendships with other trans people, or people of colour who focus on having friendships with other people of colour, as a form of in-group solidarity and care. But often, even for minoritised people, the kinds of affiliation we cultivate can be inflected by forms of oppression, ableism, caste discrimination, cissexism, classism, whatever else, and this might include oppressions we ourselves are affected by. We’ve all got cops in our head. The way I hope to care is in a way that is always critical and aware of who I find it easy to care for, and who I find it difficult to care for. What kind of links I have with others, and why I have them with some and not with others.
I have found myself in situations of feeling a slight resistance [in myself] when I become aware that somebody needs help or care or support. It can manifest as, for example, an idea that I'm not sufficiently close to them or that I'm not… These are all excuses, right? “I'm not in a position to do this.” Sometimes obviously that’s true, but I think that doesn’t usually preclude doing something, doesn’t mean you can abnegate all your responsibility to others.
Like, if I feel for some reason that there is something in me or some thought process that is telling me that I can't or I don't want to care for someone, that is usually where I try to focus my care, because I think that those kinds of intuitive resistances are the worst kind. I don't want to use ‘reactionary’ but I guess that fits in some way.
There are other things I could say about care. For example I also often think of it in terms of providing material and physical support in all the ways that it's possible to do so without preventing me from being able to do so in the future.
JK: I think it's quite interesting that, in your formulation, care is this extremely intentional and material, tangible thing. That [it] is something that you are thinking really hard about how to practice. You mentioned specifically trying to combat against your instincts because obviously the instincts surrounding why we might care about something, or care about how someone feels more than someone else, is political. It makes me curious about how you feel amidst all this.
S: How I feel, in terms of how trying and often failing to care makes me feel?
JK: I guess what your feelings are. I was really struck when you said, “Oh well, sometimes if I don't want to care for this person, or if I find it difficult to care for this person, then I try really hard to specifically focus on doing that and overcoming that. And sometimes vice versa.” I was quite struck by this sense that you're sort of fighting against your own instincts. I think that's really reasonable in terms of how you've outlined it, it makes so much sense and I do agree, especially in the context of working with people who are unhoused and who are vulnerable and who sometimes have a host of psychological triggers and stuff that can make it really hard to provide support. I think that is really important. But it did make me curious about how I feel this great distance between the response that you gave and between anything that might be personal to you or closer to your body or closer to your heart.
S: Yeah. I think, in a sense, I've exaggerated the dynamic to tease out a thought.
When I started, I mentioned the family… Part of my feeling the way I do comes from feeling that the nuclear family hasn't worked for me and [comes out] of the desire to receive the care I hope to give to others myself. To receive a kind of care which is also critical, which also isn't bound by certain kinds of circumstances. Those circumstances could be political discrimination, but I'm also thinking about times when my personal frustration with somebody has made me feel that it's difficult to reach out to them. I'm trying to recognize that it's not always eminently political.
The second part of that is… I think that the strong desire to care and the feelings that one has for others, that makes one want to care for them, often nonetheless comes along with some resistances, right? I think about the feeling of impotence that I feel when I read about the genocide, or even, on a very different scale, when I'm just walking around the city and see the awful situation of so many people living around me. The feeling that comes with feeling angry and wanting to do something for them, but not being able to do something [directly] or feeling unable to do something, and how one rationalizes those thoughts from moment to moment.
JK: As you were speaking, I was thinking about Jordan Neely. I was in New York last month, for a week. The whole time I was thinking about Jordan Neely.
At the very start of your response to this question, you said, “I want to be able to care for people in every way that I can, as long as it doesn't stop me from continuing to do it in the long term,” and I really like that formulation. It made me think of a couple [of] things. Firstly, you are the person that introduced me and our friends to the book Burnout by Hannah Proctor. I only recently managed to finish reading it in one sitting and I was so struck by all the ways in which it resonated with me. What did you think about that book?
Secondly, I was thinking about this question in response to what you said. Do you feel the imperative to reach out to everyone as far as [possible]? To always reach out?
S: [Burnout] influenced me in a big way, how I think about things. You're right to make that connection. In a way, that particular formulation that you've just mentioned, about care as much as possible [insofar as] it doesn't prevent me from doing so in the future, [is] a thought I can credit to that book specifically. So many of its ideas have become integral to how I think about things that it's almost difficult to discuss simply as a book. The central ideas and some of the discussions of feeling are just so… I'm thinking about them all the time, and so I've almost lost sight of the book because of that.
What was the second part of your question?
JK: Do you feel the imperative to always reach out? Or do you think that one should or must always reach out?
S: That's funny, it sounds like a loaded question.
JK: Oh, I'm sorry, I don't mean it at all like that. You don't have to answer it. The reason why I ask is because [of] how I know you as a friend, but also from this interview… I was thinking about this deep, deep, deep care that you have, and how much you think about everything. You said the ways in which we make assumptions about care, about relationships, and about ‘what we owe to each other’ often fail people for a myriad of reasons, and I think about the frustrations that we have: sometimes you don't want to reach out or sometimes you don't want to deal with this; what it means to overextend yourself, but also what it means to try and do your best within your possibilities. I was struck by this deep desire [you expressed] to reach out to everyone all the time. I don't think that's a bad thing at all. I mostly ask as a way to ask if you wanted to elaborate on that.
S: Responding to the question on its face: I do. Doing so is not only about how you feel about reaching out, but also, reaching out to everyone who needs to be reached out to can be practically difficult. When I have friends or comrades who I know have been involved in something very difficult, even if I'm not really that closely affiliated with them—which obviously kind of sucks and can sometimes limit the remit of my ability to care, especially if I'm not around physically—I actually will often set reminders to myself to check in [with] people. There's a lot to be said about the limits to the kinds of checking in that is sending people messages, you know? I feel very painfully aware of that. But even that is worth doing if it’s all I can do, rather than not doing it, so I do it. There are always reasons why people might not be able to or [don’t] feel like they can respond. But I don't know many people who really dislike being checked in on.
Wanting to reach out to everyone at once: the answer is yeah. I think that what you said does describe how I feel. Something that I feel is running through this—especially because you mentioned the Hannah Proctor book—[is] about limits, about ability, about capacity (that word activists use so much). I'm always thinking about what is within my ability to do. Because I have a long-term illness, I am faced most days with a hard limit, which makes things a bit easier for me in some ways.
But I do struggle with it. I might have time to do something for someone, but I can’t because I'm having a flare-up. I also have little money, which also limits me. I have thought about this a lot, especially since someone I know committed suicide, about capitalism—how hard it, and all its consequences, makes it for us to care for each other.
JK: That was really thoughtful. It's just nice to hear what you have to say. I love you.
S: I love you.
JK: What are some things that you're currently looking to learn or to learn about?
S: Plumbing and electricity. First aid. Harm reduction. How to stop using Google. Land law.
JK: Is there anything else that you would like to say or to ask me?
S: I would be interested in your answers to some of the same questions. I'm interested in what you want to learn about, and also how you think about your own activism.
JK: Thank you for asking. I'll keep it brief… First of all, the reason why I'm doing this: I have been thinking a lot about relationality, care, burnout, feelings circles, talking circles, and [the] sustainability of movements, and how to keep everything going, and where to locate and what to do with feelings, especially difficult or bad feelings. I've wanted to do this for a really long time, and I'm really excited to do so. I'm really aware of the limitations of this project, especially the fact that I aim to publish it online, so there's only so much that we’re able to talk about, but it's obviously only one iteration. The other day, I was talking to my friend [Dri] and we were both like, “Little projects are the stuff of life.”
S: Yeah, I agree.
JK: So this is one of my little projects. The reason why I ask these kinds of questions… Ideally, I would sit down for, like, a whole week and just ask my friend to tell me every single thing about their life, especially how they grew up and how they came to be who they are today. Tell me everything, I want to know everything. But obviously that's not possible.
What are some things I'm currently looking to learn about? I want to learn more about care: ideas of care, the politics of care, care work, feelings circles…
S: Yeah, I can add that to my list as well: conflict resolution.
JK: Conflict resolution, yeah. Facilitating conflict and tension. Because tension will always be there, and it's not about deleting it or suppressing it, it's about figuring out how we can be. Reading Burnout, what really struck me was all the ways in which people have tried so hard to figure these things out. That it's important to think about.
S: I would say that what really struck me about the book was, I think it represents quite a dim view of leftist movements, in a way, and how [for] so many people doing activism work, revolutionary work, guerrilla uprisings etc., it hasn't seemed possible for them to reckon with their emotions. That was really striking. I felt grateful for the book, because it made me also acknowledge what a significant development it is that people in leftist movements and in activism seem to think more about that now.
JK: I had just finished reading Everything for Everyone by Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O’Brien and I was thinking about how hopeful and doggedly steadfast in hope that book was, and how different I feel right now. I'm much more burnt out, where that felt almost naive to me, the sincerity of it. It irritated me just a little bit. I was [telling you and our mutual friend] about how, to me, that book came from this radical, exhilarating hope of 2020 and of BLM and of the experience of coming out of your house where you had been trapped for so long to go on the street and protest and feel so connected to everyone that was there. And thinking about how it's been a really long time since I've really felt that kind of feeling, that hasn't also been coupled with a complete sense of exhaustion.
On the same day [that] I finished reading Everything for Everyone, I picked back up Burnout, which I had left at page 20, and finished it. I was like, “Wow, it's so funny, everything that I've just expressed is so reflected in Burnout.” All of these different circumstances. This sense of utter exhaustion, but then still wanting to go on, but not knowing if you're ever gonna get back that doggedness. And then you said, “That's really funny. I feel like the last time I felt real hope was the 2019 general election.”
The question “How did you become politically engaged?” is intentionally really vague and up to interpretation of what the person responding thinks ‘politically engaged’ means. There's politicization or becoming aware of one's place in society and of the structural injustices of society. And then there's getting meaningfully involved, personally, in these kinds of movements. I could tell these stories in many different ways.
You and I have both shared about how strange it is—when you're a teenager, you really are upset about [everything that’s wrong in the world], and you want to do stuff about it, but feel this sense that you're not actually doing anything. The enormous step that it is, to take that step from being what you call a ‘consumer of politics’ to really feeling like you are materially and physically involved in some way. I personally feel a lot of shame, sometimes, or embarrassment around the ways in which I failed to be maximally involved in everything, all my life.
But I would agree, I think my life has fundamentally changed so much in the past year and a half. When I think of who I was in September 2023, it feels like such a completely different life. A lot of the things that this ongoing genocide in Palestine has really clarified for me—what really drove things home for me, that was different and devastating—is the utter complicity of ordinary people. How corrupt our everyday institutions are. I was a bit naive before, in that I [thought] that most people were generally on the same page about things. Then I realized that wasn't the case. That was really heartbreaking for me, to feel that whilst also getting the news every day about the horrors taking place in Palestine itself.
S: That really resonates with me. There's a lot of complex feelings there, about not being engaged [in this manner] before, and the kinds of guilt that come with that. I’m not sure if guilt is the right word. I'm still feeling the effects of the changes in my outlook, and things that came after the beginning of the genocide, and I’m still finding it difficult to navigate. I feel my relationships with other people have been affected a lot.
There's something really complex there about personal involvement and other people, how it's difficult to reckon with apathy from other people. Other people might broadly be on the same page [as you], but there's somehow some real degree of difference in participation that’s hard to overcome.
I was thinking about the concept of solidarity and how I've recently been more personally critical of other people that I'm around, when I feel that they're behaving in ways that are anathema to solidarity. Not putting your money where your mouth is [when it comes to] your interpersonal relationships. I think they're related, right? People being on the same page, but not really bringing home those principles to their everyday actions.
Talking about this is difficult, because there's a lot of conflicting ideas. There's some self-righteousness there, because we’re all guilty of some of these things, but there's some personal frustration and resentment too, there's hurt.
JK: For a really long time, I guess 10 years now, there's been this one guiding quotation for me. The quote, from Tuck and Yang's ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor,’ goes: “Solidarity is an uneasy, reserved, and unsettled matter that neither reconciles present grievances nor forecloses future conflict.” I’ve carried that line with me so much, especially the words ‘uneasy’ and ‘unsettled’ (obviously ‘unsettled’ is directly referencing decolonisation, settler colonialism, the returning of land). ‘Uneasy’ and ‘unsettled’ and ‘tense’ and ‘not a given.’
The idea of the queer community, the ‘this’ community, the ‘that’ community, [is a phrase] that people have thrown around a lot. For the past few years, I've been thinking a lot about that idea… Especially in my own work with Sine Theta and the fundamental idea that there is such a thing as a Sino diaspora and that it it’s useful to use that as a form of identification—not just diasporic in general, which is also important to me, but then specifically, what is ‘the Sino diaspora’? Thinking about what solidarity means. [The quote has] been really important for me—my instinct to avoid conflict and to be afraid of any kind of conflict; that’s something that I want to combat.
But then, as you know, it turns out that Eve Tuck is a Zionist who's been married to an NYPD officer this entire time. That sense of deep betrayal and anger that I felt when I found that out [is] because this quote has been so important to me. That paper was one of the first things I ever read on my own, that I found on the Internet—it was part of [a version of] the Ferguson Syllabus [created] after Michael Brown Jr. was murdered… I found it on Tumblr. That deep betrayal that I felt around this, around discovering that people don't always put their money where their mouth is. In some ways maybe it proves that quote, but I also think that the uneasiness of solidarity isn't really about Zionists and cops, it's about those of us who really care. That’s what you just said made me think of: who is solidarity?
S: Something that quote brings up for me is also… I guess it's the ‘unease’ element. Some trans feminist stuff like Julia Serano [and] this book Red Africa [by Kevin Ochieng Okoth] discuss, in different ways, solidarity and coalition. How there's a conflict between solidarity formed out of something that is both imagined and truly shared between people, like the solidarity that comes from all being renters in a renters’ union. But then there's the fact that sometimes when we act in solidarity, there are different hierarchies and different lines of oppression affecting us each as individuals or as subgroups. There's a possible flattening effect to the politics of solidarity as it's traditionally conceived. The LGBTQ community is the LGBTQ community. Trans, intersex, lesbian people, gay men, are all simply reduced to being “part of the LGBTQ community.”
It makes me think of this concept from this scholar [Marisa Galvez], this idea of opaque coherence. A false coherence that arises from something or is initiated from outside… Often, it's reified, and therefore it's damaging to all the constituent elements, whose specific character and differing needs are obscured. I don't know, I'm not expressing that well.
JK: Would you like to conclude our interview?
S: Yeah, go on then.