Liberated to the Bone

media release: Liberated to the Bone author Susan Raffo will join Liz Bruno, Gery Paredes Vasquez, and Cynthia Lin - Madison community members and students of healing justice - in a discussion about healing and liberation at all levels of being and belonging. Take an opportunity to practice listening to your aliveness and embodied wisdom, and join the dialogue toward building transformative, relational movement spaces.

This is an in-person event at A Room of One’s Own

Susan Raffo is a writer, cultural worker and bodyworker who does much of her work through the Healing Histories Project, a network of abolitionist healers/health practitioners, community organizers, researchers/historians & cultural workers building solidarity to interrupt the medical industrial complex and harmful systems of care, as well as locally as a core group member of REP, a Black-led network showing up to support others in moments of crisis or urgency, with care and respect for the full dignity and autonomy of those in crisis. She is the author of Queerly Classed (1997), Restricted Access (1999), and most recently, Liberated to the Bone, the seventh book in the Emergent Strategy Series with AK Press.

Liz Bruno is an ongoing student of life, love and Raffo. They are  a somatic practitioner dedicated to repairing lineages of harm, reclaiming aliveness, and building collective power and possibility.

Geraldine (Gery) Paredes Vásquez is a lifelong practitioner and collaborator for intersectional justice, collective healing and liberation currently serving as YWCA Madison’s Race and Gender Equity Director.  

Cynthia Lin is Deputy Director of Movement Building at the National Network of Abortion Funds, a board member of local abortion fund WMF Wisconsin, and an organizer at heart who centers connection and curiosity. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

Liberated to the Bone: Histories. Bodies. Futures. addresses the intersections between healing our physical bodies and healing our social relations which are shaped by violence. Bodyworker and cultural worker Susan Raffo addresses intergenerational trauma, social justice, organizing, and how all of these things are relevant to our bodies. The book illuminates three different approaches to healing: ending violence, the significance of being rooted in the present, and creating the conditions to address unfinished histories and generational trauma. By showing how these approaches are intricately connected—physically and emotionally—Raffo interrupts the traumatic binaries of the political and spiritual, the physical and intellectual, and healing and organizing.