After a while of the Book Club being inactive, it has restarted this week with its first session of 2018. On Tuesday 27th February, we discussed a chapter about sexual identities, especially regarding asexuality. In another two and a half weeks, we will already meet for the second session. But what is the idea behind the Book Club?
My name is Josie Schäfer, I’m an Erasmus+ student from Germany and will be studying social work for one semester at Mykolas Romeris University, at the same time I’m doing a part time internship at LGL. As the main focus of my internship I’ve decided to restart the Book Club since I really enjoy both reading and having a good discussion.
Book Club is about meeting up in a comfortable atmosphere and spend some time with nice company, a cup of tea and discuss a book together – and in these temperatures to escape the cold for some hours!
With this restart of the Book Club we have decided to host it every three weeks. This means that three weeks before a meeting, the scan of the chapter for the new session will be put online for the participants to read. At the event we then talk about the chapter and share our opinions about it. In the best case the participants will have read the chapter before the meeting, but it’s not completely necessary. So it’s definitely worth coming for the discussion if someone’s interested in the general topic.
The Book Club started at the end of 2016 as a personal project of former Slovakian EVS Volunteer, Veronika Štefečková. At that time it carried on for five sessions, discussing a multitude of topics from the intersection of feminism and vegetarianism to queer families, both from fictional and non-fictional books.
Since the start of my internship I had been preparing the first session of Book Club with lots of help from Rasa, who had participated in the previous sessions, as well as Kamila, the Volunteers’ Coordinator at LGL. So, this Tuesday we successfully made the first Book Club of 2018 happen. The chapter we discussed was called “Forging an (A)sexual Identity” from the book Understanding Asexuality by Anthony F. Bogaert and was about sexual identities – how they are being formed and for what reasons they can be important to people of different sexual orientations. We had a really great time discussing some aspects of the chapter, e.g. how it was a little disappointing that bisexual people are barely mentioned, and pansexual people not at all. But we also talked about things that weren’t mentioned in the chapter – how there’s a scale from being asexual to being sexual, with areas of demi or grey asexuality, and shared some personal experiences. I’m very grateful that we had such a nice first Book Club session, and I’m very much looking forward to the next ones!
If you’re interested in coming to the next meeting or want to propose a book to talk about you can find all information and my contacts on Facebook in the group “Book Club @ LGL”, or you can contact me directly at josefinschaefer@web.de.
