Queer Crip Papertrails – Zine Workshop
Want to know how to squat a building? Recover from debilitating depression? Combat fat phobia? Or just understand the world or yourself a bit differently? You can be sure that there’s a zine around to tell you.
Long before the advent of Instagram, our queer forebears were creating paper-based zines about their experiences of being disabled and queer. These zines contain radical reimaginings of what it means to be disabled, or chronically sick, or have a brain that doesn’t work the way it’s “supposed” to or live in a body that doesn’t conform to normative ideas about gender or beauty.
In this workshop, we follow the queer/crip paper-trail, looking at zines such as Diseased Pariah News, written at the height of the AIDS pandemic; ‘90s zine series Ring of Fire by E.T Russian (under the pen name Hellery Homosex); and Femme Shark Communique: Against Intra-Uterine Cannibalism!!! by queer disability justice activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and their collective, as well as many other zines from the library.
After that, we will create our own communal zine, hacking up a copy of the DSW (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used to diagnose mental illness) and creating our own interpretations through free-writing, collage and creative copying.
No zine-making experience is necessary, and the workshop is open to all queers, crips and allies. It will be held in Slash Gallery, a wheelchair-accessible space.
To SIGN UP , please mail Sara to sararosaespi@gmail.com
LOCATION:
It will be held in Slash Gallery, a wheelchair-accessible space.
ABOUT THE FACILITATOR:
Sara Rosa Espi is a recovering academic, queer parent, archivist, and writer. In her research as part of the project “Back to the Book” at the University of Utrecht, Sara focussed on the publishing of paper-based zines in a digital age. Her zines Too Much/Never Enough: ADD, Academia and Life in a Wild Mind; Curiosity Killed the Cat But it Saved My Bacon and Burnout all explore what it means to live with ADHD. She’s also published academic articles including Vulnerability Disclosures; Writing Dyslexia and Visual Text and Media Divergence. https://sararosaespi.wordpress.com
Image caption: Image of a display case filled with zines in various shades of pink. Taken on location in Milwaukee, at the Queer Zine Archive Project. qzap.org