Teaching Authorship, Gender and Identity through Grrrl Zines Production

Abstract

Zines are self- published, non-commercial magazines that range in size, form and genre, and that tackle the most disparate issues including stories from everyday life. While academia has been reluctant to bring zines within the classroom due to their non-academic layout, multitude of styles, broken grammar, strong tones and content, this paper explains what brings zines into existence and how the latter give girls and women a chance to produce and write culture while creating new spaces of resistance. It will also investigate the politics of writing, the contradictions in grrrl zines, and their potential in displacing the boundaries of socially established conventions about language and authorship. Mary Louise Pratt’s (1991) theory of the ‘Arts of the contact zone’ will be used to investigate how auto-ethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation and vernacular expressions are incorporated in the zine MOON ROOT, AN EXPLORATION OF ASIAN WOMYN’S BODIES, which explores the diverse bodily experiences of women, gender queer and trans people of Asian descent living diaspora.

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