Assignment #3: Intersectional Identities and Art Activisms: Zine [click this link to download a copy of the assignment]
>DUE AS TEAM OF 2-4 STUDENTS:
1) each team comes up with one zine prototype that includes 6-8
artistic elements. This
is a creative element and should be fun!
2) each team creates a 1-2 page description of your zine. Think of
this as an extended caption (like the captions you read during your museum
visits!) that accompanies this work of activist art and incorporates your
critical engagement with your reading and research.
3) each person in the team will individually analyze their own
intersectional identity in about 3 pages of writing. Even though this statement
is about your identity, you should critically engage with your
classmates and team members to gain an understanding of your location (inside
the matrix of domination) in relation to others.
Intersectionality is always relational! Each team member will do theirs
individually and simply stack them together as a team collection.
In other words: The artistic/activist
component of this experience set is to make a zine! This 2-4 person team
project will be presented poster-style to the entire class. EVERYONE must be present and participate in
the team presentation of these in the Tuesday lecture 14 November. During the session, you will engage with the projects of
other teams as well. This assignment is worth ⅓ of your course grade, and the study of intersectionality is the
most important part. All components are due to your TA in hard copy at the end
of lecture on Tuesday, November 17th.
The purpose of this
assignment is to experience, understand, analyze, and produce a creative work
on intersectionality. Your team of 2-4 students will create a zine that
addresses a political issue as well as explores how feminists grapple with
intersectionality personally and collectively. You will share your analysis and
art activist project in a “festival” poster session with others in a curatorial
format of your choice, appropriate to share with others in a station of work
from your team.
You will find feminist zine inspirations in two of our
recommended books, The Bedside Companion by the Guerrilla Girls, and Capitalism
Must Die! by McMillan, as well as in all the work of Alison Bechdel! Don't
forget the hard
copies of zines in the Women’s Studies Multimedia Lab! Check out in the UMD
library: Girl Zines (Alison Piepmeier and Andi Zeisler), A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over the World: Writings from the Girl
Zine Revolution (Ed. Green & Taromino) and The Archival Turn in Feminism:
Outrage in Order (Eichhorn). Also look online at:
http://www.feminist.org/research/zines.html (full magazines, longer
publications)
What is so cool about
zines?
In contrast to magazines, zines are
small-circulation, independently published texts often connected with punk,
third wave feminist, and DIY cultural movements. They allow unheard individuals
and collectives to produce and circulate art and writing that resonates with
their political investments in contrast to traditional, capitalist modes of
publishing.
STEPS TO TAKE! TEAMS
WILL BE CREATED IN YOUR DISCUSSION SECTION!
1. Team artistic component:
A.
Create a zine on the theme of intersectionality (either a print
and crafty version or an “ezine” on a website such as tumblr). If you choose to
do an ezine, you must also have some kind of hard copy (poster, artwork,
etc) for the team-presentation session. You may have your laptop or tablet to
showcase your electronic work in a presentation station, but you will not be
able to display this work on the overhead projectors. We encourage you to draw
on the stories from Octavia’s Brood for inspiration!
B.
The Zine must include multiple content forms. This means your
publication should include 6-8 components produced by team members, such as:
fiction, photography, comic strips, visual art, sculpture, crafts, video art,
dance, music, poetry, collage, word cloud, song lyrics, diorama, or anything
else that lets you be creative!
C.
Note that the zine should focus primarily on larger structures of
power and oppression, as well as on any personal experiences.
2. Writing components:
A. As a team, collectively write a 1-2 page “caption” for your
zine. What should readers know about the intent behind your
illustrations, writing, and artistic elements generally? What does each element
add to the zine as a whole? How does the zine actively work to illustrate
the matrix of domination? How does your zine demonstrate feminists grappling
with intersectionality as a process?
B. As a team, compile a paper that speaks
to your team’s intersectional identities. Briefly interview or have a
conversation with your partners about their intersectional identities, and then
individually write a 3-page "analysis of everyday life." Each team
member’s 3 pages will stake together as the team collective paper.
You should think critically about your own lived realities, as well as
make a substantive comparison to your partners’ experiences. This is an analytic analysis in which you come up with a
conceptual map for where you see power located in your own everyday life.
- Deconstruct marked/unmarked categories (rather than just acknowledging privilege). More about these in class!!
- Observe how power moves and shifts through your everyday life
Use
both the notions of power as, on the one hand, choices, influence, optimism but
especially privilege, and on the other hand, as constraint, limits, necessity,
but especially oppression. YOU MUST DISCUSS THE MATRIX OF OPPRESSION IN
WHICH YOU ARE LOCATED: BOTH YOUR OWN PRIVILEGE AND YOUR OWN OPPRESSION.
This is not about analyzing your blessings and being thankful for them, even
though such examination can matter, but about something perhaps more
uncomfortable and less often thought about: how your privileges are unearned
and the effects of a system in which others are oppressed. This is not
about blame and guilt, but about being curious and concerned about what it
takes to understand this honestly, and as a prelude to addressing issues of
social justice very broadly. Think about ways that agency is constricted,
made available, and reclaimed from both privileged and oppressed
positionalities.
Thinking of yourself in
terms of the intersectional categories you embody is an example of a conceptual
map. Other examples of conceptual maps are bell hooks’ “railroad tracks” story,
identity as a “roundabout,” etc.
3) Make connections with at least two course texts:
From our Required texts:
=Octavia’s Brood or a work by Octavia Butler (such as The
Parable of the Sower). You
can use this text as examples of storytelling. Zines are similarly a form of
storytelling.
=Fun Home, The Indelible Alison Bechdel, Dykes to Watch Out For or any other work by Alison Bechdel
Additional accompanying
texts:
=Guerilla
Girls’ Bedside Companion
=Capitalism Must Die! - Stephanie McMillan
Book website: (http://stephaniemcmillan.org/shop/capitalism-must-die/)
=That
of other graphic artists like Marguerite Abouet and Gene Luen Yang.
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