Tagged with talks

Barnard Library Zine Collection
Pratt Institute LMS Class

November 19, 2008

with Teacher/Librarian Melissa Jones
Professor Jessica Hochman

Fierce and Fabulous: Feminist Women Writers, Artists, and Activists class taught by Ileana Jiménez at the Little Red School House/Elisabeth Irwin High School

Ileana's bio:
Ileana Jimenez has been teaching English in independent schools for twelve years. For the first seven years of her career, Ileana brought a feminist vision to single sex girls’ schools in Baltimore and Washington, DC. Working with girls and encouraging them to write personal stories about race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and body image became the focus of both her classroom and scholarly work. She now teaches at the Little Red School House & Elisabeth Irwin High School (www.lrei.org), where she offers courses on feminist women writers, artists, and activists; race, class, and gender in American culture; LGBT literature and film; Latino/a literature; memoir writing; and a seminar on Toni Morrison. Ileana also coordinates a professional affinity group for LGBT independent school educators in New York, and continues to be involved in national conversations about education and social justice. She frequently leads presentations on integrating Latina/o and LGBT authors in the classroom as well as creating inclusive programming for LGBT students of color and their allies at the annual NAIS People of Color Conference and the NYSAIS diversity conference. She is also a frequent panelist and speaker at Smith, particularly for the college’s diversity, alumnae admissions, and alumnae affinity group initiatives. She is currently the board vice chair and secretary of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice (www.astraea.org) and is a judge for the Lambda Literary Awards, one of the nation’s premier LGBT awards. Ileana received her MA in English Literature at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English and her BA in English Literature at Smith College.

Zines are important in archives for a number of reasons. First of all, they represent an important primary source of information for future historians. They usually come from subcultures that are poorly documented in the larger culture. Furthermore, unlike the traditional print media, they represent an unmediated rendition of people's experiences in a particular place and time distributed to a significant (albeit small) audience. Secondly, in a time when writing communities are increasingly digital ( e.g. blogs, myspace, facebook), the print culture of the zine world is unique in its sociology. People make zines, trade them with others, write letters, and meet other like minded people. The zine genre is almost as well known for its creation of community as it is for its contribution of physical documents.

Within the context of lgbt archives, the theme of building community is an important one. However, the traditional method of cataloging and housing zines (as monographs or serials) does little to preserve the context out of which the documents were created. Despite this, the culture of community still plays an important role and overlaps into archives preserving zines. This panel will present the views of queer zine collecting in academic as well as non-traditional archives and libraries. We will discuss the ways that the diy zine communities overlap into these collections, as well as the ways the larger parent institution shapes the type of community involvement.

This workshop will introduce skills to novice and veteran media makers alike, encouraging them to 'research like a librarian,' providing tips on how to find and recognize appropriate resources for researching and fact checking their stories. The presenters will be happy to adapt this workshop to whomever is in the room, but the impetus for proposing it is sharing skills with those newer to advanced research and critical thinking. However, people who are already confident in their research skills will undoubtedly learn some things, too. The facilitators can field questions on fact checking and research, but also on the mysteries of tagging, RSS feeds and the like. Slides and handouts available from Radical Reference.