Tagged with zines

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.

18th Annual Women's Studies Conference at Southern Connecticut State University

Zines are self-published, but the motivation behind their publication is different than that driving many vanity press and chapbook authors. The principles of punk rock and riot grrrl community are fundamental to zines, not just as the cultures that birthed them in their current incarnation, but also as what separates them from other self-publications. By collecting and preserving zines, the non-music primary sources of punk rock, librarians are documenting these movements in the participants’ own voices—the voices of those too young, too politically radical, too crusty, and/or too bad mannered to appeal to the corporate media. It is important to note that zine producers are not only people who have been relegated to the margins but also people who have chosen to claim the margins. In contrast to most writers, many zine producers might choose to reject an offer from corporate publishing house. Why let someone else control what you can say, when you can do it yourself? This presentation will address the politics and cultural motivations of zine publication and contrast them with other types of self-publication. Focusing specifically on materials from Barnard College’s open-stack zine collection that uses riot grrrl and other third wave feminist zines to enhance its research-oriented Women’s Studies book collection, this paper will go on to explore why zines belong in established library collections.