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What are these zines? Our brief story….

These zines are the results of creative work performed by the students of the Fall 2021 Semester Interdisciplinary Honor Seminar titled Unruly Bodies in Literature and Media. In this class, we explored the question of those bodies that are often demarcated as “weird,” “strange,” “disgusting,” “abnormal,” “queer,” and “unruly.”

Our specific concern was those bodies categorized as monstrous and how they function to form and/or disrupt a unified, consistent discourse of the West and its proper boundaries. We looked at the ways in which the appearance of the monstrous body- with its legions and regions, its denial of binary forms of gender, its tentacles and serpentine arms, its cold and mildewed skin-  disrupts concepts of normalcy and asks us to reconsider our ways of being, doing, and living.

In lieu of a midterm paper, students created zines on monsters. You can read them on the zines on monsters page.

As a final project, this time, instead of zines on monsters, they created monstrous zines: the aim is to produce affective and critical work yet still within the broad spectrum of zines. For the final project, students created a long zine and a shorter version. Feel free to check them out, download them, fold them and distribute them around. They are monstrous zines: students designed them to be aesthetically provoking, intellectually challenging, and thoughtfully enjoyed for our community and beyond. Feel free to read, enjoy and disseminate.

Finally, as a teacher and a scholar, I cannot thank my students enough for creating these unique works and continually supporting me and each other in thinking about hard questions and their monstrous answers.