For teaching: Designing Zines

The raison d’être of these assignments: Unruly Bodies in Media and Literature is a class that I developed over the years, and the class questions the liminality of those bodies that are deemed improper within an order of aesthesis (in the way Jacques Rancière uses the term). Precisely because we are thinking of those bodies that cannot be appropriated, students often find themselves discussing the marginalized bodies with a language that is designed to speak from the margins: the disabled, the queer, the animal, the in-between are themselves liminal concepts hence I wanted students to design zines both to account for the irreducibility of these concepts to the normative forms of writing and to practice this form of writing as a subversive act fitting to the monstrosity of the bodies that we discuss.

HOW TO DESIGN?

I did not know how to design zines or how to create a zine assignment. Yet, I am very lucky as Honors College in Rutgers is extremely supportive in creative education, and with their help, I actually invited a zine scholar, Dr. Irmak Ertuna- Howison, to do a zine-making workshop in one of my class sessions via zoom (while this pandemic is truly horrific, it made some things possible: to be able to invite a great expert to my class in a way that is easy and environmentally friendly). She ran a great workshop beginning with the history of zines and how they were always the voice of the margins with hands-on exercises for zine-making. Finally, she provided students with very practical google suite based zine templates that students can work on directly. Many of the zines done for the final assignment (monstrous zines) have used her templates.

For the first zine assignment, students were paired to create zines on monsters that they had picked from The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters. Here the emphasis was to examine how the bodies of the monsters create abnormalities. My aim at this juncture is to provide students with a chance to briefly investigate the bodily performances that we discussed in the class on monsters of their own choosing.

The final project was larger and more complex, where students had to do more thorough research based on some of the theoretical or practical bifurcations of the concepts that we unpacked together in the class. Hence some of them chose to think about the concept of Julia Kristeva’s “abject” while others investigated how anomalous bodies are treated in medicine using critical disability theories. The final project also asked them to create a shorter version of their longer zine for our community to easily print out, read and disseminate these zines.