Over the course of my senior year, I am going to create a zine series on feminist science studies (aka what I am not being taught via my science degree) to share with others. Before I delve deeper into why I chose a zine format, let me first talk about what exactly feminist science studies is.
WHAT IS FEMINIST SCIENCE STUDIES???
Feminist science studies is, in short, the examination of science with a feminist lens. This is a pretty hefty topic as science itself is so diverse. (Stay tuned - I will go into more detail in a later post).
Zine and online format
I believe that the best way of facilitating awareness amongst my peers is by creating an accessible text that gives them a taste of my research without requiring them to read the entirety of my thesis. The medium of this accessible text came to me immediately: a zine.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with zines, they are a homemade booklets or little magazines. Zines often include personal and political narratives as well as information that is not readily available in other formats (aka what magazines and newspapers are not talking about). Zines cover a diverse range of subjects; I am pretty certain you could find a zine on absolutely everything.
A popular subset of zines are called “grrrl zines.” Grrrl zines gained their popularity in the early 1990s with popular zines like Jigsaw and Riot Grrrl(Piepmeier 2009: 2). The rewriting of “girl” for these zines was meant to “incorporate an angry growl” (Piepmeier 2009: 5). These zines are created by women and are used to create discourse (Piepmeier 2009: 2). As Piepmeiers states in Girl Zines: making Media and Doing Feminism, “Grrrl zines offer idiosyncratic, surprising, yet savvy and complex responses to the late-twentieth-century incarnations of sexism, racism, and homophobia” (4).My intent is to create a grrrl zine along those very same lines: My zine will be a response to my experiences as a female science student, equity in the field, and some studies that I find to be backwards.
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