LGBTQ Resource Center hosts a lecture exploring a decades old medium in the modern era.
By: Vincent Forlizzi
While digital communication grows in our communities, LGBTQ students and faculty at CSI discuss the benefits of print media and what to expect from the future of artistic expression.
Anne Adkison, Associate Professor & Coordinator of Library Instruction, held a lecture hosted by the LGBTQ Resource Center on Oct 24th. They referenced the term zines, used to describe DIY magazine-styled prints that are most often shared within minority communities. A zine can really be whatever you want it to be.
“My brain always gets to be alive when I’m thinking about zines,” said Adkison. “There are so many different questions you can ask about them.”
Adkison has been making zines themself since the 90s, and has focused much of their scholarly work around zines in the LGBTQ+ community specifically.
The lecture focused mostly on queer zine history, as well as archives such as QZAP which stands for Queer Zine Archive Project and ABC no Rio, which is a nonprofit for NYC artists and activities, who work to preserve that history today. Adkison is also hoping to start a zine archive here at CSI, which some students at the lecture expressed interest in helping them with.
As the lecture came to a close there was a focus on how zines would exist in this much more in our internet dominated world. Is there still room for this print art form? Adkison and CSI students believe there still is.
“I like making Zines because it feels more creative than posting online,” said Adkison. “On social media, you’re limited to a tiny box.”
For creatives like Adkison, the conformity of style in modern social media’s limit the potential for artistic expression. On a simple collection of paper pages, the possibilities are only limited by your creativity which is such a major shift from how we communicate and express ourselves online.
Grace McCue was one of the students at this lecture and she mentioned a friend of theirs who contributed artwork to FINAL DAYS, a digital fanzine for the video game series LISA. The zine was a massive collaboration between over 50 fan artists, and is hosted in its entirety on its own website.
“Making bigger projects, like whole fangames, takes a lot of resources,” said McCue. “Zines are much easier for smaller scale communities to crowdsource.”
As we move into an uncertain technological future, communication among minority communities is becoming ever more important. Adkison’s lecture on zines was part of a series of lectures hosted by the LGBTQ Resource Center. Two more lectures will be hosted in this series on other queer topics; November 21st they plan to discuss the correlation between minority women and alcohol.
“We are very fortunate here at CSI to have so many queer faculty and staff,” said Jeremaih Jurkiewicz, coordinator of the LGBTQ Resource Center. “We wanted to highlight that with this queer lecture series.”
