Curatorial Statement by Dr. Adrienne Shaw:

In MSP 4425: LGBTQ Media Representation students spend the semester engaging with mainstream and subcultural forms of queer media representation including zines from the Beth Heinly Zine Collection (online here) in Temple’s Special Collections Research Center. Zines are traditionally self-published, paper copies, distributed through subcultural communities, and include original and appropriated material. It’s a varied art form, with few rules and lots of room to experiment. With the spread of digital publication tools some creators are moving towards digital zines as they can reach different audiences and allow for different types of reader/text interactions. The final
project for this course asks students to explore key concepts from the course material in a zine that is either in hard copy or digital form, with an accompanying paper to explain how their zine reflects the course material. The two digital zines here showcase the different formats such a project might take.

Christopher Persaud chose a digital format that looks more like a paper zine but with higher reproduction quality for his project. “What kind of world do you want?” uses black and white images and text to communicate powerful messages about the importance of queer political critique of mainstream media practices and hegemonic discourse. His interweaving of historical and contemporary examples, personal reflection and scholarly analysis, make this a particularly powerful example of what a zine-aesthetic can communicate.

Nirvan West, on the other hand, used the tool Twine to create an interactive zine that is essentially a message to his younger self about the importance of media representation. He goes back and forth between reflecting on what images and messages he had access to as a child and the radical, political, challenging forms of queer representation that he later found through the course. By discussing historical and contemporary examples of radical and mainstream LGBTQ representation his zine resists a progressive narrative, while also communicating an evolution in his own thinking.