Visible Vulnerability: 'Zines Forever! DIY Publishing and Disability Justice' At The Wellcome Collection

'Zines Forever! DIY Publishing and Disability Justice', an exhibition at The Wellcome Collection curated by Dr Lea Cooper (artist and zinemaker) and Adam Rose (Assistant Curator, Wellcome Collection) opened its doors two weeks ago. Hearing about this exhibition got my heart racing for all the right reasons. I love anything that combines paper with emotional writing. I love diaries, journals, scrapbooks, letters. Aaaand I love zines.

I love zines because of their histories rooted in resistance. I also love them because they have beauty and they have use. This post is me waxing lyrical about why zines, radiating all their useful beauty, mean so much to me— and why I think some of you, who enjoy visiting this little corner of the internet, might find them valuable too.

But first, what's a zine if this word is unfamiliar to you? Zines (pronounced 'zeens' like the end of 'magazines') 'resist single definition'*. However, they are usually thought of as 'DIY' or homemade publications produced on a small scale and, crucially, not for profit. Often they are made from a few humble pieces of paper, a pen and held together with a couple of staples.

'Zines Forever! DIY Publishing and Disability Justice' at The Wellcome Collection explores the relationship between zines and disabled people. Zines, thanks to their histories rooted in resistance and some other reasons which I will get onto in a moment, have long been a favourite tool of disabled people and activists.

The zines featured in 'Zines Forever!' are from the ground-breaking zines archive I had the privilege—and joy—of exploring as part of my Master's degree in Medical Humanities a few years ago. This treasure-trove of an archive, now containing 1300+ zines themed on health, led me to research and write a dissertation entitled ''Just a mentally ill girl with a wifi connection’: DIY Publishing and Mental Illness'. Throughout this process, I became fascinated by how zines are often a liberating tool for expressing more stigmatised aspects of mental health problems, such as experiences with self-harm, psychosis, suicidal ideation and so on.

In ‘'Just a mentally ill girl with a wifi connection’: DIY Publishing and Mental Illness', I refer to texts whose main aim is 'to fulfil an unmet emotional need in their readers, as well as in the writers producing them'. I call these texts 'affectively-motivated texts' because I feel they have been 'crafted to facilitate emotional responses—in both directions— between the writer and the reader.

I understand these affectively-motivate texts as serving a dual and interrelated purpose: transmitting personal or intimate knowledge and mediating community around this personal or intimate knowledge. By the very nature of this dual and interrelated purpose, I realised quickly that affectively-motivated texts often contain sensitive or painful subject matter such as experiences of illness, trauma, struggles with feeling marginalised or misunderstood due to prejudice relating to disability, health, sexuality or gender and more.

However, something else struck me when I read some of the zines in the archive at The Wellcome Collection, as well as others outside of this archive** I recognised zine authors channeling uncomfortable, awkward and painful inward experiences into their zines and then trusting in the zines' form to do something outward with them.

I noticed that the authors were deliberately rendering the process of creation visible. Zines are unpolished, messy, tentative, crumpled and contradictory. They are full of mistakes and 'flaws'. They are full of all these things not because they don't care, but precisely because they do care. They care about their writers and their readers; and they care for their writers and their readers. They render their process of creation visible because this makes visible their authors' vulnerability. This visible vulnerability, I believe, facilitates the emotional qualities associated with healing. Healing from awkwardness, discomfort, pain or distress. These qualities are things like, but not limited to, gentleness, trust, acceptance, warmth and (one of my personal favourites) hope.

The emotional qualities associated with healing usually cannot be experienced in isolation from other human beings. Take tenderness (touch me, but touch me gently), affection (show me that you love me), intimacy (can you know me, can you let me know you?) and belonging (I want to feel a part of something that someone else feels a part of) for example. Where would these qualities be without a generous 0r caring other.

Noticing this 'visible vulnerability' made me understand why I was so into making and collecting zines for several years before I began researching and writing about them. Zines are liable to contain hopeful possibilities for people who have some aspect of themselves— their health, body, mind, sense of time, relationships or anything else— that feels uncomfortably inconsistent with other facets of themselves, others around them or the society in which they (try to) live.

Zines that share these personal themes and intimate narrative snippets are okay with all that uncomfortable inconsistency. In fact, they are more than okay with that. They revel in it. They delight in being messy, crumpled, incomplete or contradictory. I made this on my bed so it's crumpled. I was too tired/fed up to re-do this when I made a mistake. I didn't have a plan when I made this, but here's what I made anyway.

Zines are more than happy to encode their authors' bodies too: smudges, crinkles, folds. As feminist zines scholar Alison Piepmeier puts it in Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism, zines are 'paper artefacts that register the connections of the body and the passages of time'. For people with bodies and minds that have been medicalised, sexualised, storied, prodded and gazed at in all the wrong sorts of ways these paper artefacts might feel liberating. They absolutely did way for me way back in 2015 when I was struggling so painfully and so estrangingly with my freshly (rawly?) diagnosed BPD. I still remember how life-affirming these pieces of paper felt for me. There was nothing papery, nothing flimsy or inconistent, about that.

Zines unfailingly invite their readers closer. They intimate: hold me in your hand, turn my pages, put me in your pocket. I can only speak for myself, but I think an invitation (or a motivation?) to be touched, held or kept close is important for people who fear they will see disgust, shame, fear or pity in the eyes (or reflected in the eyes) of listeners when choosing to speak about more stigmatised aspects of their lives. I love the idea of making something that someone else can touch. I know my curiosity can get the better of me, but I also love the idea of touching something that someone else has made.

'Zines Forever!' happily allows its visitors to look at and touch the zines. Whilst others might experience the exhibition as voyeuristic or even exploitative, it didn't feel like that at all to me. I experienced it as moving, emotional, beautiful. I want zines to become visible because I want the lives of their authors to become visible. To me, becoming visible means coming out of the darkness. For me it means growth and, more than that, it means joy.

'Becoming visible: Zines about Self-Harm in Libraries' was the title of the essay I wrote in the run-up to my dissertation. In this essay I wrote about the brilliant zine ‘The Hysterical girls guide to self harm scars and stigma’ by Polly Richards. Richards writes about self-harm and also, reflexively, writes about writing about self-harm:

I’m not trying to shock anyone, I’m just letting myself become visible again. I deserve to take up space and be visible and be comfortable and I refuse to apologise for that anymore. (p. 5)

Both the showing of scars on the body and the showing of lines (written or drawn) on paper are a form of becoming visible and taking up space. Zines are a way of doing both of these things that might feel (ever so slightly) safer than other forms of communication— should you want to become visible or take up space at all, as these should be a choice not an imperative. In the zine ‘Everything.Is.Fine’ Nyxia Grey writes that '[z]ines and collages for me are spaces that I own’ [...] spaces that I can carve out that allow me to use my voice’.

Showing aspects of yourself that you may have hidden in all or some contexts, whether to a greater or a lesser extent, can understandably evoke complicated feelings like hesitancy, tentativeness or ambivalence. Should I do this or not? Am I safe or not? Will I regret this or not? Zines are absolutely fine with that sort of thing. They don't expect finished answers because they don't generally position themselves as finished products. Zines don't mind if you don't have the 'right' words yet. They don't mind if you want to fling a few words out to try them on for size. In fact, they encourage that kind of playfulness and experimentation. They are not a judgmental or demanding listener. They allow threads to dangle, untied.

In 'Why Zines Matter: Materiality and the Creation of Embodied Community', zines scholar Alison Piepmeier wrote that one reviewer of her work expressed that because ‘almost no humanities scholarship exists about zines [it?] makes me wonder if this is because the topic is simply not relevant to the humanities'. I believe zines are part of a larger web of affectively-motivated paper-based texts and artefacts such as scrapbooking, diary writing (by women), certain kinds of collage, pen pal/snail mail culture and more. Throughout history these have been dismissed as silly, whimsical, cutesy or childish— 'past-times' or 'hobbies' which should not be taken seriously or even be seen as legitimate forms of expression. In Girl Zines: Making Media Doing Feminism Alison Piepmeier writes of 'feminist participatory media'. I like the gravity of this term. Piepmeier traces pioneering paper artefacts like pamphlets written by women sharing knowledge of contraception, sexual health and related topics.**

People, often women or people marginalised on the basis of being disabled, neurodivergent, LGBTQ+ and more, have always turned to paper in subversive, playful, ambivalent and ultimately radical ways. These people have often been hiding their radicalness in plain sight with serious ideas and strong feelings dressed up as 'cute', 'whimsy' or 'childishness'. Many people have turned to zines, and the affective registers like 'whimsy', 'cute' and 'childish' that zines often leverage, to not only share their reality but to shape it in connection with others. And that is something that should not be taken lightly.

So, yeah, zines. I love them. And if you don't already love them, maybe you might fall in love with how they delight in messiness, resist definition and find comfort with contradiction. Being human means being allowed to not know all the answers. It also means you deserve to feel all these things like gentleness, hope, connection and warmth as you explore whatever you might need in any given moment.

I would love to hear from you about any or all of this!

-Rosie x

*Wording from one of the signs in the exhibition.

**When I was working on my dissertation the archive was far smaller. It was in its infancy and I think it had a hundred or so zines if I remember correctly.

***In 'Zines Forever!' I was introduced to a zine called 'Swallow it whole : a zine about PrEP for women / a collaboration between Black Fly & Prepster'. Until I read this zine, I wasn't aware of why PrEP feels important for lots of people.

References

Grey, Nyxia, 'Everything.Is.Fine' zine, date unknown.

Piepmeier Alison, 'Why Zines Matter: Materiality and the Creation of Embodied Community', American Periodicals , 2008, Vol. 18, No. 2 (2008), pp. 213-238.

Piepmeier Alison, Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism, 2009, New York University Press.

Richards, Polly, ‘The Hysterical girls guide to self harm scars and stigma’ zine, date unknown.

Related reading

Ngai Sianne, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute and Interesting, 2015, Harvard University Press.

Dale, Joshua Paul, Joyce Goggin Julia Leyda and Anthony McIntyre, The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, 2016, Routledge