Catharine is a Feminist Zine based in St Catharine's College, publishing the creative feminist work of the Cambridge University community. The name 'Catharine' was taken from our college. It aims to recentre the place of women in the Catz - and wider university - community, and rejuvenate a feminist movement.
‘The Things We Leave Behind’ speaks to the legacy of feminism, by way of its historical impact, but also its resonance and significance in the modern day. Questioning what we have sacrificed to reach the position of the present compels us to interrogate the nature of progress, to consider what parts of the past linger in the present, for better or for worse. In looking back, therefore, we also look forward - reminiscence for the past is translated into resilience for the the present.
But our theme also looks self-consciously onto the nature of the zine. As this will be the final time working on this zine for most the curators of Catharine, in many ways Catharine is our legacy - Catharine is what we leave behind to the feminist community of Cambridge. The act of leaving things behind is both necessary and nostalgic, in light of feminism, confirms and conveys the ceaseless efforts of the feminist movement to reach an end point of equality. Feminism has left much behind throughout its history in order for humanity to be able to relinquish the suffocating weight of misogynistic and patriarchal oppression. As such, to Catharine, this complex act of leaving things behind marks both a dauntless endeavour towards a feminist reality, and a means through which we can remember a past which is no longer with us.
Gloria Steinem famously said that societal change started in 'talking circles' - small, community-based circles, where people could talk freely and equally. We therefore invite you to consider this zine as a written ‘talking circle’ of sorts; a place where everyone's voice will be heard, where freedom and openness is encouraged, and where all can feel empowered by feminism.
This zine is what we leave behind for you...
Love always, The Catharine Editors
C O N T E N T S
Jam ......................................................................... Emily Freeman
Michaelmas I ......................................................... Beth Merrylees
long distance daughter ................ Chanel Wagenheim Plucinski
Little Angel on the Platform at Ely ................... Eve O’Donoghue
You pricked my eyes like the ripest blackberry in late August sun. This glossy clot-jewel in the lowest green, one I trailed through nettle and dying fern to get to. I crushed a path with ill-chosen shoes and stretched out an arm, feeling for lips on a face, a head in the dark. Stem-hooks dug into numb skin and drew out my blood in beads, heading the purple canvas of my palms. I filled ice-cream tubs and a water bottle to make your jam, to balance out my bitter, to spoon out for oats, black tea or bread. This will help winter medicine go down: lick the tea-spoon, or run your tongue along the knife, and let seeds get stuck in your back teeth.
Longdistancedaughter
Some days are harder than others, Some mornings I wake up not entirely sure wher Some days I don’t recognise my room, Some mornings I cannot find the moon, Is it my room?
Some nights I call her - how I wish she could stay bit longer!
Early afternoon she sends me a picture - she is h in the living room,
She is just having a cup of tea, yet, she thought ab
She remembers the days we would get along and over a cup of tea,
Those sunny afternoons seem so far away now, I don’t know what to do with my day or how, If I am happy here why do I feel like something is missing somehow, If I was happy there why did I long for the familiarity of now,
She called me yesterday, asked me about my day, She is glad I am happy and she does miss me.
I will call her today. I miss her dearly. And I left tea in the cupboard along with the last drops of honey. I want her to use it promptly, I won’t be able to use it truly.
Today I went outside and bought some tea and honey, I drank a cup of it mid-afternoon, I sent her a picture
She was happy for me
She would not know from this perfect shot how imperfect it was, the fact that it did not taste homely or how I miss our local honey!
The cup is empty I close my eyes as if I could see her in my mind but it is just a fantasy.
I promise myself I will hug her tighter next time, I always do my best truly, It never changes the way I feel when I am away It is never enough, sometimes I wish I could stay.
To have two places to call home is a gift, I know, How I wish I brought some tea and honey now, How I wish I could be here and there truly
Little Angel on the Platform at Ely
Seeing the photos on your fridge felt like an intrusion. Your little face, recognisable still in your childhood jumpers and sparkly jeans, shone without the cynicism and smirking that cloud the face I know now. The pictures with your family seemed so regular, but I knew they weren’t for my eyes. I wouldn’t betray you by recreating them in words now, for all their mundanity. I could focus instead on one of just you, dressed as a little angel for a school nativity. Pure, clear and sweet in your plastic costume, I swelled with love for a child I never knew.
Your little hands were clasped together, with that same shyness that comes out in restaurants and on the phone with strangers. Your hair was blonder then, naturally, but not luminous from the bleach. Your tinsel halo was slightly tilted, bowing towards whoever was behind the camera. I couldn’t make a guess.
Your expression of perfect innocence made me laugh, and then it made me sad. When did you learn your sharpness? Your vigilance? When did you train your nose for danger and for insecurity? When did you begin to lock away all the unhappy things, piling them up in some corner of your soul? When did you start to bite anyone who tried to touch your sacred little mess? When did your plastic golden wings turn to sulphur?
When I try to piece together the mystery of your pain, I’m empty-handed with only guesses and speculation. The less I know, the excuses grow. When you’ve hurt me, when you’ve twisted my words, when you’ve shut me up or made me cry, I shrug. You’re complicated. I don’t really know what you’ve been through. And besides, your good and your bad are born of one another. There’s your beautiful mind, your fierce protectiveness, your humour, your magnetism. None of you can be neatly boxed.
On the way home, from your home, we changed at Ely. You were eating a sandwich in the station café, and for a second, I saw it: the vulnerability of being caught momentarily unaware, sitting down to eat something familiar and plain. Like a deer grazing on grass, at peace and unprotected. The sadness is there in your wide, blue eyes. It soaks through when, for a second, you cease analysing, criticising, controlling. The little angel rests on your aged face.
On the platform, I imagined, instead, I was holding the hand of the little angel. Her grip was tight, burning holes in my palms. The train would come any second, the clock was counting down. Honey, I said, propping her onto a raindrenched seat in her little white dress, I have to go now. I thought I could be a family for you, sweetheart, but your wings are very heavy. Your hands hurt mine, and your sharp little fingernails, they keep slicing at my tendons. Your halo is a chain, tying me down to your messy, dark room – and I need some air, now. I’m so sorry, sweetheart.
How could I leave the little angel alone on the platform at Ely? How could I look out the window and see that vital change? The doors would be locked, the train in motion - I could only watch my mistake occur. The once innocent face of the little angel, looking around an empty platform – realising there is no one she can trust.
I’ve never been one for walking on cracks, Or passing right under a ladder.
When I heard the girls’ toilet was haunted at school, I started avoiding the mirror.
I’ve never seen ghosts, but I bet they see me And likely think: ‘she’s a bit crazy.’
I concluded that I had a popular grave
For I shivered at least three times daily. I ran past the house at the end of the street And sometimes I didn’t stop running.
If I heard a strange noise, I hid under the sheets, Not wanting to see what was coming.
Now I’m older and wiser and still just as scared, But better at pretending I’m not.
Ghosts, real or fake, haven’t hurt me just yet –It’s people that you’ve got to watch. I evicted the monster from under my bed, Only to find that I miss him.
Now they follow me down lonely allies instead And I wish it was just superstition.
But I still believe that “the right thing” exists, And that blue skies always mean good days. Good intentions count, and my gran’s still around, And occasionally I’ll even pray.
There might be a purpose, and if not I’ll make one, If just to help get me through.
But in the meantime, maybe for forever, I’ll touch wood and hope it’s all true.
Tracing Trans Trajectories: Trans Liveability and the Archival Traces We Leave Behind
Christoffer Koch Andersen
Through my archival work as a trans scholar and activist, I frequently came to wonder: What makes us despite continuous legacies of violence want to survive and forge liveable futures, and importantly, which traces do we leave behind and how do they become entangled with the bodies, histories and memories of other trans lives? How do the traces from our past merge with the present and future, interpolating us into states between distant memories, current paths and possible futures?
Trans archives provide a contact point “to encounter and study the writing of history, and sometimes to write histories themselves (…) invoking the writing, memory, recontextualizing, and technology that mediate history” (Rawson 2010, 2) Trans archives deliberately expand on societal collections to include what is valuable and memorable to our community, rather than what is ascribed to us. As such, trans archives leave behind traces of the rights to be remembered on our own terms – for and by trans people They are one of the most powerful tools of community collecting, collaborating and curating authentic and sustainable historical memory that both aid trans liveability and survival by opposing the forms of power that have historically left us behind, oppressed us and pushed our histories to the margins; thus challenging “the [white cisheteronormative] past as it has been rendered into History” (Snorton 2017, 6), wherein the history and archives we preserve enact “death not only as places for physical corpses but as politically constructed spaces where someone is existentially exiled and made to die” (Andersen 2023, 10). Within the violent reality of white cisheteronormativity, trans lives as historical memory have been conceptualised as intelligible existences under necropolitical power, where ‘the subjugation of life to the power of death’ (Mbembe 2003, 39) instrumentalises as the destruction of non-normative lives and bodies. Under this normative power to death, trans lives are made into disposable entities in order to make the white cisheteronormative subjects live on, legitimised and commemorated in the public and political consciousness, thereby, cemented as the history of life. What then can we make of the traces we have left and will leave behind in trans archives to revert this erasure from societal oppression and restore the traces of transness to create our own histories and reclaim our liveability?
The art of mapping trans history is one simultaneously of survival and one of liveability; making up two sides of the same history As such, the historical act of investigating trans trajectories through our archival traces is a peculiar one; one inherently non-linear, messy and packed with temporal differences that, despite not enabling a normative mapping of trans history, makes us able to gain access into localised breathing pockets of trans lived experiences and memory that together facilitate the nature of trans history – a history made up of individual and communal archival traces of resistance, community care, hopefulness, political refusal, joy and radical intimacy left to commemorate those moments and curate a legacy moving forward into the future potentials for trans liveability.
Despite archives as constituted by bodies of knowledge from fleshy bodies that facilitate “the processes of selection and arrangement to make legible and visible only certain parts of the whole” (Lee 2017, 22), they also embody that this ‘whole’ contains valuable archival traces of previous losses and victories, sacred memories, emotions, radical forms of care, present struggles and community resistance as well as movements and desires for the future Thus, the archival traces we leave behind are fragments for others to come across and identify, find comfort in, pick up and build on. As the pursuit for liveability is embedded into our history through archival traces, trans archival memory becomes not only a means of surviving or having survived in the past, but manifests as the desire to extend our lives beyond that of mere survival; instead, making survival inherently liveable. As an archival trace, this leaves behind an affective bond of solidarity from “the past in the present, of a desire issuing from another time and placing a demand on the present” (Freccero in Dinshae et al., 2007, 184) towards continuing our legacy of community strength and activist affordances to make trans lives liveable by calling upon the past, present and future.
Together these archival efforts merge pasts energies, present affordances and future ambitions as invaluable traces that illuminate the crucial matters of communitycurated experiences as pathways towards restor(y)ing trans futures and conceptualising holistic forms of trans liberation By appropriating archival curation as a past and present repertoire of securing our existence, the trans community leaves a myriad of things behind; but most importantly, the traces that mark the historical trajectories of continuous trans survival, community care work and memory making that point to the imagined possibilities of forging collective safety, spaces for authentic liveability and sustainable trans futures.
References
Andersen, C. K. (2023). Resisting the Anti-Trans Narratives and Algorithmic Violence: Reclaiming the Legitimacy of Trans Lives by Envisioning a Digital Transgender Epistemology. [MPhil Dissertation]. University of Cambridge. Dinshaw, C., Edelman, L., Ferguson, R. A., Freccero, C., Freeman, E., Halberstam, J., Jagose, A., Nealon, C., & Nguyen, T. H. (2007). Theorizing queer temporalities: A roundtable discussion. GLQ, 13(2-3), 177-195. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2006030
Lee, J. (2017). A Queer/ed Archival Methodology: Archival Bodies as Nomadic Subjects. Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies. 1. 10.24242/jclis.v1i2.26. Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15, 11-40. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11
Rawson, K. J. (2010). Archiving transgender: Affects, logic, and the power of queer history. Syracuse University.
Snorton, R. C (2017). Black on both sides: A racial history of trans identity. U of Minnesota Press.
Anthropocene
Ready for the Anthropocene
To be the end of all this drone. I will never feel again like at sixteen
When tears were still a film scene –Romantic in my melancholy, not grown Ready for the Anthropocene.
The finality settles in. At nineteen
It is a threshold to cross alone, I will never feel again like at sixteen.
The wild irises are dead and ungreen. Averno is rolling away the cave stone Ready for the Anthropocene.
The sacrificial lamb now looks obscene Amongst the cherry blossom bone.
I will never feel again like at sixteen.
But those days with my body lean, Gnashing teeth, waiting for salvation on loan, I was crowned slaughter in May’s Queen.
I will never feel again like at sixteen, Ready for the Anthropocene.
Martine Maugue
Hold my hand and raise my hopes
I think I heard her sing Secret Love only a handful of timesit must have been a recurrent only of her love-wracked youth, and then much later, of her final days. There would have lain in the vast stretch of time between thirty and eighty-five a relatively song-less period, in which Doris would have crooned alone from the radio, rarely joined in lilt from between the puckered lips of this Cork woman.
Rita believed in God for two reasons: that babies, in all their perfect complexity, should emerge into the world as they did, and that the sky has never once fallen on our heads. This made perfect sense to me, a child without religion. Had I cared enough to truly speculate, then I, too, would have opted for such an explanation - more whimsical than the one of coincidental design and necessary order which my small mind ultimately contrived.
This sense of wonder at the world still strikes me as uniquely beautiful. It is artistic, it summons fantasy; it is far more mystical than a tired discussion on ethics and the afterlife. If a mere glance at the sky would conduct me toward philosophical and theological contemplation, neither would I ever grow bored. I would be as excited and curious as I knew her to be, as relentlessly engaged up to the end.
Andrea Daughton
Our Secret Histories
Olivia Townsend
In 1989 Pierre Nora wrote that “Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects; history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things.” He is one of a number of historians who have grappled with the relationship between memory and history. It's a conversation that's had in between the paragraphs of academic articles and in lecture halls. History, to me, can never be confined to these conversations. It's something that, when you're studying the more recent past, is imbued with personal memories. When I think about the history of post-war Britain, a country reeling from war but rebuilding itself and growing new, I cannot separate the grand narratives of these histories from the memories of my Nan.
I grew up going to her house after pre-school to eat bacon sandwiches in front of the telly. A Disney VHS would be crackling away in the background. When I’d eaten and grown tired of Cinderella we'd go upstairs and look through the hordes of photo albums she stored in her spare room. Here I saw my Dad's childhood pass across the pages in sepia tones, but then we'd go back even further.
She'd feed me snippets about her own life whilst I giggled and listened.
If I were writing the history that I've been trained to write, I would first have to establish the context that my Nan grew up in. Born in Essex in 1944, Carole Ann Moore was the daughter of a tugboat skipper who worked in the Isle of Dogs. Her parents had moved to Essex to escape bombing during the war, but they later returned to make a home in London’s East End. Their prefab home in Poplar was emblematic of the patchwork reconstruction of London in the wake of the Blitz. It is part of a narrative that typically centres on Prime Minister Clement Atlee, the hopeful promise of the 1945 Labour Government and the Blitz spirit that carried on after the war. I know this story well, and yet when I imagine post-war London,
I remember my Nan’s recounted memories of playing games amidst the rubble of bombsites, playing on the swings in Poplar Park and getting thrown out of the Brownies for skating recklessly around their hall. On the same pair of skates she would perform for neighbours at their front doors in the hopes they’d slip her some coins.
My Nan could be adopted by historians as a symbol of a new generation blooming out of the ashes of the war, but I want to tell her story as an intimate history of a long-ago girlhood.
She seemed to grow alongside me in her stories.
When I was approaching Secondary school she started to tell me about a boy named Arthur Art who used to offer her rides on his motorbike. She always declined. This was the stuff of films and a far-off future for eleven-year-old me. In hushed tones, she later confessed that she had once hitchhiked all the way from London to Cornwall. Then the hitchhiker became the Beatnik. She regaled her time spent in the seedier Jazz bars of Soho, swearing that she’d been brushing shoulders with the Kray twins. Carole would be classed as one of the first teenagers, a pilgrim at the helm of a shiny new youth culture about to dock.
These teenagers have been historicised through their defiance of their parent’s generation and its norms, tales of Mods and Rocker moral panics and the music of the Beatles.
It’s a vibrant history which I truly love, but it will never feel as real as these stories passed down to me like treasured heirlooms.
In truth, I cannot separate the stories and memories from the histories I read.
Narratives of ‘new women’, tales of the swinging sixties and images of crowded London coffee bars will never be as potent as the stories that she left me with. Instead, her stories make those strands of history brighter - a sort of colour correction. I am not alone in this, every family has memories - they are fragile ephemera that must be passed down with care.
They might not leave behind powerful archival evidence for historians, but they are the secret, intimate histories that make our understanding of the past so much more vibrant.
My Nan is no longer with us, and the raw grief I once felt has now faded to a dull ache. It’s an ache for the details I’ve missed or forgotten, and the details I never got to know. I’d give anything to have a few more chapters of these personal histories.
Vilanelle for Eighteen
No-one told me I would grieve,
Nothing of this complicated pain.
Never a nod to the place I must leave.
Not of the school cardie with chewed sleeve, Just lessons and photo albums to gain.
No-one told me I would grieve.
Nothing of this garden, or Christmas Eve, Hazy snippets that bed down in my brain.
Never a nod to the place I must leave.
What of my mother’s songs that weave
Through a tiny quilt, and echo, remain?
No-one told me I would grieve.
Always bright lights waiting to receive Your hopeful heart, suspended on the train.
Never a nod to the place I must leave.
Not the woodland paths that mirror my veins, Not running to the post-box down the lane.
No-one told me I would grieve, Never a nod to the place I must leave.
Elsie Hayward
Megan Szell
proposal for the liberal application of superlatives
the more i write, the more i grow convinced that it is absolutely useless to do so. yesterday at lunch, i declared that greatness is unachievable and to watch people reach for it is as comfortable as wearing a squeaky leather coat in the quietest auditorium in the world. greatness is so unchic, and worse, desperate. i have become, through a university education and relentless essays, the kind of person who disdains effort while failing at it. you know, a liar! writers don't produce anything new. the people we revere today were only cannibalising old bodies, and so on and so forth till you reach the first book ever written, which must have been a response to something touchable and real. mimesis and repetition: song of the summer since you were an egg, and aristotle was an egg, and the first tiktaalik was an egg. writers will never produce anything new, so maybe i should stop this very second, too. this anxiety of mine is an expired one as well. woe, says the poet. i have written five hundred sonnets, all about laura. woe, says the substack writer. i have written fifty letterboxd reviews, all about the social network. thank god, they weren’t both brunettes. how many ways can we all find to be in love with the same thing before somebody grows bored? it is all great mush, letter-soup poured endlessly into the waste disposal. at least it isn't filling up a landfill, but it might as well be. does it matter if what ends up killing us is global warming or our own crazed rhetoric, having doubled over into itself so many times over that people roam about on the streets stabbing each other's eyes out? both are hot ends. good old ambitious, non-military chaos: maybe i am still an optimist if i am dreaming of it. there are just so many words, and there will be so many more, and that's just how it is always going to be. which is fucking bleak, because it might be the most saturated market out of all saturated markets. sure, the poor engineers are fighting in the streets in never-ending droves, but can we get some love for the column writers? a far wittier dying breed, in my opinion, and one which went down with almost no fuss in comparison. the problem is: i used to be in love with it but now we are engaged, and trying on a life together.
but there are moments, as there are always moments; when i roll over in bed and wilco is playing in the background and the worn pages of an old book are right there. then i say: god, your family is a bitch. the added components that come with you are sometimes exhausting. the light is golden-warm, and just like right now, i am indulgent and indulged. the more i read, i become convinced that everything needs to stop so that humankind can devote itself to the arduous process of writing. and i do mean humankind: i mean the people who have never cared about writing just as much as i mean the bad poets everyone else makes fun of. the unfortunate thing about stories, the most cliched thing, the thing that ruined the game of thrones finale, is that there is one of them everywhere. the more i read, greatness becomes less of a lone attribute and more of a collaborative project. i think it has been wrongly given out and made isolating; i think people have been burdened with it when groups of undergraduates in shadowy rooms would wear the mantle better, and with more grace. they don't have funding, and the zine might never get printed, but they've got greatness, they've got my poem, and they've got my vote. the mill churns on, and i say i'm going to walk out of the building, go down the hill, never to return, but i like the metaphor too much: grains into flour, nourishment through a gentle crushing. i am walking away, but then i am coming back. the creative process is a möbius strip with artificial gravity. this is major tom to ground control, houston, i say, the sheets rustling. i think i just pulled out the oxygen tank, and the bright blue marble's lovelier than ever.
I wait for him to take me in his arms to his bed and lay me down turned towards him stripped back and safe look into his eyes he is a vision in acid wash jeans when he takes of my clothes I am soft no sharp edges when his body is against mine and he goes foraging looking for something a small vacant space inside me he searches with his fingers and for the first time I really, really want this he is cosmic beauty with a saccharine smile
he finds me. I find him. a moment of green magic the first in a gallery of memories
he holds me through the night he helps me get dressed strokes my hair makes my bed
you are the person in my dreams He will be gone soon This I know.
I don’t know how to make love to men Mia Evans
Best Friends for Florrie
I no longer believe in ‘best friends.’ Instead, ‘good friends’ abound And surround us; a circle, far stronger Than a speck, if less special.
We’ve outgrown exclusivity and Matching bangles. Tangled as Our stories are, those chapters are in the Past and have been for some time.
Time, no tolerance for nostalgia, Drives her bulldozer over what we Thought was just on Pause, waiting For the day we’d press Play.
The least we can do now is notice That it’s missing, each irregular coffee date
A memorial to what we were, what stood before A desperate attempt to prise open the door
Esther Arthurson
But it’s locked. At least we knocked.
One more time, for old time’s sake?
I no longer believe in ‘best friends,’ (But if I did, you’d still be mine.)
She doesn’t tell him he is wrong.
Rather, she sits like a yellowing sheet of music by a piano
That hasn’t been played in years.
My grandmother used to have a piano like that. She had twelve children, or maybe it was thirteen, and A great old piano.
She always said she would learn to play, but Kept to her cooking instead.
I thought that if she ever did learn,
The sound she would make would be enormous,
Like a Greek chorus, howling, singing; Like if the sky itself cracked open.
For a year now, she hasn’t looked in his eyes,
For they would shine with an innocence
She knew would be so false it would kill her.
I remember my grandmother touching the piano keys, Lightly, too light to stir a sound,
But even then she drew her hand away.
‘I don’t want to disturb him’, she said.
Still she doesn’t look at him, doesn’t speak to him,
For fear of her own death.
But what about the others?
What about the others.
After my grandmother’s funeral, I sat by the piano
And began to play a song written by Mozart’s sister.
And the sound was enormous.
Sasha Brealey
Founder & Editor in Chief
June Rippon
Editor
Andrea Daughton
Editor
Annie Lomax
Olivia Rider
Events Officer
Alys Mortimer
Social Media Officer
Treasurer Front Cover and Back Cover designed by Sasha Brealey With thanks to St Catharine's College for financial support Instagram: catharinezine Facebook: Catharine Zine Email: catharinezine@gmail.com
£1 per issue sold will be donated to Women's Aid, a UK based charity that aims to support victims of domestic abuse
Beth Merrylees Illustrator All illustrations by Beth Merrylees.
by
Illustrations on front cover
Sasha Brealey. Photo on front cover of Adri Robinson, taken by Imogen Brealey. Illustrations on back cover by Beth Merrylees. Photo on p. 10 by Sasha Brealey. All photos on pp. 15-18 provided by Olivia Townsend. Photo on p. 25 by Andrea Daughton.
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Catharine is a feminist zine based in St Catharine's College, Cambridge, publishing the feminist creative work of the Cambridge University community and beyond. We are passionate about creating an environment in which everyone can feel empowered by feminism, leaning, growing and being inspired by its power and possibilities.
