a genealogy of bedrooms

a genealogy of bedrooms

Introduction When thinking about the questions posed by a Queer Disability Studies network, I thought about the zinesters already working at the intersection of queerness and disability. In Care Work, a book by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and published in 2018, they record a conversation with Stacey Milbern titled 'Crip Lineages, Crip Futures'. Leah asks how we prevent the forgetting of crip histories, and especially 'grassroots, working-class Black, Indigenous and Brown sick and disabled femme organising that flies under the radar and is not studied or noticed by abled POC or white crip land?' (pg. 242) In some ways, they offer an answer to their own question in the form of the zine Femme Shark Communique #1 (from 2008) which is digitized and archived at the Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP)* - I think zines offer one path to a crip lineage, and in that sense also I guess a source of answers to some of the questions posed by a queer disability studies network; in their conversation, Stacey and Leah connect finding crip ancestors, a lineage, and crip futurity: 'it is radical to articulate that we have a past and lineages and cultures, in a world that says we are individual medical defects to be eliminated AND it is also radical to dream a liberated future by and for sick and disabled, Deaf, neurodivergent and Mad queer/trans/Black/brown people' (pg. 249). These actions are not just both radical, but intimately linked.

In September 2020 I started working on a PhD looking at the zines at the Wellcome Collection in London, UK (the Wellcome collects broadly on the theme of health).

Despite the large number of articles telling me not to work from bed, I have spent a lot of the last year here reading, working, writing, eating, and sleeping. When I’m sitting up in bed, reading zines scattered around me or on my laptop, I feel connected to a network, a web, of bedrooms, to zinesters writing to me of and from their own beds and bedrooms. I think of zine making as a queer and crip use of the bed*. Within this I acknowledge that disability, and queerness, doesn't just happen in bed - but on the street, on dance floors, on buses, in toilets. But I'm not writing of all disability, of all queerness - and like many crip, queers before me I have moved to (as described by Leah) someplace affordable where I can go to bed early. (Nevermind unpacking the complexities of the past year, where staying at home has acquired new meanings, has become something Other People do too.) *https://archive.qzap.org/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/432 **for more on queer use see Sara Ahmed's What's the Use? On the Uses of Use (2019)

So this zine is about beds, about bedrooms, about the zine practices that happen there, and about how zines connect me, in my bed, to the work of other queer, trans and crip people. Its a short (shorter than I intended, but I have not had the best time recently) reflection on ways that zines might inform a queer disability studies, on what we can learn from them, on how they offer a lineage. It's (the start of? the midpoint of? an attempt to describe?) a genealogy of bedrooms.

I'm actually not very well at the moment, so this is a zine from a brain fog. Maybe that's why it imagines genealogies as a pool, a fog. Recently I've been thinking lots about Ursula K le Guin's essay 'The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction' and how she suggests that rather than an arrow, a shape that has served the hero, a better shape for fiction would be a bag. Rather than imagining genealogies as a an arrow, forging forward to this point, I wonder what happens when they are imagined as a bag.

Mess

What this bag is, is messy right? And I really get the desire to organise this mess (I'd like to also organise the mess of my bedroom but...) What form best captures, or I suppose emerges from understanding our histories as a sack, a bag? In Intimate Ephemera Anna Poletti writes about the importance of mess in zines by young people.

They describe how: ‘the perzine does not attempt the imaginative or representational structuring of mess, but instead positions itself as a document of the bedroom which seeks to explore the intimacy, possibilities and multiplicities of the piling, stream or smattering’ (2008, 113) What does it mean to think about this zine as a document of the bedroom? What does it mean to think about academic research as a document of the bedroom?

Citation

I wanted to start this bit by thinking about a history of zines. In defining or describing zines, there’s often a throwaway sentence or two given about their origins in sci-fi fanzines of the 1930s, or earlier in political pamphlets – you’ve probably heard this exact thing at the start of a zine workshop. This is maybe confusing the origin of the word ‘zine’ with the origins of zines; zines sit in a wider landscape of self-publishing and participatory media, and trying to write an ‘origin story’ is a failure of imagination, or if we actually want to name it, is part of a (white supremacist, settler, colonial) historical project which centers the histories of white people making anglophone zines on occupied Turtle Island. But also, when we can name other types of self-publishing and participatory media as part of the history of zines (especially writing within academia, in the global north), we risk absorbing these things into zines, homogenizing and writing over specific and unique histories and cultural contexts. Zines engage in citation in ways more or less recognisable to academia. I've seen zines go full Harvard, with a list of references, and I've seen zines less formally let you know where an idea is from and how to trace it.

Sometimes, zines also intentionally do not cite - zines offer you autonomy and if you want to write this person out of your zine you can and it's not right or wrong, but you can. Zines have a difficult relationship with copyright, but that doesn't mean they are (unintentionally) ignorant of it. In collage, images are often cut from their roots (although arguably it is often because we understand the original context of an image that collage is affective (does it matter that most of the images in this zine came from a home and interiors magazine?)). Making this zine, I felt suddenly self-conscious about the academic way I was citing and I went back through and thought, how would I cite this in a zine and why?

Seams

Zines are often visibly handmade, and people writing about zines often acknowledge the particular affect of their materiality: holding a zine leads you to make your own*.

Stephen Duncome, who wrote one of the earliest book about zines (Notes from the Underground in 1997), describes ‘emulation’ as the experience of picking up a zine and thinking 'I can see how they made that, that’s not so hard, I can do that.' (pg.123).

Paula Cameron, writing about zines as a way of exploring Nova Scotian women’s experiences of depression, uses the term “Seamfullness”. *See Alison Piepmeier's chapter on the materiality of zines in Girl Zines

She describes how ‘seamfulness responds to calls for “seamlessness” in many parts of modern life’ (on pg.32 - this is a phd thesis, it's available online or I can send you a copy). Paula connects academia’s demand for expertise and authority, with demands on young women to embody seamlessness (I'd extend this to trans bodies), to how the experience of becoming ill or disabled can disrupt this. In her zine ‘Seamfulness’ she visually connects demands for seamlessness with production lines. When Sara Ahmed, in her book Queer Phenomenology writes about Husserl and his writing table, she considers how labour is made invisible. Zines, in foregrounding the (embodied) processes of construction, how they are made, reject ‘the fantasy of a “paperless” philosophy’ which ‘is not dependent on the materials upon which it is written’ (that's Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology on pg.34) and which is crucial to understanding philosophy as gendered, and to the disappearing of labour (domestic, emotional, physical). With zines, you can see (feel) the seams, the joins, visible moments of editing, redaction or addition.

About the Zine This zine was created for the Queer Disability Studies network launch.

Zinesters are already producing work at the intersection of queerness and disability, so I think about how zines made by queer, trans, disabled, mad and neurodivergent zinesters are a site of practices which could inform Queer Disablity Studies.

It's (hopefully) the start of several zines that will approach these questions, this zine particularly is shaped by the messiness of my bedroom and by being in bed.

About the Zinester Lilith is a white, queer, trans and disabled neurodivergent person living on the Fife Coast in Scotland with their partner, mother and cat. They are working on a collaborative PhD project between the University of Kent and the Wellcome Collection. They make zines, and do zine librarianship at the Edinburgh Zine Library.

Lilith Cooper // September 2021 This zine is anti-copyright/copyleft. send me an email at ljc72@kent.ac.uk or write me back at 125 Harbour Place, Dalgety Bay, Dunfermline, Scotland, KY119GG