Events Calendar

Queer Zines: Doin' It in Print

Admission is free.

A conversation will address a broad range of issues related to zines, queer aesthetics, independent publishing and the ways in which zines are distributed, archived and exhibited. Because of their DIY production, displaying and archiving queer zines, as well as queer culture more generally, requires creative and inventive practices. Panelists include Amos Mac, creator of transman zine Original Plumbing; Milo Miller and Chris Wilde, founders of the online Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP); and Mimi Thi Nguyen, assistant professor of gender and women’s studies and Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and creator of the compilation zine ...Race Riot. Also, the Oakland/Los Angeles–based Miracle Bookmobile will distribute used and DIY publications.

About the Panelists:

Amos Mac is the New York–based creator, editor in chief, photographer and publisher of Original Plumbing, a celebrated female-to-male trans quarterly that was named Best Zine of 2010 in the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s yearly readers’ poll. Mac’s voyeuristic, snapshot-style photographs have been exhibited at galleries and events internationally, and his work has been published extensively in magazines, books, newspapers and ad campaigns. (Official website, Tumblr)

Milo Miller and Chris Wilde founded the Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP) in 2003. QZAP is a digital archive of LGBTQ+ zines and print ephemera. The online collection at www.qzap.org currently contains over 400 documents while the archive as a whole has upwards of 1,200. While the collection is predominantly in English, at least ten languages and fifteen countries are represented. The zines in QZAP represent a vast range of self-published queer experiences, often documenting the lives of folks who fly under the radar of more mainstream gay and lesbian media formats. QZAP itself is collectively run and exists not only to preserve zines but also to educate, entertain and encourage new generations of queer zine makers and self-publishers.

Mimi Thi Nguyen is assistant professor of gender and women’s studies and Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her forthcoming book, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages, focuses on the promise of “giving” freedom concurrent and contingent with waging war and its afterlife. She is also coeditor, with Fiona I.B. Ngo and Mariam Lam, of a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique on Southeast Asians in diaspora (winter 2012). With her second project on the obligations of beauty, she continues to pursue her scholarship through the frame of transnational feminist cultural studies. Nguyen is also coeditor, with Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, of Alien Encounters: Pop Culture in Asian America and publishes on queer subcultures and punk feminisms. Nguyen has published zines since 1991, including the compilation zine ...Race Riot. (Official website)

Organized by ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at USC Libraries.

For further information on this event:
visionsandvoices@usc.edu

Location: ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives: 909 West Adams Boulevard, Los Angeles

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Daria Yudacufski