The Feminist Zine
Is This What A Feminist Looks Like?
HOW I BECAME A FEMINIST Grandma sat in the dark of her house, fingers caressing the worn armrests of her recliner. Eight years old, feigning sleep on the sofa-bed, I studied her face her eyes her pink pressed nurse’s uniform. She stared into the silence. Eight years old, I watched Grandma eclipse herself, become herself before me. The wrinkles in her face: sweet signs of overcoming. The distance in her eyes: a celebration of persevering. Her stillness: a calm confidence, a meditation before bursting out.
chose the midnight shift. And I imagined her saying, if she spoke just then, This is the me
I always intended to be. This is the me… Then Grandma lifted herself from her chair. “Time to go,” she whispered. “Time to go,” my conscience echoed. And as Grandma stepped out of the dark of her house my pulse assumed the rhythm of her footsteps. She chose the midnight shift. She chose the midnight shift. And who shouldn’t choose? And who shouldn’t choose? And who shouldn’t— Time to go.
I watched, wondering why my mother’s mother, just two years into her first “career,”
Paul C. Gorski
Dare to Wear Spandex In the realm of sweat and the temple of muscle boy-men fight for basketballs and scores proving their manhood with twisted ankles; not all watch: the man in the pink shirt turns fragile muscles into senior fitness chatting every Monday with cellphone businessman; water bottles litter the shelves burdened with weights some try to lift, others try to lose. I pause at the edge of fan-filled mirror land; I, a new convert to burning muscles the thrill of one-minute-more on a treadmill's screen; yet I can't screen my body's imperfections jiggling proclamations of obesity, society's epidemic; I claim them as my own, and damn the challengers who rush to condemn apostates to their thin dogma. A daring eyebrow sends them scurrying back to their own heart-rate monitors. None dare to deny me in my ritual garb. I pause at the gate of the body's garden, proceeding to enter as goddess of spandex voluptuous, whole, and myself.
Liz Moore
Why Do You Always Speak Korean To Me? Why do you always speak Korean to me? In that, broken dialect? Of course, with my brother, You treat him as if he’s Another American. Yet, with me, I’m just Your typical Korean female That swoons when a man Says “hello” in Korean. Or, you’re hoping that I Have hot Korean girlfriends That are featured in bondage films, And that I can offer you Some free copies Or their cell numbers. Or, you just hope that I can lead you, To a sacred place--- a beauty parlor In Annandale, Virginia, Where gorgeous Korean girls Cut your hair and then Have sex with you.
How unfortunate that I’m actually, None of the above. Please, don’t refer to me as ‘worthless’ Because I am ‘uncultured’ Due to not acting like a ‘real’ Korean. And not being fluent. I am just your average college student, Trying to figure out what she really Wants in life. So yeah, quit talking Korean to me. Even if I was fluent, I would still be fucking annoyed By you abusing the Korean language. It’s not “Ack-Goh-SeeWoo” by the way, It’s “Ahn-Yah-Sey-Yo!” Idiot.
Yume Kim
DEPARTURE One day she stepped out of her dirty laundry and she said oh my. A million butterflies emerged from her yellowed sock. A falling star reached for the sky. That night she buried the statue with the golden rose and she said so long. Then she embraced the sunrise with her newfound arms. Mike Maggio
Sex Ed Obtuse diagrams and modelsReduced my body to orchids and liliesTrying to replicate virginity. I squeeze my thighs, Made intimately aware of its presence, I am embarrassed. No penis envy, Envious of freedom, Freedom to feel proud of my anatomy. No chants of I am woman, Only cheap imagery, dirty language, Whispered vocabulary. This temple, I am made to cherish and loathe. All before the bell rings.
Naima Warsame
The Premature Burial In his essay of “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud asserts that “To some people the idea of being buried alive by mistake is the most uncanny thing of all. And yet psycho-analysis has taught us that this terrifying phantasy is only a transformation of another phantasy which had originally nothing terrifying about it at all, but was qualified by a certain lasciviousness — the phantasy, I mean, of intra-uterine existence.” This element of psycho-analysis, when used to examine Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Premature Burial,” describes the internal struggles of men when confronted with the juxtaposing ideas of fantasy and anxiety towards their mothers. In the opening of “The Premature Burial” the narrator introduces his overwhelming fear of being buried alive by describing how uncanny the subject is. “The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?” This statement is familiar to discussions occurring even in today’s time, especially upon heated discussions of abortion and when life begins (and to some, ends). This creates the imagery that the womb is both the birth and death place of all men, where the warmth of flesh in one is replaced by the cold and hardness of a coffin in the other. Freud further confirms this theory by noting “that neurotic men declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs.
This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning.” Although being in the womb as an infant is often described in retrospect as a feeling of comfort and pleasure, and being born is described as “beautiful” and “miraculous,” the narrator describes a premature re-visit to the womb (i.e. the coffin) as horrific: “The unendurable oppression of the lungs -- the stifling fumes from the damp earth -- the clinging to the death garments -- the rigid embrace of the narrow house -- the blackness of the absolute Night -- the silence like a sea that overwhelms -- the unseen but palpable presence of the Conqueror Worm.” It is no coincidence that what he describes as being restrained in a coffin are directly related to the occurrences found in the womb: The oppression of body parts as birth nears, the smell of amniotic fluid, the “life garments” this fluid acts as, the narrow space of the womb, the darkness of being inside a body, the inevitable silence the womb would present, and the presence of the umbilical cord (the Conqueror Worm). It is here that the once heimlich transforms into the unheimlich. This anxiety caused by something so familiar stems from the sexual tension that occurs after birth. Freud’s Oedipus complex theory states that all men subconsciously desire to copulate with and marry their mothers, meanwhile wanting to kill their fathers. This complex
causes a mixture of emotions, where basic sexuality is suppressed by societal beliefs. These societal beliefs are so strong that although the men themselves believe and practice them, the contained aggression shows itself in other ways. These emotions are relayed into the narrator’s cataleptic attacks. He describes the catalepsy as something outside of his control, which causes him to fall into coma-like states. His attacks were “without pain” until he would awake “with a gradation slow in proportion to the suddenness of the seizure.” He could not control his attacks, much like men cannot control their attraction to their mothers, and when he awoke it is only then that his body went into seizure, much like when men realize their attraction they actively try to suppress the thoughts. The narrator continues by saying that although he was in “no physical suffering” his moral distress was infinite. He became so infatuated with the thought of his attacks causing him to get buried alive that he “hesitated to ride, or to walk, or to indulge in any exercise that would carry me from home” or surround himself by people who did not know of his condition. His seclusion in fear of being buried is similar to the actions taken by him to suppress his urges towards his mother, for fear of its repercussions. Being buried alive would be forcing him back into the womb, and causing him to come face to face with his mother, and thus his sexuality towards her. Towards of the end of the story, the narrator’s fear is realized. He wakes up from one of his cataleptic attacks to see that he has been
buried alive. In what he believes is his deathbed, he screams “a long, wild, and continuous shriek, or yell of agony” comparable to that of a newborn child. He quickly discovers he has not been buried, and is instead lying in a confined space upon a ship. The narrator describes the aftermath of this occurrence as “fearfully -- they were inconceivably hideous.” “But out of Evil proceeded Good,” as it was then that he began to live his life as a new man. He traveled, exercised, thought about things other than death, and his cataleptic disorder ended. Once his fear became a reality, and he overcame it, the fear vanished. Just as if a man where to confront his fantasies toward his mother, then he would no longer be so consumed with the thoughts of them. These fantasies and their resulting fears must be realized and “they must sleep, or they will devour us -- they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish.”
Candace Baker