It’s been so long since I’ve had to be anywhere I didn’t want to be, that I forgot how public space feels against my skin.
“You in the service?” an older man with a worn expression inquires. I look him over, reading the loose threads of his cut-offs, the wrinkles in his over sized shell of an sweat suit draping down from his carefully trimmed neck line to mean he was.
I’d not been asked this question when I grew up in my navy town. In the moment of hesitation, an image of myself registered in my mind, short curly hair above a tall body clad in board shorts and a sports bra. I forgot how reference points shift with cultural territory, how a sense of place mediates the meaning that etches itself into our bodies. What, in Northampton, is decidedly dyke boarding on queer wedges itself into the military discount arena once I set foot within 10 miles of a base.
“Naw, but my mother was an aviation mechanic. She did twenty years on fighter jets at Oceana.”
He nods approvingly in an effort to mask his surprise, “I didn’t know women did that. Ya know…back then” I want to tell him that fuck yeah some women did that, and some still do. Instead, I shrug it off refusing to indulge the novelty of his statement. After all, it’s always been normal to me.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Saturday, May 10, 2008
New Flesh, New Struggles
By Michelle O'brien
submission for Bound to Struggle
Yes," it’s more a breath then a word, a sigh I let out as she slides the needle into my shoulder. Its pain bites, twists around my trace of voice. I feel the pain wrapping itself tightly around the intake of breath and then releasing, uncoiling as I moan. I feel her fingers trace lines on my neck, the cool metal thread of another needle gracing my cheek before she runs it through the cartilage of my ear. This time it grabs me, lines of sensation running out and across my body. These needles, their pain is staking out a new map, creating a new terrain on this surface of my body, creating in its wake new flesh and new hope. And somehow, in the midst of this transformation, this restructuring of my flesh and its possibilities, I am beginning to find myself.
Next to the bed she has set my sharps container, nearly full of my 21 gauge hormone syringes. In the morning I will bike down to the needle exchange, chat with my friends that work the Saturday site, and get a new pack of points. I know the exchange workers from my volunteering with them, from social service organizing in town, and occasionally from dyke parties. Unfortunately, the exchange doesn’t carry needles for play piercing.
I spent the winter of Y2K in Minneapolis. The winter was cold, as they always are. Vicious winds whipped through streets and sidewalks, grabbing our bundled bodies, leaving the tiny ice scars on the surface of our faces and eyes. It was an exciting time. I had spent the spring before traveling in anarchist and communist squats on the continent in Europe. In Rome, an autonomist told me to link arms as we charged a US embassy, hitting a line of the squat Carabinieri vans. In Barcelona, I watched police cars turn and drive away, as we spread out across a blocked highway, chanting "You take our homes, we take your streets!" in Catalan. In London I sat with Greek anarchists for days behind a high barricade of classroom desks; watching the campus security guards outside parole our student protest turned siege. When I returned to the States, things were changing quickly. N30 hit in Seattle, and for the first time I began to seriously imagine the ways street militancy might allow us to seize, hold and defend our dear, beloved cities.
Through that winter I organized street protest trainings, teaching kids the tactics I had learned in Europe and Seattle. We practiced breaking police lines, sucking people back into crowds, staying linked and staying strong. We were preparing ourselves for A16 in DC, for the upcoming May Day in Minneapolis, for fantasies of mass street insurrection.
We were training our bodies to protest. Our trainings were rooms full of bodies but not just any bodies. These workshops shared the demographics of too many of the protests of that year -- they were mostly white kids, the young middle class that could afford an arrest or two, able-bodies who could run if it came to that, bodies that were not visibly trans or queer. We trained rooms full of bodies to stand against the police and defend each other, to meet power with a certain privileged, almost naive courage.
We enlisted our bodies for high-profile battles of street protests, while less visible wars waged across other kinds of bodies. During 1999 and 2000, construction workers were building a new downtown Hennepin County jail; not to house protesters, but the bodies of young black, native and Latino men. One Minneapolis public school librarian, a trans woman named Debra Davis, faced the wrath of transphobic parents and administrators over her right to use a bathroom. Within the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 17, immigrant activists led a successful campaign to change the national AFL-CIO’s official stance on the rights of immigrants; while they fought off a brutal alliance of the INS and hotel owners. And in the streets of Minneapolis, like in cities across the world, many faced daily harassment regardless of any protest. Sex workers, trans people, drug users, homeless people and others fought a constant battle for survival, against poverty, hatred, violence and police harassment. Wars over bodies: their survival, their control, their movement, their visibility, and their worth.
While organizing street protests, jail solidarity and lock downs, I was also in another struggle; one I wasn’t talking much about. I was dating, and at 21 had one of my first remotely functional sexual relationships. At the time, most read me as a fag, a boy, and a bit odd. My girlfriend was a butch queer woman who liked me, in part, because she read me as femme. In our sex, our day to day moments together, I began to unravel years of confused anxiety, a tangled mess of incomprehensibility that wrapped itself around my body. Slowly, I began to heal from years of trauma; from an alienation from my body and self so massive and deep I couldn't begin to grasp it. I found new ways of understanding and reading my body, new possibilities glimpsed in a pleasurable caress, in our flirtatious exchanges. Sometime early in that winter I began to seriously consider the possibility that I was a woman.
"How bad do you want it? Come on bitch, tell me, how bad do you want it?"
"So bad." Her voice is coarse, desperate, saturated with desire. I tug the scarf tightly, tying her wrist restraints to the metal rings that surround my bed. I run the suede of the flogger across her back and thighs, listening to her breath quicken. She bends her knees, and her ass is in the air. Her hair is wet with sweat, dangling over her face. She is waiting with an intensity that fills the room, an intensity that I can feel across the surface of my own skin. An intensity I never imagined I would experience, through a brief lifetime of hating this body.
She wants me. She really wants me. And it has so little to do with what’s between my legs...
continue here: http://www.deadletters.biz/kink.html
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Unegotiated Exagerations
By Anonymous with names changed
She pressed the sweaty padding of her fingers into the leather bound handle of a cheaply articulated whip When she told me that she'd be willing to attend the Halloween party if she could be a dominatrix, and though I was yet to be told that my presence as her submissive was the prop that made it "work," I naturally acquiesced. After all, our relationship had largely been built upon my unfailing willingness to humor her every whim. I missed the irony as I sat dismantling spiked costume jewelry and wallet chains, conglomerating remnants of goth and punk phases into an absurd attempt to fain her command. The night ended in the only way it could have: my dragging three socially petrified bodies by the chain fastened around my neck in retreat from the intimidation of the crowd.
When I reflect on the past, the texture of drifting maple leaves camouflages my memories of a 24/7 DS (Dominant/submissive) relationship I participated in without even realizing much less negotiating it.
She was experiencing emotional turmoil, combating memories of her abusive childhood through bing and purge sessions punctuated by bouts of extreme social anxiety. Newly returned from a season of volunteer work abroad, I was drawn to her in part by the parallels between our pasts and in part by the desperate conviction that I could proved how different we were by feeding my own craving to take care of everyone else but myself. Micheal's lighthearted chuckle balanced out my austere sense of obligation as we became the parents she never had.
Micheal and I would take turns walking her as she stopped leaving her room alone. We brought her three meals more a day than she was willing to eat. We decided whose bed she would find comfort in when she suffered from night terrors. We discussed strategies for convincing her to depart from the cloistered comfort of her room. Two virtual strangers lingered into the night arguing about what was best for her. Even white knights clash sometimes.
There was a total power exchange guiding and shaping the relationship that we all managed to remain ignorant of despite its glaring obviousness. She gradually gave up all agency in her life, her choice subsumed by her profound insecurities. Accordingly, we were there to pick up all the slack we allowed her, structuring our lives around what we instructed her that she needed. Availability had new meanings.
She got sexually assaulted, for it seemed her knack for perpetual vulnerability attracted two types of people: those who feel compelled to caregive and those who feel compelled to take advantage. In the aftermath, I found myself restraining Jeremy even while I snarled at the assailant from across the lunch room. Despite my skipping class to drive her to the Crisis Center and AA meetings, her eating disorder worsened. When I began to evaluate the life that had so quickly become identical with my own, I realized how her whole life was a succession of unhealthy power exchanges.
In her lucid moments, she could tell you how she grasped for some illusion of control through her addictions. If she felt like she had no control over her life, it was because she had learned to establish relationships exclusively through giving away as much of it away as she could.I was enabling her to give up on herself even as I was trying to prove to her that I wouldn't.
I realized that my willingness to put together the fragments of her life was contributing other increasing unwillingness to do that for herself.
I used to think that DS relationships were merely exaggerations of the relationships we all form everyday, but sometimes it seems that they about negotiating the exaggerations that are there whether you acknowledge them or not...
She pressed the sweaty padding of her fingers into the leather bound handle of a cheaply articulated whip When she told me that she'd be willing to attend the Halloween party if she could be a dominatrix, and though I was yet to be told that my presence as her submissive was the prop that made it "work," I naturally acquiesced. After all, our relationship had largely been built upon my unfailing willingness to humor her every whim. I missed the irony as I sat dismantling spiked costume jewelry and wallet chains, conglomerating remnants of goth and punk phases into an absurd attempt to fain her command. The night ended in the only way it could have: my dragging three socially petrified bodies by the chain fastened around my neck in retreat from the intimidation of the crowd.
When I reflect on the past, the texture of drifting maple leaves camouflages my memories of a 24/7 DS (Dominant/submissive) relationship I participated in without even realizing much less negotiating it.
She was experiencing emotional turmoil, combating memories of her abusive childhood through bing and purge sessions punctuated by bouts of extreme social anxiety. Newly returned from a season of volunteer work abroad, I was drawn to her in part by the parallels between our pasts and in part by the desperate conviction that I could proved how different we were by feeding my own craving to take care of everyone else but myself. Micheal's lighthearted chuckle balanced out my austere sense of obligation as we became the parents she never had.
Micheal and I would take turns walking her as she stopped leaving her room alone. We brought her three meals more a day than she was willing to eat. We decided whose bed she would find comfort in when she suffered from night terrors. We discussed strategies for convincing her to depart from the cloistered comfort of her room. Two virtual strangers lingered into the night arguing about what was best for her. Even white knights clash sometimes.
There was a total power exchange guiding and shaping the relationship that we all managed to remain ignorant of despite its glaring obviousness. She gradually gave up all agency in her life, her choice subsumed by her profound insecurities. Accordingly, we were there to pick up all the slack we allowed her, structuring our lives around what we instructed her that she needed. Availability had new meanings.
She got sexually assaulted, for it seemed her knack for perpetual vulnerability attracted two types of people: those who feel compelled to caregive and those who feel compelled to take advantage. In the aftermath, I found myself restraining Jeremy even while I snarled at the assailant from across the lunch room. Despite my skipping class to drive her to the Crisis Center and AA meetings, her eating disorder worsened. When I began to evaluate the life that had so quickly become identical with my own, I realized how her whole life was a succession of unhealthy power exchanges.
In her lucid moments, she could tell you how she grasped for some illusion of control through her addictions. If she felt like she had no control over her life, it was because she had learned to establish relationships exclusively through giving away as much of it away as she could.I was enabling her to give up on herself even as I was trying to prove to her that I wouldn't.
I realized that my willingness to put together the fragments of her life was contributing other increasing unwillingness to do that for herself.
I used to think that DS relationships were merely exaggerations of the relationships we all form everyday, but sometimes it seems that they about negotiating the exaggerations that are there whether you acknowledge them or not...
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Interview: Unschooling
Excerpts from an interview with someone who grew up in rural Canada and got her education outside of school as an unschooler. I do not have permission to post this, though I do plan to request permission and don't foresee any problems...
My mom taught college before I was born…After two or three classes of elementary school teachers she became scared because they weren’t inquisitive. She’d ask them why they wanted to teach and they would answer “I love kids”…they lacked a desperate need for something to instill in children…she started reading…and had pretty much made the decision before I came along…She was pretty much into experiential education on all levels, so it was never anything foreign to me.
I remember sitting down with the math book, but I remember long stretches of adventuring or playing with animals…not doing grammar…If you followed me around when I was a kid, it didn’t look like I was doing a lot of learning. Whenever I would try to check in with people who spent six hours a day on this education project, I wasn’t ever behind.
What you’re doing with unschooling is being out in the world…I was out in what you get trained for in school. Why bother preparing when it’s out there waiting and fine having a kid in it?...I think kids can see things through an adult lens much more easily than most adults assume. I never felt like I was especially smart or vivacious, but somehow adults were always impressed that we would have those conversations they always put in the little adult box…Kids are capable of a lot that doesn’t really occur to adults, but at the same time, I lived in a community of 130 people, so it was isolating for me…as a teenager… A bunch of kids had just moved away when I got there, so it was lonely, but I’m not sure spending two hours a day on a bus would have really helped that…
In a lot of things, I was a late developer by school standards…I went through a longing for structure…I ended-up being fascinated by groups defined by uniforms…regimented life was…so foreign and almost forbidden because I knew it was in a lot of ways the antithesis of that was working really well for me…I tried to emulate highly structured life for a couple years but that didn’t work super well for me…[except] I got really good at math…
Interests went in cycles...some of the little ones came from reading a book or seeing a documentary on something or a conversation…but there were these things that seems to cycle back almost on a yearly basis I’d get interested in the same thing again, and realizing that has been really useful for me…in terms of where my life has gone…
The way I tell whether I’m working or learning…is by the ratio of inflow to outflow…When I want a lot of inflow over one area of knowledge…I went all right I’ll see if I can get enough knowledge to make that a work thing, an outflow.
When I was fifteen and [people I knew] started reading The Teenage Liberation Handbook by Grace Llewellyn, they just had their minds blown, that they could…determine their own education. I read the TLH and I wasn’t very impressed because I had already been doing it…it was a pretty clear divide…
I moved, my parents split-up, and my mom got super busy. My mom said, “all right ____ do you want to be the person at the steering wheel of your education or do you want to go to school.” I said “I’ll do it. Can I still ask you stuff?” So I started studying textiles.
I went to Not Back to school camp when I was sixteen and realized how amazing and cool and unique and…full of their own vital energy unschooled teenagers were. I really kicked back and started to think a lot about community and sustainability…
The culture of Not Back to School Camp was pretty intense. The camp itself is a hundred kids out in the middle of nowhere in Oregon for a week…It got to be a lifeline in terms of what it meant to be outside of the system in a lot of ways…it was at a time when young people tend to spend a lot of their time trying to push against the system or visually signify that they are outside of the system but actually being out of it is really trippy and scary…Knowing that there were other people doing it and knowing how they were doing it in terms of [education resources]. The culture very quickly evolved into…deep, honest, emotional sharing…unschooled teenagers tend to be really emotionally mature. I realize that one of the arguments against unschooling is that your not going to have to build up all those coping mechanisms and defenses…that your gonna be more vulnerable…but by bypassing all that shit, you can figure out who you are a lot earlier. A lot of people had really clear picture of themselves…
I was pretty dedicated to the concept of never going to college…I would take on these projects…deciding I would spend a certain amount of time learn to do a specific thing properly…I did that with costuming. When I turned seventeen I decided my next project would be being grown-up…I spent three years making sure I could be a grown-up, that I could support myself without any help and I got an apartment….I pretty much went into that the same way I would do any other kind of educational project. It’s been pretty weird for me watching people leave my college and realize that life stuff is different from school stuff…not teach themselves the same way.
I came to college and I realized that most people were coming off of 12, 13, 14 years of organized education already…One of the biggest things for me was that I was allowed to pursue what I was curious about.
I’m so idealistic and unafraid to be dorky. I think that had the biggest impact on me when I did decide to enter an education system, which was when I was 21 and went to college for the first time. It floored me that there were people being paid to facilitate my education…I didn’t have to go get my own resources, my own mentors and books. All the books I wanted were on one shelf. At the same time, they were being paid with all the sociocultural [implications]…
My freedom to determine what I learned and why and how…I have to wonder why that isn’t something that is considered a right…I feel like a lot of the time that has to do with control and…what permissions we give ourselves as individuals and also as subcultures… The theory behind what you learn and how…I like it to a certain extent, and then it gets really scary because it is about control.
I think there are a lot of certain social checks when exposed to a society that’s trying to train you to be a certain way, and one thing that homeschoolers tend to be protected from is that. At this point, I have a community of people my age who were unschooled that I met through not back to school camp…We tend to have pretty damn strong personalities and be glorious generalists really about anything or be absolutely driven by the shit that’s interesting. I think a lot of people see that lack of being willing to be safe as either over-innocence or awkwardness…I’d like there to be more characters in the world…its something that we all have the capacity for but it gets socialized out of us.
At this point I’m not exactly out as an unschooler most places…I prefer for people to know me so I don’t get type-cast…The interactions aren’t as rich…There are so few real conversations in life…that whole mind-blow open thing I did between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one: I went to NBTS camp; I moved out of home; I realized I was gay; I realized was genderqueer; I moved to another country to live with my girlfriend; I held down jobs; I went to conventional school for the first time…coming into all of those wider cultures...the depth that I know is possible so often isn’t there…that’s why I’ve gotten so protective of my unschooler culture for…usually when I say to someone, “you’re such an unschooler,” to someone it’s as much about how they do social interaction as how they do education.
My mom taught college before I was born…After two or three classes of elementary school teachers she became scared because they weren’t inquisitive. She’d ask them why they wanted to teach and they would answer “I love kids”…they lacked a desperate need for something to instill in children…she started reading…and had pretty much made the decision before I came along…She was pretty much into experiential education on all levels, so it was never anything foreign to me.
I remember sitting down with the math book, but I remember long stretches of adventuring or playing with animals…not doing grammar…If you followed me around when I was a kid, it didn’t look like I was doing a lot of learning. Whenever I would try to check in with people who spent six hours a day on this education project, I wasn’t ever behind.
What you’re doing with unschooling is being out in the world…I was out in what you get trained for in school. Why bother preparing when it’s out there waiting and fine having a kid in it?...I think kids can see things through an adult lens much more easily than most adults assume. I never felt like I was especially smart or vivacious, but somehow adults were always impressed that we would have those conversations they always put in the little adult box…Kids are capable of a lot that doesn’t really occur to adults, but at the same time, I lived in a community of 130 people, so it was isolating for me…as a teenager… A bunch of kids had just moved away when I got there, so it was lonely, but I’m not sure spending two hours a day on a bus would have really helped that…
In a lot of things, I was a late developer by school standards…I went through a longing for structure…I ended-up being fascinated by groups defined by uniforms…regimented life was…so foreign and almost forbidden because I knew it was in a lot of ways the antithesis of that was working really well for me…I tried to emulate highly structured life for a couple years but that didn’t work super well for me…[except] I got really good at math…
Interests went in cycles...some of the little ones came from reading a book or seeing a documentary on something or a conversation…but there were these things that seems to cycle back almost on a yearly basis I’d get interested in the same thing again, and realizing that has been really useful for me…in terms of where my life has gone…
The way I tell whether I’m working or learning…is by the ratio of inflow to outflow…When I want a lot of inflow over one area of knowledge…I went all right I’ll see if I can get enough knowledge to make that a work thing, an outflow.
When I was fifteen and [people I knew] started reading The Teenage Liberation Handbook by Grace Llewellyn, they just had their minds blown, that they could…determine their own education. I read the TLH and I wasn’t very impressed because I had already been doing it…it was a pretty clear divide…
I moved, my parents split-up, and my mom got super busy. My mom said, “all right ____ do you want to be the person at the steering wheel of your education or do you want to go to school.” I said “I’ll do it. Can I still ask you stuff?” So I started studying textiles.
I went to Not Back to school camp when I was sixteen and realized how amazing and cool and unique and…full of their own vital energy unschooled teenagers were. I really kicked back and started to think a lot about community and sustainability…
The culture of Not Back to School Camp was pretty intense. The camp itself is a hundred kids out in the middle of nowhere in Oregon for a week…It got to be a lifeline in terms of what it meant to be outside of the system in a lot of ways…it was at a time when young people tend to spend a lot of their time trying to push against the system or visually signify that they are outside of the system but actually being out of it is really trippy and scary…Knowing that there were other people doing it and knowing how they were doing it in terms of [education resources]. The culture very quickly evolved into…deep, honest, emotional sharing…unschooled teenagers tend to be really emotionally mature. I realize that one of the arguments against unschooling is that your not going to have to build up all those coping mechanisms and defenses…that your gonna be more vulnerable…but by bypassing all that shit, you can figure out who you are a lot earlier. A lot of people had really clear picture of themselves…
I was pretty dedicated to the concept of never going to college…I would take on these projects…deciding I would spend a certain amount of time learn to do a specific thing properly…I did that with costuming. When I turned seventeen I decided my next project would be being grown-up…I spent three years making sure I could be a grown-up, that I could support myself without any help and I got an apartment….I pretty much went into that the same way I would do any other kind of educational project. It’s been pretty weird for me watching people leave my college and realize that life stuff is different from school stuff…not teach themselves the same way.
I came to college and I realized that most people were coming off of 12, 13, 14 years of organized education already…One of the biggest things for me was that I was allowed to pursue what I was curious about.
I’m so idealistic and unafraid to be dorky. I think that had the biggest impact on me when I did decide to enter an education system, which was when I was 21 and went to college for the first time. It floored me that there were people being paid to facilitate my education…I didn’t have to go get my own resources, my own mentors and books. All the books I wanted were on one shelf. At the same time, they were being paid with all the sociocultural [implications]…
My freedom to determine what I learned and why and how…I have to wonder why that isn’t something that is considered a right…I feel like a lot of the time that has to do with control and…what permissions we give ourselves as individuals and also as subcultures… The theory behind what you learn and how…I like it to a certain extent, and then it gets really scary because it is about control.
I think there are a lot of certain social checks when exposed to a society that’s trying to train you to be a certain way, and one thing that homeschoolers tend to be protected from is that. At this point, I have a community of people my age who were unschooled that I met through not back to school camp…We tend to have pretty damn strong personalities and be glorious generalists really about anything or be absolutely driven by the shit that’s interesting. I think a lot of people see that lack of being willing to be safe as either over-innocence or awkwardness…I’d like there to be more characters in the world…its something that we all have the capacity for but it gets socialized out of us.
At this point I’m not exactly out as an unschooler most places…I prefer for people to know me so I don’t get type-cast…The interactions aren’t as rich…There are so few real conversations in life…that whole mind-blow open thing I did between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one: I went to NBTS camp; I moved out of home; I realized I was gay; I realized was genderqueer; I moved to another country to live with my girlfriend; I held down jobs; I went to conventional school for the first time…coming into all of those wider cultures...the depth that I know is possible so often isn’t there…that’s why I’ve gotten so protective of my unschooler culture for…usually when I say to someone, “you’re such an unschooler,” to someone it’s as much about how they do social interaction as how they do education.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Documentary: Radical Imagination
Here's my first documentary! It's called Radical Imagination, and it's an abstract explorations of what it means to be radical...
Sunday, December 16, 2007
What the Hell is This?
Welcome to the homepage of what I hope will become a regularly published zine.
For those of you unfamiliar with the genre, zines are self-published print works (often bound together like booklets) that normally circulate by personal contact with the author or (in this case) editor of them. An idiosyncratic form to be sure, they are usually produced on a shoe-string budget complimented by passion for the subject at hand. That means no one profits off of it, rather it is something that is created purely for intrinsic value.
As for this zine in particular, I am compiling articles (open format) addressing subcultures, lifestyles, & identities of those whose lives transcend the boundaries of social norms. Topics of interest are not limited to: asexuality, transgenderism, anarchy, Buddhism, BDSM, Straight-edge, Body Mod, Poly-amory, Veganism, Autism, etc.
I hope to draw parallels among people who live in radically different ways, cultivating new understandings of our lives, and highlighting the insights that extend beyond.
This zine is about experience, about constructing lives around our authentic needs, about the interplay of theory & practice, about how our values inform the choices we make, about how we understand ourselves within the context of a larger society, about what it means to embrace the possible even when it defies the normal--about liberation.
I'd love to hear from you if you have something to share or would just like to talk. Questions, concerns, & submissions should be sent to InTheMarginsZine@gmail.com.
For those of you unfamiliar with the genre, zines are self-published print works (often bound together like booklets) that normally circulate by personal contact with the author or (in this case) editor of them. An idiosyncratic form to be sure, they are usually produced on a shoe-string budget complimented by passion for the subject at hand. That means no one profits off of it, rather it is something that is created purely for intrinsic value.
As for this zine in particular, I am compiling articles (open format) addressing subcultures, lifestyles, & identities of those whose lives transcend the boundaries of social norms. Topics of interest are not limited to: asexuality, transgenderism, anarchy, Buddhism, BDSM, Straight-edge, Body Mod, Poly-amory, Veganism, Autism, etc.
I hope to draw parallels among people who live in radically different ways, cultivating new understandings of our lives, and highlighting the insights that extend beyond.
This zine is about experience, about constructing lives around our authentic needs, about the interplay of theory & practice, about how our values inform the choices we make, about how we understand ourselves within the context of a larger society, about what it means to embrace the possible even when it defies the normal--about liberation.
I'd love to hear from you if you have something to share or would just like to talk. Questions, concerns, & submissions should be sent to InTheMarginsZine@gmail.com.
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