Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies - Volume 19, Issue 4, 2016

Zines are self-published booklets, magazines, or comics which can cover any subject. A large proportion of the zines produced today are feminist personal zines, or ‘perzines’, which discuss issues such as sexual violence, mental health, menstruation, and lesbophobia. Despite blogs and other digital media being popular among feminist zine makers, they choose to publish life-writing on paper. Through analysing zines and interviewing contemporary feminist zine makers from different countries and age groups, I argue that the accessibility, creative freedom, and community of feminist perzines build a ‘participatory playground’ in which amateur writers can share life-writing on feminist issues and which therefore creates a safe space for transforming personal experiences into political awareness.

Like the author, the main character of The yellow wallpaper (1890) suffers from mental illness and – even more so – from the treatment thereof. Both Charlotte Gilman and her heroine react against their unfair treatments by telling their own story. This article elucidates the truth those illness narratives contain. I approach the short story, its narrator, and its author from a gender-deconstructionist angle, focussing on the concept of performativity as theorised in Judith Butler’s Bodies that matter (1993) and Giving an account of oneself (2005). In that context, performances of identity, like storytelling, are coded by an enabling matrix. Matching up these insights against theories of Elaine Showalter, sociologist Arthur Frank, and queer theorist Jack/Judith Halberstam, I establish a link between performance, storytelling, and gender. The analysis shows that illness narratives are potentially, yet not necessarily, subversive. Indeed, while Gilman offers an alternative for suppressive Victorian discourse, her narrator fails to disjoint the system that terms her ‘ill’.

During the summer of 2016, Kif Kif, a local Belgian antiracist movement, organised the first Gender & Super-diversity summer school with support from the Belgian feminist group Vrouwen Overleg Komitee (now Furia) and ella – the Belgian non-profit knowledge centre for gender and ethnicity. This interview with the summer school’s initiator, Evelien Geerts, who is currently a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a member of Furia and Kif Kif, and the summer school’s co-organiser, Kif Kif-employee Hanan Challouki, addresses the summer school itself, their personal passion for activism, and the importance of intersectional feminism in the super diverse society of Belgium, both on an academic and activist level. Apart from addressing the notions and theories of intersectionality and super-diversity – a term that has gained more and more academic popularity in the UK and Belgium, and mainly accentuates the already-existing and ever-increasing diversity among minority groups, cultures, and subcultures within diverse societies – the interview also touches upon topics such as the current-day political situation in Belgium and Flanders, gender and diversity in academia, the institutionalisation of the discipline of gender studies, and the rise of a neoliberal discourse in Belgium.

The predominantly masculine imagery and theological conception of God and Jesus have often been criticised by feminist theologians and artists, for instance by investing in ‘Christalogy’ as an alternative systematic theological reading of Christ and by sculpting and painting ‘Christas’ or female cross figures. In this essay, I argue that such a feminised depiction of Christ does not solve the problem of the gender dichotomy. I discuss two examples of art/popular culture that represent a gender ambiguous Christ figure. Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin’s photograph The Last Supper (1998) first of all depicts Jesus among leather people and transvestites, sipping on champagne and eating crisps. The second example shows Conchita Wurst, the so-called ‘lady with the beard’, who won the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest, and who can be read as a contemporary Christ figure. Both examples demonstrate that the gender identity of Jesus can be destabilised, adding to the archive of a ‘queer Jesus’ who defies norms of gender and sexuality.