Exercise 4:


This exercise requires research outside of the lab/classroom. After reading the "Introduction" to The World of Zines, I'd like you to bring some local zines into class for study. If you are unsure of where to look for such things, try the local comic, independent record, and retro clothing stores. You can almost always find zines in these places. We'll look at these zines and webzines in class to get a general idea of what this kind of writing feels like. For exercise four, I'd like you to write your own zine for the World Wide Web. Using C. Kile's webzine Girls Can Do Anything as your model, use the five cultural stereotypes that you pinpointed in exercise four as food for thought. That is, I'd like your webzines to be working with these same five ideas or stereotypes. C. Kile stages some of the cultural stereotypes that hail her in her webzine. Let your analysis of Girls Can Do Anything direct your work with your stereotypes.

Where the aesthetic presentation of exercise four is concerned, you need to think carefully about two things: the look of each screen in your web (for this exercise you should produces at least 15 screens) and context, or the relationships between screens. Try to spend quite a bit of time thinking about how your reader will proceed through your zine, what choices s/he will be given, what connections you will make. The goal here is to make the links between documents highlight the staging of the various stereotypes; the links between documents should communicate as much as the information within your documents.

Readings:
The World of Zines, "Introduction"
excerpts from Textual Poachers
Judith Williamson's "Engaging Resistant Writers Through Zines in the Classroom"
C. Kile's Girls Can Do Anything