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