"Putting out a zine, any zine, is a political act. Whether it's the high school kid who does a zine about Sloan, or the collective's newsletter advocating environmental awareness, both are reclaiming what was essentially theirs to begin with."
-Hilary Clark

Journalism Question #7 - Photocopied Politics

After examining and disecting the following quote, my head was spinning for about five minutes before I put fingesr to keyboard and realized what I had to write about. Earlier in the year, the journalism students spent a day couped up comm. experiencing what it would be like to be journalist with our first ever zine day. Everybody was in groups and we had to start and finish a zine on a budget by the end of the day. I don't mean to brag, but my team - composed of myself, Ashley Kate, and Brendan Davis, were the only successful team to complete and print out our very first zine. It was nothing glamourous and for the most part it was a cut and paste zine with our personal opinions of the way society and celebrities live out their everyday lives.
First off, I completely agree with Hilary Clark. It is evident that although my zine was cut and paste and not completed with a high degree of quality that others are known for, we still had a message to portray and it was a political one indeed. It was not a message that we took from a magazine or a book, but complied from our own thoughts and ideas. It is important that in our day and age, that we are not sucked into the garbage that the media throws at us and expects us to eat up. We have to develop our own ideas and opinions and not rely on those of other people. According to Hilary Clark, a zine is our own way of stating our thoughts and claiming them as our own. They are our ideas and we should take the credit for them. We can't continue to read beauty and fitness magazines and how and wish that one day we will look like that. By putting out a zine, we are claiming what is ours, our thought and opinions. It is important that we don't lose "ourselves", especially with the images portrayed throughout the media; stick thin models and buff athletes do not represent the everyday individual. In today's society, being who you are - just as creating your own zine - is a political action because one is going against the norm and doing what is true to themselves. Zines are an expression of everything that we are, what we are striving to be, and what we wish to be. There is no correct way to make a zine, as there is no correct way to be a politician and run foriegn affairs. We have to adapt to what we know feels right and stick to our guns and our beliefs in order to truly reclaim what we know is true and not what the media and what other influences are feeding our minds.

Zines are an artform. Art is what we make it and not how others view it. Through the zines we created, we threw all our beliefs and thoughts in a hat, mixed it up, and created an expression that was able to capture the essence of all three contributors. Speaking about our disdain that young women who strive to be thin and providing healthy meal options may be a political act on its own, but through our opinions, we claimed what we wrote through our zine and didn't keep anything back - a political, you decide.

silentsanchez.