The 'Zine:

One of the coolest projects we are planning is the Shakti Center monthly ‘zine. As yet untitled, we plan to run a monthly workshop for women to create a homemade magazine from scratch. There’s this wonderful tradition of using ‘zines—homemade, do-it-yourself, roughed up, and made on the fly—as a form of creative expression and uncensored communication in global radical communities, and we want to bring this home to Chennai. ‘Zines can include handwritten poems, essays, letters, reading lists, photo-collages, thought-provoking worksheets, journal entries, drawings, paintings, and anything else that comes to mind! Each month we’ll all figure out a theme—be it the body, a political event, violence against women, or everything else under the sun that affects women—and collaborate on putting together an issue of the magazine. Some of the issues we want to touch include gender, race, caste, desire, body image, popular culture, and how these issues affect us as women in our everyday lives. Then we’ll upload a PDF of the magazine to the Shakti Center website under a creative commons license (link) for free access to our brothers and sisters around the world! Because we believe that combining self-expression with free access to information is the best way to start connecting with the larger world. Shouldn’t everything be free?

For some good examples of radical homemade ‘zines, check out Broken Beautiful Press, The Ruckus Society, Freedom Is Free (also from Broken Beautiful Press), and Hex Presse to get a better sense of the radical D-I-Y aesthetic looks like. (Or click on the pics below to download your own pdf versions of a few.) Keep coming back to the website for our ‘zine schedule and how you can get involved—and if you have any comments or suggestions for issue themes, contact us at thefolks@shakticenter.org!

think. speak. create. connect. act.