Sara Rosa Espi, Utrecht, The Netherlands: Preserving Ephemeral texts: Queer Zines in the Archive

"Zines are a form of self-publishing that preceded blogs by many decades, although personal zines cover some of the same content: intimate discussions of childrearing, accounts of heartbreaks and relationships, epic travelogues."

Flyer of "The Queer Zine Archive Project"

Sara Rosa Espi is a PhD student at the University of Utrecht. In this paper, she focuses on the collection of queer zines, a form of self-published personal manuscripts, in archives, libraries and memory projects. She further analyses "how these projects use the concept of the "living archive" in the way that they collect and display the material, and structure community participation in project."  

Do you think that queer zines should be archived or do you agree with Bruce La Bruce that "Queercore fanzines aren’t supposed to be catalogued, historicised and analysed to death, for Christssake"? What do you think about the potential of the notion of the "living archive"

To read Sara Rosa Espi's full paper, please click on the following link: Sara Rosa Espi's paper 

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