ABSTRACT
This case study examined how and why two young Latinx women in the southwestern United States constructed zines and related media as texts of gender and cultural identity. The study was informed by intersectionality theory and intersectional feminist views, recognizing multiple oppressions stemming from intersecting subjectivities of race, gender, and social class and by a theory of conocimiento, a decolonial epistemology of alternative ways of knowing and understanding. Data included observations and photographs of these zinesters, their zines, demographic questionnaires, informal and semi-structured interviews, and screen shots of their social media and extended texts. Data were analyzed by thematic analysis in a social semiotic approach. Each wrote zines chronicling the personal and/or political oppression women face by stereotypical expectations for performing gender. Both wrote to resist marginalizing social/political messages and to form community for social change. Findings demonstrate how alternative media can be agentive vehicles for identifying sites of oppression, providing safe spaces for self-representation of racial, gender, and body-positive identities, and for creating sites of resistance against subjugation., constituting one of few investigations identifying body size as a site of oppression.
