By Lucy Scholey, Assistant News Editor
In the dimly lit Wardroom, among pitchers of beer and endless games of pool, people are slumped in chairs with their noses stuck in a newly launched zine.
Other copies of the Feminist Collective Zine lay in piles around the University of King’s College bar while local poets, dancers and musicians – including self-declared feminist singer Jenocide – performed at the event’s opening Nov. 24.
The new magazine is the culmination of discussions and ideas from the Feminist Collective, a society new to King’s this year.
Emma Morgan-Thorp, gender and women’s studies major and self-described “feminist dork,” helped initiate the society. She wanted to bring together a group of people to share ideas and viewpoints on feminism. It’s a topic that isn’t openly discussed on campus, she says.
“Only since the beginning of the Feminist Collective, have I walked into the Wardroom and heard someone say ‘feminism’ in a conversation over beer,” she says.
She wanted a project to encapsulate the ideas brought to the society’s weekly meetings. She pitched the zine, and fellow Feminist Collective members Kate Hazell and Jess Geddes took on the role as editors.
The theme for this month’s edition is “Sex and the Sex Trade,” with roughly 20 submissions from essays, to poetry to photo collages.
“There’s a lot of very honest submissions here,” Hazell says. “Honest words.”
The submissions include articles about prostitution laws in Canada, burlesque dancing and consensual sex.
Fourth-year King’s student Simon Ross-Siegel wrote about religious prostitution under Islamic law. For him, feminism is about “getting our culture to the point where women have access to the political sphere, voting, rights, institutional rights.”
“I think we’ve fallen away from it, in a way. You hear arguments, for example, about how women in Afghanistan are really anti-imperialist, in a way, because they’re rejecting media stereotypes. I think this is ridiculous.”
For Feminist Collective member and zine contributor Melina Giannelia, feminism is often guided by misperceptions.
“For me, when I was younger and in high school, the word ‘feminism’ was always a bad word and no one ever wanted to be associated with it,” she says.
Since starting university, she says she’s gained a new perspective.
“Feminism is not a bunch of scary, bra-burning separatists who think that the world would function only without men. There are so many different ways to express feminism and to be a feminist,” she adds. “There are so many different sides and so many different aspects and I think that that’s an important part of what the collective is trying to do.”
Morgan-Thorp says many people are still misguided when it comes to feminism and feminist issues. Some have questioned the Feminist Collective’s philosophy.
“A lot of people have come up to me in the past couple of months and said, ‘Well do we really need feminism still? Isn’t sexism kind of over?” she says. “That blows my mind. I can’t imagine anybody believing that.”
But she thinks the Feminist Collective has opened new discussions across campus. The zine will continue providing an outlet for people who want to discuss feminism and give voice to the different feminist perspectives. “Gender and Violence” is the theme for next month’s issue.
“I’m really glad that the term ‘feminist’ didn’t deter people from making submissions,” adds Hazell, who says she’s pleased with the zine’s response and hopes it will spark interest across the city.
“It’s crisp now,” she adds, holding up the black-and-white zine, “but I hope to see it weathered somewhere months from now in a café or in a library just having been enjoyed by many, many people.”
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