Crafternoons brainstorm Zine ideas for March 

The Women’s Center hosted an event Tuesday for students to get their creative juices flowing and brainstorm ideas for the center’s zine to honor the theme of “Bodies” for Women’s History Month. 

Women’s History Month is in March, and the center is having these Crafternoon events to get students more information about this month.

BriShaun Kearns, the graduate assistant for the Women’s Center, said the event helped inform students and encourage sharing about things such as body image. 

“Because of how information was shared, especially about menstruation, abortion, birth control, physical safety and things like that, it was important to inform how we took up space and what we did with our bodies,” said Kearns.

 “We’re also doing a lot of sharing imagery of bodies to normalize the different ways and things people focus on with it. Whether it’s body shape, size, ability, or different things, and all of the different ways that something as simple as one word, like bodies, can show up for everybody.” 

Kearns explained to the group of students what a zine is before they started. 

“A zine is essentially a piece of regular printer paper with different information.

 Sometimes people will fold them up, so they have multiple pages, or they’ll just kind of be like pamphlets with different sections,” said Kearns. “People would make these little crafty zine things and leave them all over the place for people to pick up. It was a good way to share information about any activism that was going on.” 

Kearns also talked about the history of zines while students worked on them. 

“There is a long history of using zines to subvert kind of mainstream publishing of materials dating back to the 60s and 70s into the 90s before the internet was super popular,” said Kearns. “Sometimes, there were just pictures designed to empower and inspire the people involved in activism or marginalized within the community to engage in the work, stand up for themselves, or be true to who they were.” 

The Women’s Center will edit the final zine, which will be shared around campus. 

“Most likely, we will make photocopies and find a way to compile them, whether we share copies on the Facebook page with people’s permission or keep them in here in the Women’s Center,” said Kearns.

 “We might also put them in the library, whatever that may be, at the end of the month, obviously with the discretion of the authors of them, of course.” 

This zine will continue until the end of Women’s History Month. 

“We’ll sort of keep building the zine, whether it takes one person a little while to finish one or whether people do multiple and keep coming back and whatever, building sort of a library of them,” said Kearns. 

If students want to contribute, they can go to the center’s Instagram profile, @wcentermankato, to find more information on when the upcoming events are. 

Header Photo: Yesterday’s Crafternoon event was the second of four crafting events this month, all hosted by the Women’s Center.  Crafting supplies are always included, and the events are open to anyone interested. (Julia Lin/The Reporter)

Write to Lauren Viska at lauren.viska@mnsu.edu