I have had the honor of sharing a feminist collective and a friendship with Lauren Denitzio for years now, and am always amazed at their consistently powerful analysis of the intersections between art and social justice, and the way that d.i.y. projects can be a way to enact our feminist values in our communities. I was so excited to answer their interview questions, and found that several of them are related to my progress with putting together Issue 3 of the zine, so I thought I would share. Excerpts are provided below; the full interview is
here.
<< One of Lauren's in-studio pieces from this year. Check out their other visual art and design projects here at
Black and Red Eye.
I first met Kathleen McIntyre when
she joined For The Birds, a feminist collective I have been a part of
since its inception five years ago. Among our many activities is
maintaining a zine distro of feminist titles ranging from personal
zines, to resource guides to compilations of various topics. Kathleen’s
compilation zine on grief and loss, The Worst, is regularly a
best-seller and is scheduled to have its third issue released later this
year. While not involved in feminist organizing or zine-making,
Kathleen is also a social worker in New York City. Her work is a
constant inspiration and I was excited to ask her about the many
intersecting facets of her work.
What were the original inspirations for the zine, or what was your original goal in editing a compilation zine like The Worst, as opposed to writing a personal zine or essay on the topic?
My inspirations were personal zines where the authors would devote a
handful of pages or a full issue to exploring the losses they had
undergone. (Cindy Crabb, Sascha DuBrul, Timothy Coleman and Ciara
Xyerra are some crucial writers who addressed grief in this way). I
realized I wanted to hear more stories from folks who somehow identified
with radical, activist or d.i.y. communities about how they were
engaging with the grief process. I also wanted to create a forum for
ideas about how we might push these narratives into a larger,
community-level grief praxis, which took the form of introductions and
“commentary pieces,” suggestions for grief groups, and resource lists in
each issue of
The Worst. So ultimately I wanted to merge these
intensely personal accounts of loss from many different voices with more
over-arching narratives that we might begin to engage with at the
larger community level, and the compilation zine format seemed to fit
these needs the best.
In the words of Audre Lorde: Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
I’m interested in the aspects of your zine where contributors discuss
coping mechanisms and elements of self-care in the grieving process. Is
this aspect of the zine political to you?
This aspect of the zine is perhaps the most political to me and I hope
for most readers. My radical feminist anti-capitalist lens includes a
critique of interpersonal relationships and emotional lives as a crucial
“site” of reproduction of capitalist value systems, and likewise as a
potential location from which we can struggle against the intrusion of
capitalism into our most precious human experiences. In other words,
neoliberal capitalism depends, not only on people accepting an economy
based on wages and alienated labor, but on us internalizing certain
capitalist values and dynamics in our home and personal lives, in our
“social factories.” This presents us with a mainstream narrative of the
grief process as something that should be silenced, contained,
time-limited, and proscribed by capitalist psychiatric “science” (for
example, the DSM 4 alots a time period of just two months after a loss
occurs in which a person may be diagnosed with “Bereavement,” after
which they must be diagnosed as having either Major Depression or
Adjustment Disorder). Within this climate, any enactment by a griever
of the authentic experience of their loss becomes a useful
counter-narrative to speak back to the narratives that are imposed upon
us. Oftentimes, these authentic articulations of grief expose peoples’
ongoing needs for care—both from themselves, and from their communities.
Self care in this context becomes a radical assertion that our
relationships matter and that the loss of a relationship therefore
requires care. Enacting this care, or claiming one’s own need for care
within an often uncaring system is a powerful refusal of capitalism’s
“business as usual” in our relational lives. It can be quite a source
of power for someone who is grieving to truly be cared for by themselves
and their community. My strongest intention for the zine is that it be
a tool for helping all of us learn and re-learn how we might struggle
to make this very personal and very political process happen.
In that same vein, how is community response to grief and loss a feminist issue?
My own feminism emphasizes that everyone deserves a place at the table,
so to speak. A pervasive myth in capitalist culture is that everyone
starts from a level playing field, and the things we gain are all
possible if we simply work hard enough for them. In fact, this myth
seeks to erase our culture’s long legacy of structural inequality;
slavery, economic oppression, gender-based violence, disenfranchisement
of the poor, people of color, and immigrants, violence against the
mentally ill, and biased legal systems and policies which enact social
control differentially based on what should be non-relevant factors like
race, gender, and language ability, etc. (Stop and Frisk is just one
example of why our country is not and has never been a true
meritocracy). On top of all this, we all have “normal life events” to
deal with that impact our emotional lives, such as loss, aging, physical
and mental illness, and the maintenance of relationships and families
through carework. Grief is exhausting and requires time and energy to
process in healthy ways, but all too often, it gets suppressed or
de-legitimized in the face of so many other pressing issues of survival.
We grieve within historical and political contexts. Trayvon Martin’s
parents, for example, are not simply grieving the loss of their son, but
also trying to cope with the fact that his murder was
racially-motivated and is being processed by a judicial system seeped in
white supremacist rhetoric and practices. So feminism provides us with
a complex analysis of all of the factors that shape a person’s grief
experience and thus becomes a tool for validating the many permutations
that grief can take, rather than imposing a “one-size-fits-all” model of
what grief “should be.”
Feminism also has such a rich history of praxis around struggles for
marginalized groups to gain access to resources and community support
they have previously been denied. Because the experience of loss cuts
across ALL social and class divisions, it is crucial that in our
feminist organizing we understand how grief can affect us, how it can
interface with other life issues to create specific realities, and how
leaving grief and other emotional needs unaddressed only weakens our
movements. Within a culture that suppresses and contains the authentic
expression of our emotions, a griever who does not feel supported in
their grief does not have a place at the table until we do the work to
make one.
After putting together two issues of the zine, and now a third
one on the way, are there similar themes that contributors want to
change about popular thought surrounding grief and loss? How are you
feeling the impact of the discussions started by the zine?
A compilation zine is interesting because the authors are not
necessarily in dialogue with each other as they write and contribute.
Thus, any themes which emerge end up having a coincidental undertone to
them, which can be quite exciting, or, scattered. What seems to have
emerged is a need to not be silenced or contained by others; a need for
others to understand, in depth, the contributors’ pain. And that until
this kind of safe acceptance is achieved, many contributors seem to have
been blocked in their healing, or stuck in a pattern of complicated,
persistent grief. I’m excited to say that, quite by accident, issue 3
is dealing a lot with suicide and the tremendous intense anger that we
often feel when someone dies. Both of these themes are some of the more
“taboo” topics in grief and as an editor watching the submissions come
in, I had the sense that people were really working hard to get to some
of these more stigmatized emotions. So whereas the first two issues had
explored meanings around sadness, shock, depression, confusion, and
hope, this issue is tackling the rest of it; when the person you died
was someone you also hated, who may have been abusive, who you’ve had a
complicated relationship with. When the person chose to die, and all of
the complicated feelings that arise from being left to pick up the
pieces without them. When families and friends had a different
experience of the person we lost and we feel isolated and silenced as we
try to process what their death means to us vs. what it means to others
around us.
So I would argue that all of these themes are important, but the great
thing about a compilation zine is that you can take what you want to
take from it and leave the rest. So in terms of discussions being
started or supported by the zine, I’ve heard of some radical grief
groups that formed using the zine as a starting point; of friends
learning about friends’ experiences with loss for the first time through
the zine and that leading to conversations; family members reading a
submission and being able to broach different divisions or
mis-communications around a loss for the first time, and people using
readings or gatherings to share their pieces publicly for the first time
as a way to heal. While I’m not sure what larger themes have come out
of these interactions, the biggest function of them seems to be making
grief okay to talk about. This theme, while simple, is probably the
most important goal of the zine, because if we are able to engage with
each other around these things there is no limit to what we can build,
and how much more support we can receive/offer.
