fag on the rag
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This project ended up being a way for me to combine my skills with journalism and visual art. I loved collecting the period stories and opinions through online queer networking, and giving the stories a physical space to exist in people’s hands. I regularly discussed my work with my peers and enjoyed collaborating with them on how to best communicate the story, title endorsement, and the use of ink and a risograph.
My frontispiece for the work and page excerpts are below.
My frontispiece for the work and page excerpts are below.
frontispiece
There is an excerpt of Bluebeard’s Egg by Margaret Atwood where the narrator speaks of the sacred nature of stories told by women only to other women. Stories of hardship, shared in spaces like kitchens as peas fall from shells, quietly, and never with men. She narrates that her “father enters the kitchen, wondering when the tea will be ready, and the women close ranks, turning to him their deceptively blankly smiling faces.” Men, the narrator’s mother tells her, are to be shielded from such delicate matters.
I felt a nostalgia for the truth and reality of this community amidst mothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, that Atwood describes. But I cannot comfortably find myself defined by the womanhood and cisness essential to her work. I deeply felt the absence of queerness and transness from Atwood’s analysis and wondered of other ways to frame this type of community. I desired a framework that captured a fraught relationship to patriarchy without restricting itself to a binary that left out so much history and culture. And so I chose to focus my comic on something at the crosshairs of womanhood, community, and gendering: periods!
Menstruation is marketed and regurgitated culturally as an “entry into womanhood.” Especially in America, they are a painful inauguration for women to suffer and for men to approach from a distance. This phenomenon of shedding lining, evading pregnancy, staining their sheets and pants with blood, creates its own community.
There is an excerpt of Bluebeard’s Egg by Margaret Atwood where the narrator speaks of the sacred nature of stories told by women only to other women. Stories of hardship, shared in spaces like kitchens as peas fall from shells, quietly, and never with men. She narrates that her “father enters the kitchen, wondering when the tea will be ready, and the women close ranks, turning to him their deceptively blankly smiling faces.” Men, the narrator’s mother tells her, are to be shielded from such delicate matters.
I felt a nostalgia for the truth and reality of this community amidst mothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, that Atwood describes. But I cannot comfortably find myself defined by the womanhood and cisness essential to her work. I deeply felt the absence of queerness and transness from Atwood’s analysis and wondered of other ways to frame this type of community. I desired a framework that captured a fraught relationship to patriarchy without restricting itself to a binary that left out so much history and culture. And so I chose to focus my comic on something at the crosshairs of womanhood, community, and gendering: periods!
Menstruation is marketed and regurgitated culturally as an “entry into womanhood.” Especially in America, they are a painful inauguration for women to suffer and for men to approach from a distance. This phenomenon of shedding lining, evading pregnancy, staining their sheets and pants with blood, creates its own community.
This is clear from the unique and precious bond that forms when one person brings up a period story
in a group setting, and the bevvy of stories that follow. And because they are
so often left out of the conversation and empowerment around periods, I wanted
to focus on deliberately visualizing the community of people that bleed and who
do not identify as girls or women: transmasculine people, butch lesbians.
I knew that my own stories wouldn’t cover our community’s breadth of experiences, and that people unfamiliar with our niche would be reading the comic as well. I posted a google form to my social media, asking friends to share it with their friends. My questions begged for transmasc people’s silliest period stories, as well as musings on their personal relationship to menstruation and it’s harsh gendering.
This analog accruement of stories also inspired the visuals, as I was reminded and in awe of the grassroots cartoons and zines of lesbians in the 80s and 90s. I chose to render my linework and characters in a similarly loose, doodled style. Printed publications such as Fag Rag, Lavender Vision, and Come Out! were based on the east coast (like me!) and independently produced by gay and lesbian people (like me!). It was an art of independent, non-editorial storytelling to foster a specific community. Particularly I, like many others, am inspired by Alison Bechdel’s strip comic, “Dykes to Watch Out For.” And finally, I chose to use red ink as a kitschy, literal choice ;)
I knew that my own stories wouldn’t cover our community’s breadth of experiences, and that people unfamiliar with our niche would be reading the comic as well. I posted a google form to my social media, asking friends to share it with their friends. My questions begged for transmasc people’s silliest period stories, as well as musings on their personal relationship to menstruation and it’s harsh gendering.
This analog accruement of stories also inspired the visuals, as I was reminded and in awe of the grassroots cartoons and zines of lesbians in the 80s and 90s. I chose to render my linework and characters in a similarly loose, doodled style. Printed publications such as Fag Rag, Lavender Vision, and Come Out! were based on the east coast (like me!) and independently produced by gay and lesbian people (like me!). It was an art of independent, non-editorial storytelling to foster a specific community. Particularly I, like many others, am inspired by Alison Bechdel’s strip comic, “Dykes to Watch Out For.” And finally, I chose to use red ink as a kitschy, literal choice ;)
Visual Research
