Voices From the Margins Latinx and Chicanx/Filipina Women Writing Ephemeral Texts for Representation and Resistance

• Published in: Genders, Cultures, and Literacies pp. 164 - 178
• Main Author: Guzzetti, Barbara J.
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2022
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: Super Heroes; Spanish Language; Inductive Thematic Analysis; Agentive Vehicles; Digital Multimodal Compositions; writing; Young Men; Panel Cartoon Strip; Comic Zine; Flor Y; Demographic Questionnaire; Heritage Language Learning; Multimodal Texts; Face To Face; Clips; Family Literacy; Decolonial Epistemology; adult literacy; zines; Commercial Magazines; White Mainstream English; multimedia; Latinx women; Girl Magic; Intersectionality Theory; Toxic Masculinity; Children's Heritage Language Learning; Slice Of Life
• ISBN: 9780367744564; 0367744562; 9780367742751; 0367742756
• DOI: 10.4324/9781003158011-15

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.