How this Zine Came to Be (and Thanks)
by Professor Julie Shayne
This zine is the collective efforts of the students in my spring 2019 class “Rad Womxn in the Global South” (AKA “Badass Womxn in the Global South”) at the University of Washington Bothell (UWB). I worked with my long-time collaborator, UWB Digital Collections librarian Denise Hattwig, and my newer collaborator, UWB Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS) librarian Penelope Wood to develop this very ambitious project. I worked with Nicole Carter, GWSS student and class peer-facilitator to manage our 41-person class and pull this project together. Students worked in teams, partially chosen by them and partially by us, to create the zine. In addition to the teams who made the zine, there was one team who made a video and another who made a poster about the project itself. Every student in the class found a badass womxn, femme, or enbie (non-binary person) from the Pacific Northwest to research, many with the help of Penelope, and had to write a very short essay capturing her/their life. Students were asked to model their essays on Kate Schatz’s Rad Womenand Rad Girlsbooks. Thank you, Kate for “meeting” with the class through video conference early in the quarter to get us all excited about the project! Some students ran with this project as if was their only commitment in life while others balanced it with all of their other school, work, and life responsibilities. A few students are GWSS majors or minors, the majority are not, and for many, this was their first GWSS class ever. It was an exhausting project, a labor of feminist love to be sure, and I hope that readers enjoy it, especially the badasses who are featured in it. We hope this zine does something to inspire every girl’s, womxn’s, femme’s, and enbie’s inner-badass. Thank you students for all your hard work; thank you Denise and Penelope for your research and digital support, and thank you Nicole for working along side me all quarter long. But mostly, thank you badasses for all of your bad assery and reminding us that even in the face of our present misogynist !&%@ storm, there are always people fighting back, including some very close to home.
