By McKenna Foley, Mia Gebrowsky, and Steph Wong, Oakland University

We knew from the start that we wanted to create this project in the form of a zine because we felt it provided the extravagant and limitless feelings that queerness provides. Zines allow for a variety of voices and styles. They allow for the coexistence of the serious and the fun, of the formal and the informal. Choosing the form of a zine allows for the teaching of complicated subjects in a more accessible, down-to-earth way. 

Because capitalism is so embedded in our lives, we also knew fairly early on that capitalism would be the subject of this project. While this semester-long project was time-consuming, it felt more like an artistic endeavor, rather than a tiresome academic assignment. In teaching others about how to find joy in the oppressive state that is capitalism, we ourselves found joy; we were given the creative freedom to queer academia itself, which furthured our understanding of this social construct. Being given the opportunity to simply play and create art with meaning was, we can say confidently, one of the most fulfilling experiences of our college career.

Queer theory opened our minds to an entirely new way of approaching life, because we were shown both the academic and campy sides to queerness. The foundations of queer theory are all about creating your own meaning, and that’s what we decided to do here. When learning about how to queer the world around us we recognized that to queer the world meant to bring joy to the world. The zine is meant to provide a small but significant piece of queer joy to peoples lives. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.