Although I had heard about zines in the past they didn’t properly attract my attention until I attended a talk by Hamja Ahsan at the Autism Arts Festival 2019 at the University of Kent, England. Hamja spoke about his book “Shy Radicals“, his previous involvement in “DIY Cultures“, and listed a number of zines created by autistic and neurodivergent people. Watching Hamja approach the subject of zine-culture via my current area of passionate interest – autism – was a mildly mind-exploding moment for me at the end of a very (over?)stimulating weekend. I suddenly realised that even though I had spent the last 2 or 3 years immersing myself in autistic culture (in the period before and after receiving official identification) I had never considered or even heard of this sphere of activity. Fantastic! A new territory to explore! One full of creativity, authentic self-expression, and truly ‘autism friendly’ decentralised egalitarianism.
Over the next week or so I began casually googling the subject of autistic zines and zines about autism and I was surprised by how difficult it was to find them. I asked on twitter, revisited my notes from Hamja’s talk, and even though I found a few I was frustrated by being unable to find a good list anywhere. It seemed that the area of autistic culture that I spend so much time in – blogs, #ActuallyAutistic twitter, and Facebook groups – hadn’t intersected very much with autistic zine culture. As I researched more broadly by reading articles on zine culture and its history, listening to podcasts, visiting a zine library, and even attending a zine fest I became convinced that zine culture by its very nature must be absolutely saturated with autistic and neurodivergent people, many of them perhaps unidentified as such.
At a certain point I decided that my main twitter account wasn’t the place to keep tweeting every autistic zine I found, and was too ephemeral a medium anyway, so I decided to make a little blog and put my list there. And here we are. I have called the blog “Autistic Zines” for simplicity’s sake, but I don’t yet have a clear rationale on what does and doesn’t count under my definition. Does any zine that mentions autism or Asperger’s count? What about only ones made by autistic people? What if the zine is made by an autistic person but doesn’t mention autism at all? What if it isn’t even a perzine (a personal zine, sometimes diaristic)? What if an autistic person makes a zine about their favourite flavour of ice cream and never once mentions autism? Would that count? What if they make fifty – should I list them all? What if they only mention being autistic in the description on the zine’s Etsy page? What if a person who isn’t autistic makes a zine about autism? Would that truly be an “autistic zine”? Well, I’ve decided to largely abandon all such questions and just keep this thing scrappy and unfixed, rather like zines and zine culture themselves. Hopefully somewhere, in that tiny minority (of a minority) of autistic people who might be interested in zines, someone will find this useful. And if not, at least it gives me a fleeting illusory sense of usefulness and a place to practice blogging (which I haven’t done for years). At least until the interest burns out anyway…
-D
24-May-2019
Autistic Zines 