What do you think about White Supremacy?
Full short coming soon
Check out how white folks on the streets of Chicago react to this simple question…props to Chicago videographer TCAL for creatin’ this!
Hi Everyone!
The It Gets Fatter Project is a Toronto/Montreal-based body positivity project started by fat people of colour, for fat people of colour! We would really love to send Asam to represent us at the NOLOSE conference in July that takes place in Portland.
We have received partial funding for registration and lodging, however we need your generous support for us to be able to attend.
Please donate ANYTHING you can! If you an ally and can afford it, this is a great way to support the project. If you donate $20 or more, you will get 3 buttons designed by us!If we are not able to raise the total amount, your donations will go to other It Gets Fatter endeavours in the future.
THANK YOU SO MUCH!
XOXOIt Gets Fatter!
show some love and donate some $$ to these fine folx!
Hey ya’ll! We had a little hiatus catchin’ up with life and whatnot, but we’re back in action and ready to flood your tumblr feed with major POC love.
- We’ll be tabling/reading at the American Library Association Annual Conference on Sunday, June 30th. The reading is part of the “Zine Pavillion” and hopes to connect librarians with zines and self-publishing resources. Wish us luck!
- If you know of any zine distros/stores/online stores that would like to add some POC zines to their archives, please send them our way!
- Issue #2 is finally available at Quimby’s Bookstore. Get it!
- We are brainstorming Issue #3 at the moment…how exciting! If you have any input or want to get involved, hit us up!
We’ll leave ya’ll for now with a lil’ excerpt from our very own Pidgeon Pagonis. In Issue #2 on the struggle of self-care as people of color, she wrote a piece called “White People Will No Longer Dominate Self-Care”, in which she gives a raw and humorous narrative of her developing relationship with yoga.
“Self care is sometimes understanding that to partake in the things that white people have colonized in this country like running, therapy, eating healthy, massages, acupuncture, flossing and yoga, to name a few, are not inherent and exclusive to white folks with money. There shouldn’t be any shame in POCs self care game. As long as we feel shame, embarrassment, or like hellnawfuckdatewhitepeopleshit - we potentially miss out on some really cool subversive ways of taking care of ourselves, building community, and staying the fuck out of the medical industrial complex (as much as we can)”
hi yall. monica told me to check out the tumblr and i figured out how to log in and wanted to say wassa.
umm, if you were at the reading i was the one in the blue adidas track jacket lolll who talked about what it mean to be white and my family lineage and alla dat.
i really did not expect the response we got. sometimes i forget that telling your truths stories is a form of resistance. and it was really sick to invade space with some powerful sisters of mine
my personal blog is mijajaja.tumblr.com if any yall wanna fallahh me
- i will update about future performances and shit
The amount of love, support, and mad props we got this weekend was slightly overwhelming in the most positive way!
The Exhibitor Reading event was awesome, and we were blown away by all of the cool, different styles and stories that our fellow zinesters brought to the table! New zinester Oz (or Aus) from Toronto read from his new minizine Avalanche, where he hilariously comments on the classist/racist nature of apocalyptic survival writing, and Suzy X made us all laugh our asses off at the end as she read from her Chronicles of a Mallgoth (can’t express how ecstatic I am that this is a blog). We ended up reading some of our stories from the Identity zine, piecing it all together with a few new lines and some choreographed speaking-in-unison parts just hours before the event and boom, who knew we could be a performance troupe? :p Anyone have any video or photos from this event?
We ended up selling out of the close to 90 zines we brought with us (approx. 30 of issue #1 and 60 of issue #2), closing up shop about an hour before the fest was even over. We connected with tons of badass QPOC from Toronto, New Brunswick, L.A., Brooklyn and other random ass cities, and are getting ready to send out mad zines to various distros across the country.
It was honestly a little weird/hard to process random white folks approaching some of us and just saying thank you and walking away (hmm..you’re welcome?), but it was also incredibly moving to have random people of color coming up to us and just diving into how much they could relate to our stories and how they’re inspired to finally tell their own. The amount of visible POC zinesters is rapidly increasing and that makes us super fuzzy all over!
The fest was filled with so much creativity and beauty that it was hard to take it all in/visit all the tables, and almost made me wish the actual fest was two days instead of just one. :) Some zines that stood out and that I can’t wait to read include Open Pit, Open Dialogue by Savuri Gomez (No Shame distro), Todo Sobre Mi Madre by Rachel Casiano Hernandez, Chronic: a story about chronic illness by Sam Green-eggs, Cocoa & Shea by Kyla Somerville, and so many more!
I guess next on our agenda is thinking about issue #3, figuring out an easy way for folks to buy our zines online, and connecting with more of you fine azz POC folk who be hiding all over the place!
Special thanks to CZF organizers! Ya’ll rocked it!
Hot off the presses, issue #2 is officially done! Here’s a recap of what they’re all about and where you can get them at Chicago Zine Fest this weekend!
Issue #1: On Struggling Identity
Created last fall just in time for the POC Zine Project’s Race Riot Tour stop in Chicago, this collaborative zine made by some Chicago folks of color is filled with short stories, poems and a random interview with my aging abuelita, all on the topic of POC identities and the complex politics that surround it.
Issue #2: On Struggling Self-Care
After an extremely rough year on many of us, we decided to explore the difficult world of self-care. Through more short stories, poems and artwork, we touch on the importance of taking care of ourselves, as well as challenging notions such as yoga being associated with white culture, the reality of “mental” illnesses, and the shortcomings of finding happiness in social institutions like marriage as queer folks of color. All covers are handmade/block printed.
Find us at table 5 during Zine Fest this Saturday!
A few of us will also be reading at 826CHI tonight between 7-9pm as part of CZF’s Exhibitor Reading event!
We look forward to meeting you all!
Sneak peaks at issue #2 in the making!
“We are Chicago people of color. We find it absolutely necessary to our survival to eradicate our invisibility in a society that cherishes white and detests dark. We are working through years of feeling neglected, unappreciated, undervalued, and unheard by every deep crevice of life that we take part in. Through our short stories, poetry, photography and artwork, we are dismantling the walls of silence that surround our distressed hearts. We are putting our struggles out there for other people of color to grab on to when they’re barely keeping afloat…” - from the introduction
Quimby’s Bookstore: Chicago, IL
http://www.quimbys.com/store/5518
Bluestockings Bookstore:
172 Allen St, New York, NY
Chicago Zine Fest on Saturday, March 9th!
http://chicagozinefest.org/
Hey ya’ll! We got a tumblr to make it easier to connect with people and vice versa. If you’re new to who we are and what this zine is all about, read on!
The “On Struggling Identity” zine started out as a simple attempt at finding commonalities amongst people of color struggling with their identities because of assimilation, disconnection, racism, not feeling brown or black enough in their own communities and other oppressions that burden our sense of self in a not so post-racial society. We seek to explore both the advancements and limitations of identity through art, poetry and short stories, finding a safe place between seeking a comforting common ground with others, and still knowing the hazards of forming false affinities.
We focus solely on including the voices of POC in our zines because of our history of forced silence, invisibility and dismissal in society. Some of us are intersex, anarchist, queer, non-spanish speaking xicanas, palestinian, light-skinned, dark-skinned, etc, but we all have found common ground in struggling to remain resilient in the face of racism.
