Event Description

Zines have long functioned as queer counter-archives: informal, embodied, and collective forms of knowledge-making which resist the limits of official documentation. Writing about zines as participatory archives, scholar T. Honma (2016) argues that zine culture enables marginalized communities to document themselves while actively producing new forms of collective identity and community.

This Queerborough zine workshop intends to build on that tradition by approaching zine-making as a queer archival and pedagogical practice rooted in place. Centering Scarborough, we will explore how queerness is lived and remembered outside of downtown cores and institutional archives. Rather than asking participants to produce polished narratives, this workshop embraces fragmentation and mess not as failures of documentation, but as central to queer world and knowledge-making. Participants are invited to think with questions such as: Who is this for? What does it mean to archive ourselves? How do our individual experiences connect to longer histories of queer survival and care? And, most importantly, what does Queer Scarborough mean to you?

Although not required, we encourage everyone to come in with gathered scrap-booking materials (perhaps, a donation box of old books and magazines) and ready to get their hands dirty!

Project Background

The Queer Scarborough Archival Project aims to document the past, present, and futures of queer Scarborough, an eastern suburb in the city of Toronto. This workshop series is part of a larger research project that seeks to develop a digital archive of queer Scarborough, affirming that queer people have been – and continue to be – present in Scarborough despite the common notion that queerness only exists in the downtown core. With a lack of existing archival material and formal documentation, we are looking to use creative practice to generate new artifacts that document and affirm our community’s continued presence and resilience.

Funded by the Queer and Trans Research Lab at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, this series seeks to both spotlight the works of local queer of colour artists and open up space for queer youth to gather, and creatively think through questions around space, memory, and queer futures/possibilities of Scarborough.

Contact the host of Queer Scarborough "On Zine"