Borderlands Rhetoric

Materially and affectively vexed, borders are forged through violence even as the poetics and practices they generate transmute trauma into a resource for social, political, and personal transformation. While queers are often borderlands dwellers, not all borders are created equal. Indeed, the differences of experience, power, citizenship, and relationships to the land among differently located queer formations are vital to queer of color and queer indigenous theory and criticism. In Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetorics, the Chicana feminist critic Adela Licona unearths how radical women of color zinesters constitute a powerful “borderlands rhetoric”—a thriving, coalitional “third space” in which these young women forge a politics and a vision for the future. Drawing on her own queer mestiza experience of “having been born and raised in the US/Mexico borderlands,” and Chicana feminist theorists like Gloria Anzaldúa, Emma Pérez, María Lugones, and Chela Sandoval, Licona identifies these third spaces “as the in-between spaces that are created at virtual and material intersections” in which “two or more things come together and create a third space of sorts” (8). The zines Licona analyzes leverage crude cut-and-paste production techniques and in-between cultural and political practices—between national, gender, and racial identities; between public knowledge and personal experience—to create bottom-up knowledge and radical community.

The term zines is a punk catchphrase for magazines, its fragmentation signifying a host of distinctions that define zine culture and writerly practices. Zines are a tangible form of countercultural social media often produced within and constitutive of punk culture. Predating image editing, blogs, and other digital forms of self-publishing, zinesters usually work with basic tools like a typewriter, scissors, a glue stick, and a copy machine, opening self-publishing to everyone.¹ Zines provide an alternative site of knowledge production outside formalized, corporatized, and academic discursive formations, evincing “a sophisticated engagement with academic theory . . . often for the purpose of holding theory—and authorized and expert knowledge—accountable to communities for which and from which it is produced” (104).

The primary strength of Zines in Third Space is Licona’s powerful archive. Because the zines she analyzes are not widely known among academics, her work is a bridge between zine culture and her interdisciplinary fields: rhetoric, cultural studies, Chicana feminism, and queer theory. Licona’s archive focuses on zines by young women of color, such as Bi-Girl World, Memoirs of a Queer Hapa, and Bamboo Girl and Borderlands, the last of which “disrupts normative racialized assumptions steeped in dominant and white reflections” (20). Licona includes mainstream zines like Riot Grrrl, but highlights zines in which “coalitional consciousness is explicit, activism is engaged and promoted, and community building knowledge generating and grassroots literacies and info sharing are the articulated foci” (21). With the inclusion of only one Native American zine, Blowin Chunxx 5, which addresses vital issues of “historic displacement, cultural appropriation, and commodification” (42), Licona is unable to make deeper connections between indigenous and other queer women of color formations. Nonetheless, this archive produced by and about multiply displaced subjects is significant in its capacity to refute “colonial histories that have obscured shared yet diverse lived experiences and community knowledges” (48).

Licona leverages the category queer for an intensely intersectional critique of race, class, nation, and citizenship. Licona “borrows” the term brrl from a zinester who confuses a gender binary—“Boy? Girl? Brrl” (104)—utilizing the neologism as “an example of borderlands rhetoric . . . to represent the ambiguous, while also functioning to subvert the normative” (104). Queer is not just an identity category: the zinesters whose work Licona analyzes “are action-oriented, feminist and sometimes queer-identified; they are conscious of race, racialization, sex, sexualization, gender, and class” (2). The unevenness of queer identities and lived practices contributes to the radical heterogeneity of zine culture. Licona treats concepts such as queer with a light theoretical hand, which may leave the reader wishing for a more rigorous theorization, yet her deeply contextual and...