In the words of Kate Huh in the issue I want to highlight, in Rebel Fux #7: “Well, I guess this is the election issue.” I am writing this pre-results but by the time this is up we will know who the next president of Amerikkka is. This is a highly political post, but in honor of the Queer Zine Archive Project’s sheer existence, the personal is political. I am sure that many of us, including myself, are going through sociopolitical stress in response to the moment or more persistently in response to how this moment reflects the entirety of many of our lives. Pasts, presents, and possible futures. The cynicism and pessimism that rightfully occurs during these times should not be diminished. There is no space for celebration in the imperial core but we make do. I am not trying to tell anyone who to vote for, or whether to vote or not to vote. Alongside this issue of Rebel Fux, it paints the atmosphere of catastrophe and poison that we all feel as of right now.
In this issue, like the rest of the series, mixed media from a plethora of different sources form a kaleidoscope of eerie collages depicting the affective realities of an election cycle. Photos by Jacob Riis, a “muck-raking” journalist, and social documentary photographer; photos from the Brown Brothers. Words from Thorstein Bunde Veblen, an economist and sociologist who, during his lifetime, emerged as a well-known critic of capitalism. As well as words from the at-the-time voters’ guide and a “weird gay survey.” I picture the creator of this zine either finding these sources, piecing together what inspires this topic, or whether the pieces emerged first and then the connection between them all made itself evident in the set and setting of election season.
“don’t vote for assholes cause’ assholes hurt people!”
Under these political conditions that everyday person is cut up into individual pieces, reduced to nothingness but a number and statistic. Diminished to a singular action but an action that might feel as if the entire nation, but in the case of the American Imperial Core, the entire world’s weight is upon the choice of your ballot. We still live under the guise of democracy, so these actions do mean something, but remember you are more than that something. Being poisoned by the reduction valve of this action, making all you are what the government proclaims you are, what the government and dominant ideology allow you to imagine yourself and your community to be is a death sentence. A slow but slithering tumor that grows through the entirety of your roots and it is infectious ways.
On page 2…
“The principal manifestation of
poisoning is central nervous
system depression.
Blurred or double vision, approaching stupo-”
A person photographed by what I assume is Jacob Riis, injecting themselves. The dominant ideology might provide the tools, the substances, and the environments in which we exist for these poisons to thrive, but we are also the ones that place the injection into ourselves. The mental rejection is a tough action against an ever-present powerful tide of the landscape. To stay true to yourself and what you believe in with so much noise, silence has a purpose and that is to listen to the hum of your drum. Remember to honor it despite all the poisonous noise.
Again, Rebel Fux uses Junji-Ito-esque two-pager spiralizations into horror scenes, but in comparison, this horror is our realities. Violent streets while the angel that watches is omnipresent and being carried by a foreign in emotion but local in its owner: the manifest destiny angel. Painted in “pure femininity” and bringer of the front lines to the expansion of empire, the fate of conquest.
“This ballot proposal is a dose that produces anesthesia” as said on page 10. The ballot is one of the variety of substances used for self-injection produced, serviced, and distributed by the market of the imperial core to its own citizens. This time, as told by Rebel Fux, is an anesthetic. We often connect the anesthetic to the removal and domestication of feeling, but we must also witness the effect of the anesthetic upon movement and action. A form of desensitizing bliss that does not actually provide much-needed rest but is just a muffler and distraction to a possible imagining of what could be done outside, in spite, regardless of, or more than what the ballot offers us. In the injection of the anesthetic, the submitting and entrance of the ballot into its box, we are enticed and given the chance to lay in the imperial bliss of mediocrity. Allow yourself to bear witness within your mind, yourself, your community, and the world, for more.
It is valid and right to mourn and grieve, but the next day utilize said emotions to sensitize your actions. Later on in the zine, this powerful page proclaims “The emphasis is kept on weapons…” Although this zine was created more than 2 decades ago, it still rings true. “…by a passionate common sense,” the landscape that we live in is not and was not created out of failure to its origins and logistical purposes. The “common sense,” the logic built into the system is working perfectly fine, actually working extremely perfectly. The way that it fails multiple groups within its borders and outside of them, is the method of the system. The common sense is very much alive and passionate as we witnessed last night. The structure of the system and its legalities was built to function in this way. All nations, like the human body, run through lifespans and cycles not unique to the present patterns we are experiencing. Although something might feel unique it does not mean it is, and this is not a failure, this feeling is the common sense that has been built into the minds of the everyday American citizen. The “blurred or double vision” trusts the dominant structure. As if its omnipresence that dishonors the divine, is a warm blanket protecting us. In reality, as a frog in a boiling pot, we are being cooked and blissfully staying in vertigo of the water. This cognitive dissonance is essential to the blurring of vision, to leave all of us dizzy to each other, to solidarity.
We are not bound to what has been imposed upon us, just cemented in birth to the reduction valve of this country. Our instinct, although common sense would like us to believe, isn’t isolation and individualism. Discover ways to imagine and do more outside of the mediocre injection of the ballot. Remember and return to what matters.
Valeria is interning at QZAP this semester. She is in her senior year at University of Wisconsin-Madison studying Gender & Women’s Studies. She was born and raised in Valencia, Venezuela and now lives in Teejop land (Madison, WI).
The fuxxed creator’s journey vacuums alongside Lynd Ward’s woodcut prints. In an extreme black point contrast, the direct lines set a scene for the poetics. Ward illustrated a 
“I shall not be merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors.
