Self Reflective Essay

I was really lost throughout the entirety of this project, but I have to say I think I pulled
through okay. There were a lot of moving pieces, but through it all I think I learned a lot about
the process of writing. I understand now more than ever how genre and rhetorical situation
influence writing, because a zine and an article have such different situations, which lead to
drastically different pieces of writing. For this project I translated a passage, ​Feminist Battles for
Sexual Self-Determination in Postwar Italy, ​ from the article “Sexuality and power in
contemporary Italy: subjectivities between gender norms, agency and social transformation” by
Zambelli, Maindari, and Hajek into a zine.
I learned through my conversations with friends about my idea that a zine isn’t a well
known form of literature. The formal definition of a zine is “a noncommercial often homemade
or online publication usually devoted to specialized and often unconventional subject matter,”1
which is still very vague. Basically a zine is a form of self expression. It can be filled with poems
or pictures, rants and raves, or anything the authors think needs to be discussed. Zines have been,
and continue to be, important tools for small or undercovered movements, like the feminist and
other political movements.
I learned a lot about zines after I started this project, but the main reason I initially began
with the idea of a zine was because I knew there was a passion behind each one. People don’t
normally go out of their way to make a zine unless they’re saying something important, or giving
their perspective on an important subject. It is a lot like an unacademic, academic article, in the
sense that each one is contributing to a larger conversation.
Of course some zines can be just for personal use, but political zines are where I drew
most of my inspiration. A lot of my ideas came from some artists I knew of that either wrote
zines or wrote in a style that I thought would work well with the genre. Litarnes on instagram
writes about their mental struggles through vague poetic language and drawings that hold a lot of
emotion, which is something I hoped to mirror in my zine (but fell a little short of).2 Kathleen
Hanna used zines to talk about the feminist movement in the 1990s through her collage of cut

1
“Zine.”merriam-webster.com. ​https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/zine​.
2
​https://www.instagram.com/litarnes/?hl=en
outs and drawings.3 Fran Meneses is a New York based artist who made a zine in the past using
the risograph technique (a form of printing that involves the use of bright colors) and has
recently made a collection of drawings on an instagram post called “What’s wrong, Chile?” in a
zine format to discuss the political unrest in Chile happening right now.4 These were the sources
I drew from when deciding the format of my zine, because I liked how they each encapsulated
different parts of a zine: the poetry, collages or drawings, and the importance of the message that
each artist wants to express.
I started off my translation by breaking down the passage because I found it to be
confusing. After failing to read it online a few times, I took inspiration from the way that
Rosenberg broke down the academic articles she needed to read, and I printed out the passage of
the article.5 I had a plan! Visualizing the flow of the zine I wanted to create was a little difficult,
so I first numbered the paragraphs in the passage to have a rough outline of how many pages I
would include because just about every paragraph had its own main idea: I ended up with ten
pages. I didn’t think I would stick to this strictly, but I figured it would be a good start.
Next, I highlighted the main ideas of each of the paragraphs, and/ or any key phrases that
I thought meant a lot to the meaning of the passage as a whole. These main ideas would become
the topic of each page in the zine, or roughly, because the ideas of each paragraph flowed nicely
together, so I figured they’d flow in the form of the zine pages as well.
In the margin, I made sure to take note of the novels mentioned. Most of the novels the
authors mentioned were novels that were important to Italian women at the time and were
influential to the Italian feminists. These I thought deserved a space on my zine, if not in the
book itself, than as part of the cover.
The last notes I did were initial sketches of the drawing ideas I had, and how I thought I
could translate the ideas into pages. These ideas fleet fast so I had to scribble them down before I
forgot them. These quick thinking drawings didn’t really end up in the final draft, but they got
the ball rolling on how I could interpret the article into drawings.

3
​https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/c.php?g=576544&p=3977232

4
​https://www.instagram.com/p/B37unSBgGTY/
5
Karen Rosenberg. “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources.”
 Initially, I had trouble knowing what I was going to draw on the pages. I drew women, I
drew torches, and I drew protests, but none of those ideas really led me to a complete zine with a
strong message. So I looked back at my margin scribbles, and saw a little flower. This would
become the focus of my drawings. I thought that using flowers as the central “characters” could
be a clear metaphor for the feminist movement. Flowers are typically seen as feminine, and I
wanted to use this stereotype as a way of reclaiming an outdated belief that women are like
flowers because they symbolize softness, beauty, and weakness. Instead, I took on the beliefs of
the “Flower Power” movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s (which is roughly the same time period as
the article’s events) and made the flower a symbol of not only peace and love, but also strength
and resistance. Flowers were something I felt I could easily work with symbolically and through
drawings. The rest of the zine revolved around the use of flowers as a symbol of not only women
but the feminist struggle.
My zine used the concepts of each of the paragraphs from the original article as pages,
and each idea had an image that was symbolized in a flower. I’m honestly really proud of the
ideas I came up with: self care was a watering can because it creates growth, women’s support
centers were greenhouses because they are where women and flowers can flourish, and marital
union was symbolized in the amount of pots that the flowers were in, which admittedly was a
little on the nose. McCloud’s “Writing with Pictures” served as a great tool for structuring my
zine and gave me a better idea on how I should create my drawings.6
For each drawing, I used different mediums to represent the idea I was depicting. I used
paint pens for ideas that I felt were broad, and generally easy to understand, that didn’t need a lot
of explanation, because paint pens can’t really create a lot of detail. For ideas that I did feel
needed more explanation, I used alcohol markers, because I had the ability to create more details
and refine the drawing I was trying to create. The final medium I used was watercolor, because I
felt it could be more vague and interpretive. For example in the green houses the only difference
is the colors I used, and I didn’t really depict any plant life, but you could probably tell which
one was thriving and which one was dying, which ultimately depicted the destruction of

6
McCloud. “Writing with Pictures.”
“consultori” throughout Italy. I definitely had a good grasp on how I wanted to depict the events
through drawings. I cannot say the same about the writing.
I have to say the scariest part of this assignment was actually writing the damn thing. I
went through many iterations on what I wanted to say, and how I wanted to say it. Ultimately I
did the writing last, because it seemed so overwhelming. I knew that a zine format didn’t really
allow for a lot of writing, so whatever point I was trying to make had to be short and precise. I
started out with just a summary of the main idea of each paragraph, but this felt less like a
translation and more of just a sparknotes version, and also didn’t connect with the symbolic
drawings of flowers. I decided to make each main idea into the line of a poem. A poetic
interpretation had more room for emotion, which was something that I really wanted to see in my
zine. I wrote my poem many different times, and everytime I tweaked it the smallest bit, but
occasionally I would throw away or add in new ideas or lines entirely.
My first line was “flowers grow taller and stronger everyday.” The article begins by
saying toward the beginning of the 1970s the feminist movement in Italy had grown substantially
larger, so I imagined the feminist movement as a flower that was budding and growing to
represent that. Italian feminists were gaining a louder voice in the conversation on equality and
rights, and the growth of a flower was symbolic of that.
I continued the line by saying that “each flower grows in her own way,” because early
feminism in Italy was based around the idea of a woman’s unique spirit. There were theories
about alternatives to motherhood and family life, and ideas that women should be allowed to
choose what they want for themselves. Because this is a decision for each woman individually, I
thought saying that growth is unique to each flower, encapsulated the meanings of early
feminism.
Later on, French feminist ideals spread to Italy. They focused on the physical beauty of a
woman and how a woman’s body and sexuality. So I said “a flower is beautiful on the outside,”
because of the focus on a woman’s body.
Along with French ideas, US feminism also made its way to Italy. They focused on
women’s health, and the fact that the current state of medicine neglected women’s health. In my
line, I connected it with the contrasting French belief of beauty on the outside with the idea that
beauty on the inside is good health and that meant a woman needed to care for herself. Along
with that I created a line about the Consultori, or women’s health centers in Italy, and called it
the flowers’ “safe place” that she created on her own.
I can go on with each line, because each encapsulates an idea from the article I read.7
Even though the connections may not be totally clear they are there. I think that my zine would
be read well paired with the original essay itself, because my translation is about expressing the
emotion of the events, while the article was the piece that explained in depth the events
themselves.
Though my project had a rocky start, I’m proud of the zine I can turn in because it is a
poetic and symbolic interpretation of the Italian feminist movement, and I couldn’t ask for
anything more from it.
The Power of a Flower
Flowers grow taller and stronger everyday
And each flower grows in her own way.
A flower is beautiful on the outside
And works hard to be beautiful on the inside.
She has the power
to create her own safe place.
And to drift on to new fields even in the dark and cold.
A flower can make her own decision. For her own future.
But not everyday will bring perfect weather.
Life may get a little harder.
Her meaning might get lost in all the fuss.
Because a flowers life wasn’t meant to be clearly defined,
Or easy to understand.
But nonetheless she is still a flower
And she will keep on living.

7
I’ll just leave the comments there and you can read them if you’d like.