While I still have a sense of pride in my work i feel that the messages represented are difficult to interpret provided a lack of total understanding of the base material. That being said, I can use handy dandy words to explain some of these oddities. The headline of the page is meant to emphasize the the descriptor used for a male parent, which often gets confused when he is at-home with the kids. The Mr. Mom label was frowned upon (see lower left image) in the newsletter. The convention of labeling an at-home dad as a mom is like calling a craft gun a hand gun.... not to mention the conventions surrounding the stereotypical user population of the two items in my simile. The fact of the matter is that many dads feel embarrassment about it, usually due to a loss of a job, or simply because they are in a different gender role (see middle top image). The evil archer is a caricature of some assumptions presented in the newsletter. They were assumptions made about the at-home dads that reduced them to creeps and even so low as child molesters. I drew the newsletter as a shield against such hurtful word-arrows. It allows fathers to find a community of others like him that will accept and respect what he is doing for his family. Hopefully, others will come around too.
Bishop:
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad to see your inclusion of your zine page, as well as the explanation of the work you've done. I really like your page and think it's jam-packed full of interesting commentary (even though I dismiss your assumption that zine-creating is less collegiate and (implicitly) scholastic than writing and reading--you're distilling your reading into writing/images, after all!!).
I wonder, though, if you feel like your page NEEDS your extra help w/ interpretation? If so, I think you should brainstorm ways in which this zine page could include your insights and images (I'm thinking about annotations, but I'd love to see other ideas, too!). Not that jamming this all onto a tiny page is easy by any means--but I guess I would encourage you to USE words (if words are what you like) in your zine page itself, not to think of them as necessary outsiders. Make sense?
Great work here--keep it up!
best,
Dr. Renzi
I really liked what you did with your zine--I thought it was a perfect mixture of creativity and political statement. I also didn't think it needed the explanation though, it was really well articulated through what you had. I did think something that would be interesting was what your opinion of the subject is. Did reading the newsletters or making your own zine change any opinions that you had? I know that when I was looking through all of the different archival it definitely sparked a bunch of ideas I hadn't had before.
ReplyDeleteI also really enjoyed your zine. It is so sad to me that most people have a skewed view of what gender a stay-at-home parent should be. I liked your similes and the figurative way you represented the document. Did the document you read support stay-at-home fathers? I also thought the fact that you used guns (a typically male weapon or tool) to shoot down the newspaper. This may be problematic or used on purpose? Good job overall!
ReplyDeleteI really like your interpretation of the newsletter in your zine page. I wish it was more accepted, and even common, for dads to take paternity leave or be stay-at-home fathers. When I was in high school, two of our teachers were married and when they had a baby, the mom took off the end of the school year following the birth, and then the dad took a few months at the beginning of the new school year to stay at home with their infant. In my rather conservative high school, they made it seem like this was a big deal, as if it was a completely foreign idea for a dad to want to spend time with his new daughter. I definitely think that the assumption that only moms can take leave or stay at home with their children is one that needs to be broken.
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