Reconfiguring Anxious Affects as Temporal Modes of Becoming: Thinking–Making–Doing With Zines in Feminist Materialist Inquiry

In this paper we engage with feminist materialist zines as embodied, creative, sociomaterial methods to ask what else – and what more – anxiety can be/come for young women (inclusive of gender diverse subjectivities). Zines, as self-published and handmade magazines, offer a site for feminist inquiry where time, subjectivity, and affect can be rethought through collective creative processes. In our inquiry, zine-making workshops were conducted with young women who self-identified as experiencing anxiety, fear, or worry. We return to the zines to think further with feminist materialist temporal concepts, offering three zine scenes that suggest critical reimaginings of anxiety. Our thinking–making–doing of these zine scenes provides situated accounts of women's embodied subjectivities, mapping intra-actions across pasts, presents, and feminist futures. We propose that zine-making in conjunction with feminist materialist thought can disrupt normative and pathologizing constructions of women's distress. Eschewing universal, representational accounts, we engage with the shifting and entangled sociomaterial histories and futures of young women's embodied encounters with anxiety to reimagine other ways of becoming with/in worrying times.