Have you ever considered how your clothes and other worldly things allow you to be seen? How objects and ideas shape your experiences in the ‘real’ world? ‘Real’ means something that can be authenticated usually by regulations that determine how we perform our own positionalities. Concepts of identity are often based in race and gender norms that are mediated through a generational and social negotiation of the markers and rites of passage into womanhood and manhood. 

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Women and queers use the Realness of commodity to subvert sex, gender, and racial norms as they are posed in the ‘real’ world, by exposing the absurdity of these regulatory constructs. The exhibition and archive that occupies these pages is titled One of Us. It offers the zine medium as a tool and alternative  space to reflect and practice knowing the self without regulation.  The name One of Us is an ode to the online game Among Us, in which players take on one of two roles: crewmates or imposters. The game demonstrates our use of internal hierarchies when basing decisions on how to look, act, and be seen. The compact mirror and the series Pose introduce a beautifully renegotiated relationship between tangible being and intangible becoming that takes place in alternative spaces that support disidentifications. The LGBTQ+ community use tools like the mirror and alternative spaces like Ball Culture to embody Realness and perform their identities on safer stages in preparation for the 'real' world. Like performing identity, developing concepts for a zine takes time, care, research, and support.

 

One of Us is an invitation to disidentify by reflecting on the role of tools of self-care in the creation of global communities and the negotiation of identities in time and space. Readers are invited to consider the importance of representation and submit their own self-care zines to our archive.  

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