Cuntry Living’s website is emblazoned with the slogan, ‘CUNTS NOT DEAD’ and it was with this in mind that I took my very much alive cunt down to LMH for a cut and stick session which would set the wheels of the Hilary 2014 issue in motion. For those who have not come across it, Cuntry Living is an Oxford-based feminist zine which publishes articles on all aspects of gender and sexuality and opposes all forms of oppression, subjugation and degradation.
The website’s fairly militant assault on all things patriarchal is written entirely in Caps Lock and accompanied by the contact email, ‘[email protected]’. This kind of irreverent campaigning is a far cry from OUSU’s polite calls for change, and conjured up images of a modern-day feminist Baader Meinhof network, operating large-scale clandestine printing outfits from deep within the recesses of the Rad Cam. With this in mind, the fairly genteel surrounds of the LMH Old Library came as some surprise – the frustration expressed in the articles was set against a delightful neo-classical frieze, and the thick plush of the carpet was bouyant to my militant footfall.
The ‘cut and stick’ sessions are a cornerstone of the zine’s history: in order to produce a publication it’s pretty cost-effective to cut up other publications and stick them back together with a different message. Thus Levi’s ‘Let Your Body Do The Talking’ slogan can be pasted ironically next to an article on consent, while Page 3 boobs are slapped onto a chiselled Adonis. The process by which Cuntry Living is created nicely corresponds to its content: by cutting out magazines’ objectifying photos and lazy headlines and transplanting them into a sheet of A4, the reader can see them in a new light – out of context, they seem ridiculous, and serve as a neat and funny accompaniment to a heavier article.
The lo-fi feeling of chatting about identity politics with a pair of scissors in one hand and a Pritt stick in the other also conjures up a pleasantly grassroots, Instagrammed vision of activism before the internet: it’s what one vaguely imagines university would have been like in the 60s, before change.org could assemble all the causes in one stock petition format and render them all slightly less compelling.
I was welcomed by houmous and discussions on vegetarianism before getting down to some deeply therapeutic cutting and sticking. Three out of four hand movements quickly devolved into an undextrous grab at a nearby bag of Malteasers, but I did manage to decorate an article on the feminist dimension of Girl Scout camp within an hour.
The zine has spawned a Facebook group by the same name which swiftly eclipsed Wadham Feminists as Oxford’s go-to page for feminist-minded debate. As a predominantly passive member of the Facebook group, I’ve come to consider myself a well-intentioned and passionate feminist whose theoretical understanding of issues discussed is less extensive than that of its more vocal members. Debates feel like a fast-paced but enjoyable tutorial, where you’d never have come to the conclusions your tutor is outlining but you try to write them down as quickly as possible so you can use them in the exam. The arguments I skim read as they are drip-fed to me via my newsfeed flag up new considerations to bear in mind when applying feminist thinking to real life, and have provided me with a handful of ideas that are now impossible for me to un-know. I find myself dissecting rather than laughing at jokes that play on gender tropes and stereotypes, for example; jokes that I previously accepted without question.
These positive aspects are hindered by Facebook’s inherent drawbacks. You can’t see faces or judge tone of voice, and the currency of likes creates arbitrary ‘winners’ on every post with a woeful lack of nuance. There is also a conflating of opinion with identity when debating on the relentlessly ‘personalised’ medium of Facebook – your photo and name preface every immortalised comment, meaning that, in Oxford’s tiny bubble, words can alter people’s perception of you, for better or worse.
This fear of silent hordes watching you from their laptops as you misrepresent your understanding of intersectionality may be irrational but it’s still there: you can’t see your audience and they can’t see you. Being challenged by an individual in such an echoingly vast forum can feel as if every one of the 1748 members is against you. You flounder, imagining that your silent audience has branded you less feminist than Robin Thicke eating a sandwich prepared by Pussy Riot under duress. Posting can be rewarding but also opens you up to the unappealing binary of ‘likes’ versus a fairly nerve-wracking and potentially time-consuming public exchange.
So the zine can be read but is not interactive, while the Facebook group is interactive and enriching but in a very Facebook kind of way. The humble cut and stick session, therefore, gets rounds these problems by actually letting you meet people face to face and talk about things you think, or are unsure about, in a genuinely pleasant environment. CUNTING AND STICKING ARENT DEAD.
