Revolutionary Women Stencil Book

By Tui
www.cherrybombcomics.co.nz

The cover (and woah, that is a terrible photograph up there, sorry!) and title of this zine are a little misrepresentational: there are lots of stencils in here, but there are also bios on twelve different women revolutionaries that are pretty interesting.

Who's included? Harriet Tubman, Emma Goldman, Lucia Sanchez Saornil (pictured below), Angela Davis, Leila Khaled, Comandante Ramona, Phoolan Devi, and more. The zine apologizes for having a Euro-American bias, but only five of the women included are white, which seems like a much better ratio than you'd usually find, and probably indicates who you can actually find information about in English.

While I don't agree with all of the politics and beliefs held by all of these women, I think it would be hard for someone to list twelve different people who's politics they do agree with entirely. I also found the zine interesting in that it raised the question of "what is revolutionary?" in my mind and made me think and reconsider what the word means to me and to others.

The zine says that a lot of the research was done by "cutting and pasting stuff off the internet", and I'm not exactly sure what that means. If it means that the text was taken without permission and not credited than I'm not really down with that (I'd be pretty pissed if someone took some of my writing and reprinted it without giving me credit).

The stencils themselves look good and there were a couple of them that I would totally be up for using if I was into stenciling (someday...) both because of their design and because of the ideas that the women represented.

My copy had a few of the pages out of order, but it was easy enough to figure out which bio went with which stencil.

And now a terrible photo of one of the stencils.