Femme à Barbe chronicles the beard stories, musings and dreams of twelve diverse contributors. Focusing on female folks with beards, the zine also touches on transmale, transfemale and genderqueer perspectives.
This zine is by turns playful, serious, and a bit mystical. We open with a discussion of hairy female saints, a topic that brings to mind the myth of the alchemical androgyne buried within Christianity. We finish with the editor's own essay, Praxxxis, about resisting the pathologizing of bearded females as PCOS sufferers needing medication and asserting the subversive beauty of performing gender as the Bearded Lady.
The drawings are great, and I'm delighted by the interesting and varied contributors. Female bodied and female-assigned folks speak of their beard love, beard acceptance, shaving and depilating away their beards, and surviving in society with facial hair. Being trans, it is always a delight to read collections of work that support a variety of approaches to body modification and body love.
From the zine:
"In the icy winter of 1897-8, during a period of intensive study of the radioactive element Polonium, Marie Sktodovska Curie watched a smattering of light hairs turn into a dense thicket of gray and black. The cause, as she would have surmised a half-century later, was the radioactivity of the materials with which she worked. At the time, however, she could think of nothing to do but shrug.
"By 1900, the chemist sported a thick, silky van dyke that rivaled the full beard of her then-husband Pierre, both in its impressive sheen and its careful grooming. Her whiskers were considered for the Nobel Prize in Facial Hair, but due to certain diplomatic tensions, the award was given to the Italian Camillo Golgi for his pulled walrus mustache." - Femme à Barbe, front cover
44 p./half size/black and white with hand coloring on cover
