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
Femme à Barbe Vol. 2 is a slightly slimmer follow-up to FAB 1. The articles and essays are fantastic. Again, there are a variety of genders represented (FTM and MTF spectrum people, genderqueers, cis ladies and more) discussing their varying feelings about and responses to body and facial hair. Sari (Hoax), Bastian Fox Phelan (Ladybeard), and editor j. bee (Sassyfrass Circus) are among the diverse contributors. confessions of a stubbly were-bitch by robyn t. banx was ferocious, delicious writing. j.bee and Amber M. have lent some of their fantastic illustration skills to the articles and cover, too.
From the zine:
As the weeks passed and the hairs grew longer and more abundant I noticed a great deal of variation: the hairs were black, gold, red, sometimes starting blond and growing darker toward the tip; some hairs were straight, others curly, some with weird kinks, some fine and others thick and wiry. There's one huge hair that comes and goes on the left side of my moustache-- it's huge, curly, thick and red and sometimes I play with it until it drives me crazy. I wish that my entire moustache were made up of these hairs-- I would buy a hot air balloon and become an adventurist."
-"Responses to Ladybeard," Bastian Fox Phelan, p. 14
Half size/26 p/B&W
$3.00 - Backordered 1 week. Feel free to order now; your zine will ship on Dec. 27-28.
J.Bee Darling is a sideshow freak from Baltimore who spends most of their time drawing comics about (and experiencing) pet rats, coffee, freaky sex and Bakhtin's theories of the grotesque. They edit Femme a Barbe, a compilation zine about Bearded Ladies and other gender outlaws, and also make the comix perzine Sassyfrass Circus, which is mostly about social anxiety, queer puberty and over-caffeination. You can find comics, zine updates and other occasionally interesting stuff at sassyfrasscircus.com.
