Do you fancy art? Are you an artist? We need your help to make our 3rd Dragon Fruit Project Zine happen!
Hello APIENC Community! My name is Ralph and I am an APIENC summer intern. I will be helping with the Dragon Fruit Project, ensuring that the hxstories of our community are accessible. One way I’m doing that is by coming up with media strategies, such as this zine, to amplify the hxstories of the people in the Dragon Fruit Project.
But what is a zine? A zine (short for magazine or fanzine), is a self published work that centers around freedom of self expression and that serves to visibilize issues outside the mainstream. We believe it is befitting to create a zine for the Dragon Fruit Project (DFP), an intergenerational oral history project that explores queer and transgender Asian and Pacific Islanders, so that we can visibilize our historical, present day, and future acts of love, activism, and revolution.
Through reading interviews, I learned that resistance manifests in many ways, and, at different moments of our lives. These interviews provide a window to the breadth of what resistance can look like. The Dragon Fruit Project showed me that embracing my existence, in a society in which a certain kind of person is allowed to thrive, is a radical act of resistance. These interviews allow me to access my inner self, open myself up to vulnerability, and lean on the support of the collective past to move through my present uncertainty.I live by my truths knowing that others before me have lived by theirs and have overcome and carried on. The Dragon Fruit Project empowers me to resist in a myriad of forms –from simple daily acts of resistance to more revolutionary forms.
This edition’s theme, Daily Acts of Resistance, explores different forms of resistance, and also what resistance can do to empower, heal, and unite people. It serves to remind us that resistance can be practiced daily, as part of a broader picture of activism. The personal is political and for as long as there have been queer and trans Asians and Pacific Islanders, there has also been resistance.
Here is a healing. Here is love. Here is resistance. Help me explore what it means to resist through the Dragon Fruit Project. I encourage you to show us your form of resistance by contributing to the third Dragon Fruit Project Zine. I invite you to collectively reflect on these interviews and how you are learning to resist on your hxstory to inspire others in their process of writing their own.
Submission Guidelines
- Deadline for submissions is July 30, 2017
- This will be a half page zine (8.5in x 5.5in). Submissions should be 1-2 pages.
- We are looking for a mix of visual art (drawings, paintings, illustrations) and text (short poems, stories, and rants).
- Text based submission should be in Word or Rich Text format and online art submissions should be 300-600 dpi or.pdf files.
- Submit via e-mail at with subject line: DFP Zine 2017 Submission, or mail to 17 Walter U. Lum Place, San Francisco, CA 94108
- To see our first DFP Zine, click here http://issuu.com/apienc/docs/dragon_fruit_project_zine and to go to see our Dragon Fruit Project click here http://www.dragonfruitproject.org/
- If you have any questions, contact us at