Future Generation

China Martens

Description

China Martens started her pioneering mamazine The Future Generation in 1990. She was a young anarchist punk rock mother who didn’t feel that the mamas in her community had enough support, so she began publishing articles on radical parenting in an age before the internet.

The anthology of her zine, The Future Generation: The Zine-Book for Subculture Parents, Kids, Friends & Others, was first printed in 2007 and has been out of print for many years. Covering sixteen years, it uses individual issues as chapters, focusing on personal writing, and retaining the character of a zine that changed over the years—from her daughter’s birth to teenagehood and beyond.

We are proud to present a tenth-anniversary edition including a new afterword by China’s grown daughter, Clover. The Future Generation remains a timeless resource for parents, caregivers, and those who care about them. Though first published in the 1990s, many of the essays and observations—about parenting, children, and surviving in a hostile political climate—still ring true today. The next four years are going to be especially demanding for those trying to balance parenting, politics, and survival. We’re going to need the voices and experiences in The Future Generation now more than ever.

Sujets

• Motherhood
• Work?life balance
• Single-parent

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629634562
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

The Future Generation
by China Martens 2017
This edition PM Press 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages for the purpose of review.
All rights retained by the original artists and authors.
Cover book design by Scott Sugiuchi, revised by Jonathan Rowland Future Generation logo (previous page) designed by Clover, age 10
ISBN: 978-1-62963-450-0
LCCN: 2017942908
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
www.thomsonshore.com
CONTENTS
Foreword by Ariel Gore
Introduction by Clover
Issue 1
April 1990
Issue 2
November 1990 THE CHILD
Issue 3
December 1990 ANARCHIST CHILD RAISING
Issue 4
January 1991 GETTING TOGETHER
Issue 5 PART 1
April 1991 VIOLENCE
Issue 5 PART 2
July 1991 DISCIPLINE
Issue 5 PART 3
Unreleased SEX VIOLENCE
Issue 6
April 1994 FOR HOMES LIKE YOURS, WITH LITTLE FOLKS
Issue 7
February 1997 INDUSTRIAL MARY
Issue 8
August 1997 RESISTANCE
Issue 9
August 1998 WELFARE MOTHERS MAKE BETTER LOVERS
Issue 10
November 1999 HOME SWEET HOME
Issue 11
May 2002 SELF-EXPRESSION
Issue 12
April 2003 THE OCEAN
Issue 13
September 2003 HAPPY FATHER S DAY
Issue 14
March 2005 WORK
THE SEA OF LIFE
RAD 17
Afterword
Foreword
by Ariel Gore
Before Hip Mama and Mutha Magazine and Rad Dad , before you could Google nursing after nipple piercing or gender fluid parenting, before celebrity mom rags made childrearing look glam and easy while they hid all their nannies labor, I pushed a secondhand stroller down Haight Street in San Francisco.
Breeder! some punk yelled at us from across the street. I looked down at my plain cotton spit-up covered clothes from the Goodwill. It s yuppie scum like you who are fucking up this city! the guy went on.
But the yuppie scum at my daughter s new daycare didn t want to have anything to do with me, either. They looked down their nose-job noses at me with a mixture of pity and concern.
Maia started to fuss in her stroller, so I pulled her out, sat down on the curb, and lifted my shirt to let her nurse. A bike messenger almost got hit by a Muni bus craning his neck to stare at us.
How could it be that the simple acts of getting knocked up and having a baby had alienated me from every single subculture I had ever heard of?
Maia fell asleep sweetly in my arms there on the curb, and I lifted her back into her stroller, careful not to wake her. I pushed on through the light summer drizzle, made my way up to the anarchist bookstore, a little closet of a shop. I pawed through the zines- EcoPussy and Wizard Man or some such. I sighed. My pussy wasn t feeling very ecological these days and I was pretty sure I couldn t get into wizardry. I started to turn away, but suddenly the punk from across the street was standing right in front of us. Why don t you go to Barnes and Noble, breeder?
I turned back toward the zine shelf so as not to let him see the tears well up in my eyes (I was 20 years old and it was still easy to hurt my feelings). But just as I turned, from the bottom of the rows of anarchist, hippie, feminist, and punk publications, a little Xeroxed something glowed up at me, a quote from Emma Goldman: We, who pay dearly for every breath of pure, fresh air must guard against the tendency to fetter the future. Japanese electronica burst from speakers unseen and cartoon stars floated from the homemade zine and filled the tiny store.
I grabbed issue #1 of The Future Generation , quickly convinced the guy behind the old-fashioned register to let me pay the 2 in food stamps, then locked eyes with the mean unpunk punk and snarled: Fuck off.
It s a powerful thing, to find a little Xeroxed island home in a sea of alienation. Since the first issue of The Future Generation came out in 1990, the zine world has exploded. From Mamalicious to Mad Lovin Mama , indie parenting mags have a whole shelf to themselves now. Alternative mothering websites abound. Even mainstream corporate publishers have gotten into the action, hoping to sell a few hip maternity outfits and touting a baby as the new must-have accessory. We re a demographic now, I guess. But in a mass-market economy, what is genuine quietly prevails. Each new issue of The Future Generation glows up from the shelf promising the political and philosophical resources to sustain you, the voices of the moms like you and unlike you, and the stream-of-consciousness truths only China has the ovaries to tell. In these pages, the shitty days are never glossed over and the spiritual highs never toned down for the sake of coolness. Kodak moments turn psychedelic and the impossibility of our mama-mission is put into its proper radical context. When China lays it down, it stays down. For more than 16 years, The Future Generation has pushed me along my path as a mom with gentle chiding and solid support.
In issue #9 China says, I want to be the female Bukowski, the female Burroughs, instead I m just the female. But I ll bet Bukowski and Burroughs are rolling around in their graves, wishing they could have been the male China Doll Martens.
So, welcome to The Future Generation: The Zine-Book for Subculture Parents, Kids, Friends Others . Please stow your baggage in the overhead compartment. You ve been invited on an adventure starring one lionhearted superhero mama and her wickedly independent and spirited girl-child. Cartoon stars should be floating up from the page right about now, and do not be alarmed if Japanese electronica bursts from speakers unseen. Prepare for takeoff.

Cartoon by Clover
Introduction
by China Martens
The first issue of The Future Generation came out in April 1990, soon after my daughter turned two years old, but I had been working on the idea for a while. I wanted to start a zine as a resource network for parents in the subculture to share information and help each other out. I was in new territory and felt like a total minority. Most punks weren t parents and most parents weren t punks. I knew from all my best experiences in the anarcho-punk scene that we needed to work together to support each other to create change. So much had seemed possible to me back then!
I grew up moving around each year like an army brat and then came of age in the suburbs of Washington DC (Prince George s County). Mine was the classic tale of a misfit kid. I spent my teenage years being depressed and alienated, although those feelings had probably started even before that.
When I left home in 1984 (at 18), I rapidly discovered how much was going on. The subculture held the ticket to being yourself, the information to liberate yourself. There was always a place to stay, food to eat, protests to take place in. Taking part in direct actions in DC during the Reagan Era, seeing the autonomous squatted realms of Berlin and NYC, warehouse living in San Francisco, going on the Peace March, taking road trips across America-I spent three years widening my horizons-in art, culture, possibility, social construction in every way. There were so many little different groups of people in the underground. And there was a history of counterculture, there was a whole lineage of revolution.
This was the world I was prepared to live in for the rest of my life. If there was a housing crisis, a class issue, a food problem, a gender/sex question, an emotional dysfunction-we took it on as a group. Wrote a zine about it, shared information to the alternatives, and created structures to build a better and new way of doing things and protested that which we felt was wrong. Want to be free, come panhandle with me.
But after the birth of my daughter, right before my twenty-second birthday in 1988, I could no longer keep up. I wanted to live as radically as ever, but the support I needed as a parent was not there. I found myself slipping back to an impoverished and controlled state. There was a vacuum in the subculture where issues about children simply didn t exist while The State was fully prepared-with its social workers, public indoctrination, and other mechanisms-to take over. More a freak than ever, I was unwilling and unable to navigate in the mainstream just as much as I was unsupported by the individualism in my own tribe. People in the scene were not really unfriendly to me. On the contrary, I have had many lovely experiences. But few knew what to do with a child and fewer still had one of their own. It is a lot of work to raise a child. There are a lot of places where you make life decisions and a lot of ways in which you are impacted in a physical way, that a child-free person could have easily jumped over those same hurdles
I had known about the existence of zines for some time; I had considered myself a writer but it wasn t until I became a mother that I started my first zine. It was the single issue that affected me the most, and on a daily basis. There wasn t anything out there like what I wanted to start. I was hungry for information. I was trading notes on the playground with anyone similar to me. I might have been late to join the subculture, but I felt on the cutting edge of a change in parenting values.
Having a zine on parenting was going to the next level. I didn t feel like talking Anarchy 101. We d run that topic into the ground along with the subject of oppression, revolution, freedom, or how to change the world in our late n