DIMITRA No. 1

Named for Demeter, the Greco-Roman goddess of agriculture and fertility, DIMITRA is a new independent, print-first 'zine/journal built for one purpose: applying dialectical materialism to whatever is worth thinking about. Half zine, half theoretical journal, DIMITRA fuses the hand-crafted, heterodox spirit of zine culture with genuine argumentative rigor, and asks the same question of every subject it takes up — identity, self-doubt, adulthood, queerness, television, a rally you were standing in — what does it look like to actually think this through, rather than simply have an opinion about it? Issue No. 1 opens with "What Does Victory Look Like?", a short meditation on what winning actually means for people who've spent their lives being told to wait for it. From there, "On Subjecthood and Identity Mine Own" traces Blackness, Creole identity, and transfemininity as living syntheses rather than fixed categories, before "On a Sense of Self-Doubt" turns that same rigor inward, asking what it really means to know that you know something. "On Adulting" is the collection's most personal essay, an open letter to friends, comrades, and family about growing up in public. "Queer'd Liberalism" is a sharp, multi-part critique of assimilationist and aesthetic queerness alike, and "On the Art of Television" makes the case for the small screen as a genuinely revolutionary medium. The issue closes with "Notes from the Rally: No. 1," a bilingual Kouri-Vini/English transcript of a speech delivered in solidarity with Haitian immigrants. DIMITRA is independent — not affiliated with any organization, political party, corporation, or other entity — and is edited by M. R. Framboise, author of The Starshine Essays and Colloquia Creolicae. Everything DIMITRA publishes is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license: free as in freedom, because we believe accessible information is a human right. DIMITRA is planned as a monthly publication, available in both free digital and print editions, and we're actively looking for collaborators in writing, illustration, design, translation, and proofreading to help it grow into something genuinely collective. DIMITRA doesn't shy away from the personal or the difficult, and we'd rather sit with a hard subject honestly than smooth it over. If that sounds like your kind of reading, welcome to Issue No. 1 — we can't wait to see what's yet to come.