The Ones We Aspire to Be Like: Profile of a Columnist

Mary “Mhaire” Fraser is, undoubtedly, a badass. Eloquent, sharp, and outrageously educated, she not only has her own blog/ zine, Debutante Gone Wrong (http://www.debutantegonewrong.com) and writes a regular column for Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women’s Studies (http://womenst.library.wisc.edu/fcmain.htm), but she is a professor of psychology and women’s studies at DeAnza, a community college in Cupertino (a suburb of San Jose), and Stanford University. Her research examines social identity and gender issues, and focuses on leadership issues and spirituality, adolescent women, and attitudes about dating, with Third Wave feminist identity and pop culture as special interests. She is a columnist, a feminist, an activist, and a truly excellent thinker of our time.

Having grown up in North Carolina, Mhaire attended the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she received her first undergraduate degree; she moved back home upon graduation and realized that she wanted to know more (of both academics and the world) and so she decided upon coming to California for grad school at the University of Southern California (USC), from which she received two masters and her PhD. She also has another undergraduate degree, as well as other masters from CSU Sonoma. All the while in her course of study, and well after, she up kept her interest and activity in the zine world, helping to put together everything from art shows to poetry slams, and music venues, and organized a number of feminist gatherings in which a "Zine Trade" was a key event. Clearly glorious and utterly cool, but even more extraordinary (in my own opinion), she teaches a class called the Fundamentals of Social Activism (how effing cool!!!).

I was directed to Mhaire’s faculty web page by my best friend, who is majoring in psychology and has taken a few of her courses, one of which he is currently enrolled in (he adores her). He had told me of her inclusions of everything from activism to zines in her social psych curriculum, a class he took last quarter, and upon looking at her page, I saw that she was a regular columnist. I was more than interested. I looked into the publication she writes for, Feminist Collections, which is put out four times a year (thus, a quarterly) by the University of Wisconsin-Madison; from the above link, I learned that the publication offers “news of the latest print and audiovisual resources for research and teaching in women's studies,” everything from book and film reviews to hard-to-find materials like pamphlets and reports. It contains “thoughtful articles by experts explor[ing] women's publishing, Internet resources, library organization, archives, and other tools for feminist scholarship.”

The site also linked several of Mhaire’s articles, a series of well-written, insightful zine reviews, ranging everywhere from "Zine and Heard: Fringe Feminism and the Zines of the Third Wave," a three part series in which she reviewed not only better funded, consistent zines, but many of the cut and paste, do-it-yourself ones that people had sent her and that she’d acquired over time, to "Rebel Song: Feminist Zines from the (Southern) Third Wave," in which she exemplifies some of the ideal zines from her own rooted region, to "Queens of the Zine Scene: Best Lines," in which she picked some of the best lines from various zines that she has been reading; everything from a journal entry to a physically present but mentally father, reading "bye. I love you. Call me. I'll write;" to "If I am made in God's image, then God has a fat ass;" to "Why, if I am so young, do I feel as if my life has passed me by?"

I, myself, having dabbled with interest in the zine and underground writing and music scenes, had actively sought out great reads both in print and online over the past six or seven years, and have come across a fair few that I truly adore and keep up with. So you can imagine my overwhelming and mind-blowing surprise when I found Mhaire’s name attached to a site that I’ve been reading for far longer than I’ve known that she’s my best friend’s professor (!!!). The aforementioned Debutante Gone Wrong is a witty, charming, smart blog that I’ve long loved, and come to find that it is, in fact, actually a product of a paper zine that Mhaire started long ago in North Carolina, which she developed online. I have long, unknowingly, been a fan, and have genuinely respected and enjoyed her musings and writings. Small world doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Mhaire Fraser is exactly the kind of writer that you want your daughter, sister, mother, friends, and self to read. She is self and otherwise utterly aware, and engaging in her writing. In speaking of herself, she wrote, “I discovered that when all is said and done, ideas are my addiction. The new ones and the ones to which there will never be solid answers even after endless nights of wine and Blues.” Mhaire is (presumably) in her early to mid-thirties, and still very much alive and operative with the glory of ideas, good writing, the spread of knowledge, and impactual activism.