Cancelled Job
摘要
The production of minicomics, like zines, often takes advantage of photocopiers in places of work. While zinesters and scholars celebrate clandestine acts of photocopying as evidence of the subversive nature of the cultural forms they produce, this chapter emphasizes how making comics with office photocopiers often gets caught up in office politics, especially where gender is concerned. In tracking the different permutations of photocopying comics in the workplace, this chapter examines the photocopied cartoons, jokes, and mock documents that have circulated around US offices, called “xeroxlore” (Preston). Xeroxlore has been analyzed by folklore scholars as a form of resistance against the stifling bureaucracy of the capitalist workplace, though this chapter qualifies just how far xeroxlore subverts existing hierarchies of power. The final section of this chapter discusses the gendering of photocopying as a form of office labour and refers to how the 1970s comics of Lee Marrs depict the relationship between women and technology, especially office equipment; Marrs’s comics show how technology can be appropriated to transform existing relations of gender and employment.