Queer Aesthetics & Intimacy in Technical Communication: Destigmatizing Sex Work Through Zines

Over the past 20 years, there has been a rise in scholarship on extra-institutional communication (Ding, 2009), including (but not limited to) recognizing the professional writing occurring in “mommy blogs” (Petersen, 2014) and uses of tactical folk medicine (Alexander & Edenfield, 2021). This work has set a foundation for studying professional and technical communication that occurs outside of institutions and, often, in direct opposition to them. Extending this work to sex worker zines, and the queer aesthetic possibilities within them, continues to move our understandings and analyses of extra-institutional communication forward. It continues to be important to extend our understanding of extra-institutional communication particularly in our current cultural moment where legislation is aimed at silencing and erasing the voices and experiences of anyone outside of a cis- and heteronormative, white, patriarchal structure. These attacks have expanded across federal and state governments as well as on higher education, from Ohio’s SB.1 (S.B. 1, 136th Gen. Assemb, 2025)) to the Texas Tech University system Chancellor’s April 2026 memo censoring any LGBTQ + content, including in students’ dissertations or theses (Reed, 2026). Historically, these oppressive tactics create the necessity for extra-institutional communication that navigates sharing resources, practices, and combatting surveillance. These goals are tied up with not only the social justice turn in Technical and Professional Ccommunication (TPC) (Agboka & Dorpenyo, 2022; Jones, 2016; Jones et al., 2016; Shelton, 2020; Walton et al., 2019), but also social justice action to create change (Shelton & Warren-Riley, 2022; Walton & Agboka, 2021) and the view of social justice actions as “ethically motivated” (Walwema et al., 2022, p. 262).

Due to these intersecting concerns, the broader theoretical question that guides my work is: How might we use the social justice turn in TPC to further challenge, complicate, and extend what we count as professional communication? Then, with the call to engage with aesthetics in TPC (Kostelnick, 1990; Ledbetter, 2018; Slater & Rosselot-Merritt, 2024; Welhausen, 2018), the question becomes: How can aesthetics be used for social justice aims, including expanding our definitions of “professional” in TPC?

Aesthetics are not at odds or separate from social justice concerns and action in TPC. Dragga and Voss (2001) explore the ethics of technical illustrations by arguing for humanistic illustration that does not ignore the humanity behind data representation. They remind us that technical communicators “schooled in rhetoric and trained in the humanities, are in a unique position to help raise the level of ethics in the visual display of technical information” (p. 272). The same attention we pay to writing, they argue, we need to pay to our visual communication. Here is where aesthetics can be a way forward. Kostelnick (2019) dicusses how in both fine art and technical communication “the rhetorical purposes of human forms in these two realms also overlap significantly in terms of their persuasive power, emotional (pathos) appeals, and embodiment of cultural values of a given era, place, or ideology” (p. 26). Zines, and their use of the human form, are one example of this embodiment. Dragga and Kostelnick offer technical communicators ample room to explore humanizing visuals, but don’t attend to queer possibilities within the aesthetics of our visuals. Though Kostelnick argues that “pictures with individual agents typically focus their agency on definitive activities in well-demarcated settings, often in relatively small windows of time. Those pictures create an engaging level of intimacy that’s most apparent and affecting in the fine arts” (p. 83), I extend his argument to the frank, playful, and intimate representations of sex workers pushing the boundaries of what our field deems “professional.”

When I read this special issue’s call, I immediately thought of how the aesthetics in sex worker zines pull together the threads of humanizing visuals, social justice, and ethics in our field. One way sex workers form a community of sense is through sex work decriminalization activism and their own professional writing often in the form of extra-institutional communication. Itchuaqiyaq et al. (2022) and Jordan and Edenfield (2025) situate sex worker documents as extra-institutional professional communication. Sex work decriminalization, and similar activist work, is a site for technical communication intervention and coalition-building that are “alternatives to institutional or normative aesthetics” (Call For Proposals). The professional communication that sex workers create, practice, and the change it makes in the world is the epitome of what we hope to achieve through the social justice turn in TPC. However, we must not only acknowledge sex worker communication as professional communication, but also listen to sex workers.

For this project in particular, my question then becomes: how do sex workers’ professional and technical visual representations challenge dominant narratives of hetero- and cis-normativity, white supremacy, and motherhood? In this article, I use ProMomme: A Sex Worker’s Guide to Parenting to anchor an analysis of how a queer aesthetic of intimacy is used to destigmatize sex work showing the potential for aesthetics in technical communication to challenge these dominant narratives and attempt to invert power structures that stigmatize sex workers, particularly mothers participating in sex work. Ultimately, my analysis offers a concrete example for extending what communication we deem “professional” in TPC and how extra-institutional communication, particularly through zines, works toward activist aims to ultimately end stigmatization, oppression, and violence against sex workers.

Zines, with their do-it-yourself (DIY) and transgressive ethos, have been an object of inquiry for technical communication. Derek Ross (2025) engages zines as radical communication and Ross and Pears (2022, 2023) share zine’s pedagogical implications and empowering potential. From zines as a site of queer engagement (Edenfield, 2019) to pedagogy (Bikmohammadi et al., 2025; Kostopolus, 2023), TPC scholars have argued for zines as a site of technical communication. Building on TPC analyses of sex worker created documents (Itchuaqiyaq et al., 2022; Jordan, 2022, 2023, 2024), Jordan and Edenfield (2025) brought terms of service, “queer use,” and sex work together by analyzing Razorcake Magazine’s digital sex work safety guide to show how zines can be used to negotiate power through overlapping networks of compliance. However, these analyses often do not focus on the aesthetic within these documents.

Sex worker zines have been studied in feminist and queer scholarship across a diverse range of disciplines. For example, Levitt (2025) argues

“sex workers use zine-making to challenge the interrelated phenomena of femmephobia and whorephobia, and how multiply marginalized sex workers use digital zine making to theorize the connections between whorephobia, femmephobia, and other systems of oppression like racism, classism, nationalism, homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny.” (p. 220)

As Levitt highlights, zines are one way that sex workers can challenge “whore stigma.” Since sex workers are “a polyseme onto which cultural anxieties are projected, reflected, and amplified to the detriment of sex workers” (Starr & Francis, 2018, p. 876) then sex worker created media, from films to zines, are necessary to counteract this cultural marginalization, oppression, and violence.

Sex worker zines, then, are an important site for analysis for Technical and Professional Communication. With our field’s foundational concern with power (Jones et al., 2016; Scott et al., 2006) and engagements with activism (Bivens et al., 2020; Grabill, 2000; Jones, 2014) we need to attend to how power is at work in the documents, texts, and media we create. Starr and Francis (2018) warn that ignoring power and privilege “within sex worker-created narratives is to dehistoricize and dehumanize real-life media creators under the banner of the prostitute or the whore and obscure some of the most important forces at work in sex worker art and culture” (p. 883). Though Starr and Francis focus on sex worker created films, this same argument can be applied to sex worker created zines. One particular area ripe for analysis is the aesthetics within these zines and how aesthetics are used to counteract, challenge, and subvert various systems of oppression affecting sex workers.

Aesthetics in zines can be viewed through a variety of lenses. For example, Farmer (2013) argues that zines “especially traditional paper zines, appear the way they do not because of aesthetic choices (or rather, not primarily for that reason) but because of necessity” (p. 80) and Piepmeier (2009) argues that there are “aesthetic demands of the zine medium” (p. 90). These two scholars view the zine medium as forcing particular aesthetics. However, I argue that rather than view the materiality of zines as creating a “necessity” we can probe and question not only what “aesthetic demands” are created by the zine medium, but how and why they are negotiated to challenge dominant narratives. The zine medium becomes an opportunity for playing with aesthetic possibilities, sometimes within constraints. For Piepmeier, those demands are to use the “cultural ephemera” of a zine-maker’s time and place. I extend Piepmeier’s assertion about aesthetic demands to how zines DIY medium creates aesthetic opportunities to queer normative assumptions about sex workers and the post-partum body. Sex workers use their aesthetic choices within zines as what Warner (2002) calls “poetic world making” (p. 82) often in direct contrast to the stigma and stereotypes that permeate our culture’s representations of them.

Since zines are a visual medium it makes sense to focus analysis on aesthetics. Aesthetics, too, are part of how intimate zines can feel. Aesthetic choices range from print to digital, “of selecting paper to be the background, deciding whether to handwrite, typewrite, or word process, is a level of personal involvement” (Piepmeier, 2009). This personal involvement in aesthetic decisions is part of what mark zines’ ability to work against cultural “norms.” Since “sex workers radically challenge respectability politics by imbuing their creative works with an intimacy that exceeds the normative expectations of relationality” (Yiu et al., 2023, p. 2), then it follows that guides, manuals, and other technical communication within sex worker documents can rely on this intimacy through a queer aesthetic.