The Hegemonocle: Showcasing Student Life Through Satire
by Zoë Roos Scheuerman
Around midterms and finals week, a slim, colorfully photoshopped magazine floods campus. This is the Hegemonocle, Macalester’s quarterly student satire magazine. Since its founding in 2009, the Hege has become one of the college’s cultural staples.
Each week, the magazine’s staff meets to share and workshop draft pieces, as well as to brainstorm ideas for things such as the next issue’s theme or possible social media posts. Pieces may be written by the entire group or by an individual, but even when one writer conceptualizes and drafts a piece, the workshopping process allows the rest of the staff to offer feedback and suggestions. Because of this, everyone on the Hegemonocle staff often has a hand in each finalized piece. This communal influence is one reason why some articles might not list a singular author’s name. It also helps ensure that, if Hege faces the ire of a disgruntled administrator, no one student is targeted, and that if the magazine publishes an article that goes too far, the whole staff can be held accountable for enabling its publication.
Although the Hegemonocle’s editors have the final say over whether a piece appears in the published magazine or not, pieces are rarely scrapped. One of the magazine’s few hard rules is to never punch down, i.e. by making racist or sexist jokes, or by trivializing sensitive topics. One of the rare situations in which Hege editors would choose not to publish a piece would be if it breaks these rules.
Because Hegemonocle writers have so much creative freedom, the magazine always contains a plethora of different satirical styles, topics, and mediums. Pieces can be anything from a standard
article to a list, quiz, comic strip, crossword, or scavenger hunt. The magazine’s articles often satirize recent campus news; recurring targets include food quality, the administration, dorm life, and in the pandemic age, Zoom learning. Recently published pieces feature a quiz to identify which old man at Dunn Bros you are, a movie script detailing a fight over a dorm’s last available dryer, and a comic about an alternate future where Café Mac never removed the soft serve machine.
While most articles are about experiences specific to life at Macalester, the magazine tries to avoid being too niche and reliant on inside jokes that some readers might not catch. Recently, the magazine has made an effort to include articles that are less Macalester-specific, making it more accessible to students who want to share it with friends, family, or others who are not familiar with the college.
As the Hegemonocle evolves, one of our major goals is to grow our readership through the use of its website and social media feeds. We also want to meaningfully engage with social justice work on campus. Anyone interested in reading the magazine can find copies strewn in virtually every building on campus or online at issuu.com/hegemonocle. The magazine is also on Twitter and Instagram under the handle @Hegemonocle. Anyone interested in the magazine is welcome to join the staff at 9 PM on Thursdays in Campus Center 206. Alternatively, if students want to submit pieces, they are welcome to send them to [email protected]