CONTEXT OF PRACTICE 2 - ten sources

Context into practice - focusing on Riot Grrrl and the exploration of zines and the impact they have on society

1. Schilt, Kristen. Popular Music and Society, Vol. 26, No. 1, 2003.

Kristen Schilt is a graduate student in sociology. Her research interests include youth culture, sexuality, and gender. She has an article on zines and cultural resistance forthcoming in Youth and Society, as well as an article on gay and lesbian media advocacy forthcoming in the Gay and Lesbian Journal of Social Services. 

2. Bag, Sarah. The G Word, in Leeds and Bradford Riot Grrrl, 1993.

Riot Grrrl!!! was a zine put out by the Riot Grrrl Bradford/Leeds chpater in England in the early 1990s. Riot Grrrl!!! was a text-heavy zine that covered everything from the origins of the Riot Grrrl Bradford/Leeds chapter to the coverage their chapter received in the British music magazine NME.

“Why is there something odd and unnatural about women who want to try to do something with their lives? Why are women such fucking appendages in everything?… Feminism isn’t over, it didn’t fail, but something new must happen- Riot Grrrl… Next time a guy feels your ass, patronises you, slags off your body- generally treats you like shit- forget the moral highground, forget he’s been instilled with patriarchy and is a victim too, forget rationale and debate. Just deck the bastard.”

—	1993 issue of Leeds and Bradford Riot Grrrls zine.

3. Blase, Cazz. But What of Us? UK Riot Grrrl, 2005.

Cazz Blase, a veteran of the zine scene who started her first zine,Aggamengmong Moggie, in 1993. After Aggamengmong Moggie, which ran until 1999, Cazz wrote the zines Real Girls (2001) and Harlot's Progress (2002-2006). Cazz is now one of two music review editors at The F-Word website, for which she has written extensively about both women and the UK punk scene and the UK riot grrrl scene, and was a contributing author to the book Riot Grrrl: Revolution Girl Style Now! (Black Dog Publishing, 2007). At the Fanzine Convention, Cazz will be launching her most recent zine, Too Late for Cake, a collaboration with David Wilkinson (who is also speaking at the Fanzine Convention), which is themed around Stockport, Cazz and David's home town.

4. Marcus, Sara. Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right, 2011 and Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution

“For a Second Wave feminist like myself, Girls to the Front evokes wonderfully the way the generation after mine soaked up the promise and the punishment of feminist consciousness....A richly moving story.” —Village Voice writer Vivian Gornick

Girls to the Front is the epic, definitive history of the Riot Grrrl movement—the radical feminist punk uprising that exploded into the public eye in the 1990s, altering America’s gender landscape forever. Author Sara Marcus, a music and politics writer for Time Out New York, Slate.com, Pos, and Heeb magazine, interweaves research, interviews, and her own memories as a Riot Grrrl front-liner. Her passionate, sophisticated narrative brilliantly conveys the story of punk bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy—as well as successors like Sleater-Kinney, Partyline, and Kathleen Hanna’s Le Tigre—and their effect on today’s culture.

5. McIntosh, Heather. Bring the herstory of Riot Grrrl back into the present, 2010.

6. Carlip, Hillary. Girl Power: Young Women Speak Out!, 1995.

Carlip illuminates the worries, hopes, dreams and experiences of girls ages 13 to 19, through their stories, poems, letters and notes. Their voices come from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives--cowgals, lesbians, teen mothers, sorority sisters and girls in gangs--and reveal the depth, vulnerability, wisdom and power of the writers.

7. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 1979.

'Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style is so important: complex and remarkably lucid, it's the first book dealing with punk to offer intellectual content. Hebdige is concerned with the UK's postwar, music-centred, white working-class subcultures, from teddy boys to mods and rockers to skinheads and punks.' - Rolling Stone

With enviable precision and wit Hebdige has addressed himself to a complex topic - the meanings behind the fashionable exteriors of working-class youth subcultures - approaching them with a sophisticated theoretical apparatus that combines semiotics, the sociology of devience and Marxism and come up with a very stimulating short book - Time Out

This book is an attempt to subject the various youth-protest movements of Britain in the last 15 years to the sort of Marxist, structuralist, semiotic analytical techniques propagated by, above all, Roland Barthes. The book is recommended whole-heartedly to anyone who would like fresh ideas about some of the most stimulating music of the rock era - The New York Times

8. D'Angelica, Christ. Beyond Bikini Kill: A History of Riot Grrrl, from Grrrls to Ladies, 2009.

This thesis explores aspects of the riot grrrl movement that have generally escaped media and scholarly attention. It traces the movement's origins, ideologies, and lasting achievements without placing the most famous grrrl band, Bikini Kill, at the center of the narrative (as almost all previous analysts have done). It also discusses the continuation of riot grrrl long after the pioneers of the movement appeared to have left it behind and moved on to other projects. Far from dying out when high-profile grrrl bands broke up, the movement spread through interne communication among young women across the United States. This thesis tells the story of the committed women who maintained and benefited from riot grrrl well after the mainstream press declared the movement "dead."

9. Pierpmeier, Alison and Zerisler, Andi. Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism, 2009.

With names likeThe East Village Inky,Mend My Dress,Dear Stepdad, andI'm So Fucking Beautiful, zines created by girls and women over the past two decades make feminism’s third wave visible. These messy, photocopied do-it-yourself documents cover every imaginable subject matter and are loaded with handwriting, collage art, stickers, and glitter. Though they all reflect the personal style of the creators, they are also sites for constructing narratives, identities, and communities.

Girl Zines is the first book-length exploration of this exciting movement. Alison Piepmeier argues that these quirky, personalized booklets are tangible examples of the ways that girls and women ‘do’ feminism today. The idiosyncratic, surprising, and savvy arguments and issues showcased in the forty-six images reproduced in the book provide a complex window into feminism’s future, where zinesters persistently and stubbornly carve out new spaces for what it means to be a revolutionary and a girl.Girl Zines takes zines seriously, asking what they can tell us about the inner lives of girls and women over the last twenty years.

10. Duncombe, Stephen. Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture

"The subterranean world of zines uncovered in words and pictures: Slug & Lettuce, Pathetic Life, I Hate Brenda, Dishwasher, Punk and Destroy, Sweet Jesus, Scrambled Eggs, Maximunrocknroll - these are among the thousands of publications which circulate in a subterranean world rarely illuminated by the searchlights of mainstream media commentary. In this multifarious underground, Pynchonesque misfits rant and rave, fans eulogize, hobbyists obsess. Together they form a low-tech publishing network of extraordinary richness and variety. Welcome to the realm of zines. In this, the first comprehensive study of zine publishing, Stephen Duncombe describes their origins in early-twentieth-century science fiction cults, their more proximate roots in 60s counter-culture and their rapid proliferation in the wake of punk rock. While Notes from Underground pays full due to the political importance of zines as a vital web of popular culture, it also notes the shortcomings of their utopian and escapist outlook in achieving fundamental social change. Packed with extracts and illustrations from a wide array of publications, past and present, Notes from Underground is the first book to explore the full range of zine culture and provides a definitive portrait of the contemporary underground in all its splendor and misery.