Girl Zines - Making Media, Doing Feminism by Alison Pipemeier
- punk girls play their own music and create their own publications and Bikini Kill’s fans could shove the booklet into their pockets and take it home to read about what it means to have a revolution
- pocket sized publications, take it home to read
- aesthetics, narratives and iconography that emerge from the experiences of girls in early 1990s
- zines are quirky, individualised booklets filled with diatribes, re-workings of pop culture iconography, and all variety of personal and political narratives
- self produced
- anti corporate
- production, philosophy and aesthetic are anti-professional
- Stephen Duncombe, author of only book length stud of zines, “they are scruffy, homemade little pamphlets. Little publications filled with rantings of high weidness and exploding with chaotic design.”
- messy, photocopied documents that may contain handwriting, collage art, stickers, glitter
- ephemeral underground publications
- impossible to determine how many are in circulation
- one scholar estimated 50,000 in 1997
- cover every imaginable subject matter
- food politics to thrift shopping to motherhood
- example of participatory media
- media created by consumers rather than by the corporate culture industries
- despite predictions of their demise in mid 1990s due to the rise of the internet they are a part of a continuing trend in late capitalist culture
- sites where girls and women construct identities, communities and explanatory narratives from materials that comprise their cultural movement: discourses, media representations, ideologies, stereotypes and physical detritus
- Mary Celeste Kearney “the primary type of media created by contemporary American girls”
“please listen to me you mother fuckers, i, unlike hundreds of boy fanzine writers all across america, have a legitimate need and desperate desire to be heard. i am making a fanzine not to entertain or distract or exclude or because i don’t have anything better to do but because if i didn’t write these things no one else would either.” - Tobi Vail, Jigsaw 3 (1991)
“BECAUSE we must take over the means of production in order to create our own meanings.” - Bikini Kill 2 (1992)
- most studies of zines identify them as resistant media originating in male dominated spaces
- positioned as descendants of pamphlets of the American Revolution and Dadaist and Samizdat publishing
- emerged from the fanzines of 1930s and punk community of 70s
- zine proliferation was triggered by convergence of punk culture and technology
- punk culture provided “zine” terminology, along with non-elitist DIY structure and aesthetic
- ideologies channeled into the production of zines because of technological innovations such as desktop publishing and inexpensive, widely available photocopying
THIS IS NOT THE SAME FOR GIRL ZINES - they are not just a side note to male zines
- they are places where third wave feminism developed
- Riot Grrrl
- exhibit distinctive style, rhetoric and iconography
- the look of these early zines, their playfulness within the terrain of femininity, their use of contradictory visual images, and their expressions of extreme rage and profanity would become characteristic of grrrl zines and the third wave
- common trope in early riot grrrl zines = juxtaposition of seemingly contradictory images and rhetorics e.g. Hello Kitty wearing a Riot Grrrl dress and carrying a teddy bear with an anarchist symbol on its jumper, Action Girl Newsletter
- juxtapositions came to define the third wave aesthetic
- some referred to this as “kinderwhore: or “kitten with a whip”
- this aesthetic differentiates the third wave from previous feminism
- no self-respecting second waver would do anything with Hello Kitty imagery other than reject it
- take command of language and make it work differently e.g. manifestos, BECAUSE i believe with my holeheartmindbody....
- indicative of Riot Grrrls’ creative reclaiming of language
- hole = makes reference to the vagina and identifying the hole as part of what defines a woman
- swearing = an effort to articulate rage at an unfair social system, normally reserved for men
- amplify language to meet up with feelings
- excessive expressions of emotion, embrace of denigrating terminology, manipulation of feminine iconography = pervasive among grrrl zines and help make these publications both distinctive and effective
Why Zines Matter
“This is no substitute for envelopes marked with your location, sheets of stationery with your script scratching across parallel lines, feeling the back of the paper and an embossed pattern in the shape of every character formed (because maybe, like me, you press down with your pen, every letter a deliberate creation) the smell of your house on the paper itself.” - Marissa Falco, Red-Hooded Sweatshirt #3 (1999)
- significance of the materiality of zines
- when taught about zines, a significant percentage of students begin to make their own
- many never heard of zines, but when given them they become inspired
- getting hands on actual zines is necessary to ignite a creative urge
- fascinated with different sized pages (some long, skinny 4 1/4 by 11 inches, some an almost square 4 1/4 inches by 5 1/2 inches)
- combination of collage art, comics, scrawled stories on note book paper
- people gravitate towards zines that are visibly different from magazines and other mainstream publication - either by virtue or size or hand-colour drawings or their sheer unprofessional appearance
- zines personally invite you to enter into the zine discourse
- in an age of electronic media, when the future of the book itself is often called into question, and when the visual and textual landscape is dominated by an increasingly voracious culture industry, zines endure.
- instigate a “gift culture”
- instigate intimate, affectionate connections between the creators and readers
- inspired to become a part of zine community because of physical encounters with actual zines, not by reading anthologised zines
- in a world where more and more of us spend all day at our computers, zines reconnect us to our bodies and to other human beings
- embodied community has implications for the zine medium
*STUDIES OF FIVE ZINES GIVEN ON PG 59*
Paper versus Electronic Media and Fragments of Friendship
- Victoria Law
- created this zine out of a year’s worth of email correspondence between herself and her friend China Martens
- zine format: codex, digest size, tan cardstock cover, plain printed title
- zine has no images, just email messages printed on paper, physically cut and glued onto other sheets of paper and then photocopied
- content = one off zine made primarily for Martens, not intended to sell or widely distribute but meant it as an artefact that would both encourage her friend and also document a year of friendship
- the emails themselves were deficient
- wasn’t inspired to archive the emails using digital means, such as CD or website
- instead, she chose paper
- makes explicit an idea that many zine creators allude and adhere to: the notion that paper is better suited for facilitating human connection than electronic media
- identifies a letter as a site of physical interaction
- “feeling the back of the paper and an embossed pattern in the shape of every character formed” - figures paper as connecting two bodies, so that the fingers of one person respond to the traces of the handwriting of the other
- piece of paper bears the marks of the body that created it as well as carrying other sensory information to the reader
- the paper is a nexus
- technology that mediates the connections not just of people but of bodies
- although blogs and zines are often conflated, zine creators know that the material matter
“Zines are different from e-zines, which are ‘zines’ published on the internet, via personal webpage or email lists...There are significant differences between the two genres, and we choose to retain the distinction. When zine World says ‘zine’, we mean something on paper. We only review zines.” - major zine directories
“Real zines are xeroxed.” - Lauren Jade Martin
“People thought the internet was going to herald the death of print, which was a crock even in the boom days. The feeling of a printed document is never gong to lose its appeal or be replaced by an electronic alternative.” - Lisa Jervis
“Often people who have never ‘zined’ ask why I choose to print instead of publish online: I state that it’s obvious - how will we remember websites 5 years or even 20 years from now?” - Raina Lee
- zines and blogs do have similarities
- too-easy comparison of the two media obscures the function of the crete forms of zines - the function
- paper can offer a differently intimate connection than emails
- zines demand a level of aesthetic decision making that digital media like blogs sometimes don’t
“Your zine is visual, you have to make a choice, whether it’s pasting clip act or photos or using Xeroxes of fabric or whatever behind your text, or you’ve made a decision to just have text on white pages, you’ve made that choice, but I rarely ever see blogs where people have designed them. Among the people that I know, I think I’m the only person who actually designed their blog...The design element’s really been removed from what you would have in the worst zine; even if its not a good look, it’s an aesthetic. And most blogs, their aesthetic is, you know, one of the templates that was available with Word Press or Livejournal.” Sarah Dyer, create of the Action Girl newsletter
- blogs are easy to create because they are a ready-made technology
- only bloggers with web design skills can play an active role in designing their pages
- bloggers can and do exhibit a great deal of creativity in blog design and content but available blog templates make it easy for bloggers to focus on the text rather than on the appearance of the blog p.g 65
- zines are simpler technology
- no template exists so each element requires choice and each zine is different
- look of zines is individualised and significant in a way that blog aren’t
- necessity of making aesthetic decisions with zines, of selecting paper to be the background, deciding whether to handwrite, typewrite, or word process, is a level of personal involvement that is not as often present in electronic media
- personal, physical involvement meant not only intentionality but also care p.g 66
“To make a really lame analogy, it’s like singles versus albums. When you have a zine, someone collected a bunch of their ideas in some form to make sense to them and put it together as a package, and a blog is something that, even if you decided to sit down and read a whole month’s entries at once, they were not written as a grouping that would make sense. It’s just coming in every day or week or whatever, and this is where I post. So the packaging of the information is completely different. And the reading experience is completely different. I’m sure that people I know who have blogs, if they sat down and did a zine, it might have the voice of their blog, but I feel like you would get something very, very different, because when you put the zine together, you’re really making a whole thing out of all these little pieces and you just don’t have that experience reading a blog at all” - Dyer, personal interview
- Dyer states a zine is conceived of as a unit, an artefact, with beginning and an end, blogs are running collection of ideas
- p.g 69 “It’s almost like getting a personal letter from a friend...Also, as much as I get information online, there’s nothing like getting something fun in the mail and holding actual paper. The experience is different and more satisfying.” Judyth Stavens, personal interview
- p.g 70 “The glossier and more professional my zine gets, the less mail I get from readers.” quoted in Rev. Phil and Joe Biel, directors, A Hundred Dollars and a T-Shirt: A documentary about zines in the North West US (Portland, Ore.: Microcosm Publishing, 2005)
- Most zine creators reject the commercial aesthetic because they reject the ideology of commercial mass media; rather than positioning readers as consumers, as a marketplace, the positions them as friends, equals, members of an embodied community who are part of a conversation with the zine maker, and the zine aesthetic plays a crucial role in this positioning. - Duncombe refers to the phenomenon of zines encouraging readers to make their own zines as “emulation”
- p.g 73 the zine structure offers a greater sense of intimacy even than other print media. Books van pretend to be a diary or can even be the publication of a diary, but the mechanisms of publication and the formal structures of books make it apparent to most readers that they aren’t actually privy to someone’s confidential information. With zines, there are fewer layers of separation between reader and creator.
p.g 74 ZINE DISTRIBUTION
- many of these factors - a personalised human connection, informality, the evidence of the creator’s hand - come together in ways zines are transferred from the zinester to the reader
- generally distributed in ways distinct from the consumer culture industry
- aren’t available in most corporate venues that sell books
- independent book and music stores do carry them
- availability online is on the rise but still limited
- online distribution zines known as distros
- primary distribution = person to person or through the mail
- 1990s when zines were in their heyday - traded rather than sold - could get a zine if you traded it for one you had made
- this practice is in decline
- sell from between $1 to $5
- zine distribution is mostly personalised and geared toward creating relationships that facilitate self expression; few dollars received for creation doesn’t cover expenses for producing it
- zine distribution is another component of zines’ meaning
- it’s a factor that’s easy to overlook but helps create embodied community of zines
- creation of community happens when zines are distributed
- the immediacy of person to person distribution and its ability to create community are evident in story of zine DORIS #4 1994
- process of slipping zine into backpack of girls
- by secretly offering zine to a stranger, wants to counter the cultural messages that keep people isolated from one another
- zine functions to create community
- exchange is qualitatively different from financial exchanges that make up capitalist distribution methods for mainstream publications where they’re for-profit entities
*case study*
- most zines are photocopied and therefore not made from on individual but still intimate medium
- print runs are often fewer than one hundred copies, particular aesthetic and structure make zines feel like they were made for individual
- process of hand delivering zines = enhances intimacy and creates meaningful results
- p.g 78 the way that zines distribution differentiates them from other media is particularly visible in envelopes
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