Girl Zines »

Alison Piepmeier directs the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina, where she is associate professor of English. She is the co-editor of Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the Twenty-First Century and author of Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America.

With names like The East Village Inky, Mend My Dress, Dear Stepdad, and I'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.

Library Journal

Zines are an idiosyncratic and personally distributed form of creative participatory media, engaging with topics often ignored by mainstream media. In the early 1990s, created mainly by girls and women, they began to proliferate. Piepmeier (director, women's & gender studies & English, Charleston Coll.) calls them "grrl zines." Using textual analysis, art scholarship, interviews, and participation in the subculture that creates zines, Piepmeier examines how zines not only provide voices for individual women but also contribute to the theoretical work of third wave feminism. She traces their genesis to 19th-century women's club scrapbooks and second wave feminism's mimeographed publications, then contextualizes them in feminist history while examining how they are relevant to a new generation. Using images to illustrate her close reading of five zines, she notes that the material form of the zine is an important aspect of its message. VERDICT Presented in densely written academic prose that makes for slow reading, this interdisciplinary study will be appreciated by scholars from a wide range of disciplines and may also be of interest to the producers and collectors of grrl zines. [See also our quarterly column of zine reviews in LJ's newest enewsletter, BookSmack!—Ed.]—Judy Solberg, Seattle Univ. Lib.

Acknowledgments ix

Foreword Andi Zeisler xi

Introduction 1

1 "If I Didn't Write These Things No One Else Would Either": The Feminist Legacy of Grrrl Zines and the Origins of the Third Wave 23

2 Why Zines Matter: Materiality and the Creation of Embodied Community 57

3 Playing Dress-Up, Playing Pin-Up, Playing Mom: Zines and Gender 87

4 "We Are Not All One": Intersectional Identities in Grrrl Zines 123

5 Doing Third Wave Feminism: Zines as a Public Pedagogy of Hope 155

Conclusion 193

Appendix: Where to Find Zines 201

Notes 207

Index 241

About the Author 249