Piepmeier 2009

Piepmeier, Alison. Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism. New York: NYU Press, 2009.

zines -- "self-produced and anti-corporate" (2); "They are an example of participatory media -- media created by consumers rather than by the corporate culture industries -- and, as such, despite predictions of their demise in the mid-1990s due to the rise of the internet, they are part of a continuing trend in late capitalist culture." (2)

"Zines created by girls and women -- what this study will call 'grill zines' -- are sites where girls and women construct identities, communities, and explanatory narratives from the materials that comprise their cultural moment: discourses, media representations, ideologies, stereotypes, and even physical detrits." (2)

"Why zines? What forms of expression do zines enable that may not be possible in other media?" (4)

"I ultimately contend that, considered collectively zines are sites for the articulation of a vernacular third wave feminist theory." (4)

Vail -- helped coin the term "grrrl" but later hated it; effaced all instances in the zine, changing the existing artifact; "Her zine, then, must be understood not simply in terms of its content but in terms of its existence as a material object that can be altered to mark the passage of time and changing opinions." (5)

no clear lines between ironic and sincere, hope and cynicism (6)

girl scholarship -- positioning "girls as producers of culture, not merely consumers" (7)

third-wave feminism

"since the id-1990s, the third wave has been widely described but under theorized. I suggest that the theoretical contributions -- the vocabulary, conceptual apparatus, and explanatory narratives -- the the third wave have not been recognized by scholars because they're being developed in unexpected, nonacademic sites, like zines." (10)

"theory" -- "requires a tcertain degree of abstraction, but feminist practices have rightly demanded attention to the material origins and conditions that are particularized" (10)

"I am skeptical of the kinds of intellectual binaries that would have us divide cultural productions in terms of complicity or resistance." (11)

"In this volume, I examine what agency looks like in a social and cultural context defined by dislocation and self-creation, along with many persistent and innovative versions of the sexism, racism, and homophobia that feminists have been critiquing throughout the twentieth century." (13)

zines v. blog? "zine creators don't necessarily view blogs as a replacement for zines but, instead, as a supplement, a format that's doing something slightly different" (14)

hostility experienced by women bloggers online -- not th same as hostility in zine community

"It's also the case that zines as paper artifacts register the connections of bodies and the passage of time more fully than digital technologies" (16)

"Many grrrl zinesters have felt that they were creating an entirely new feminism, but I contend that they were revising feminism without reinventing it." (18)

Action Girl Newsletter and Riot Grrrl

"Zines configure resistance at the micro level; rather than a grand revolution, they offer resistance in small, particular, utterly grassroots manifestations. ... While global capitalism and media consolidation work to create homogenization for the sake of ever-larger markets, zines embrace the unmarketable, the local, the particular, and the quirky. They perform micropolitical interventions within hegemonic systems and within the symbolic order; indeed, their interventions are so personalized that they are often invisible as activism to scholars who are searching for the kinds of social change efforts that were prevalent in the social justice movements of the earlier twentieth century. By offering an alternative to mainstream late-capitalist modes of operation, zines enact a public pedagogy of hope." (20)