Communication, Culture & Critique ISSN 1753-9129
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Feminist Ephemera in a Digital World:
Theorizing Zines as Networked Feminist
Practice
Rosemary Clark-Parsons
Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
Zines have made a resurgence in the United States. What functions do these humble,
self-published booklets perform in the current media landscape, where digital reigns
supreme? his article explores the political salience of zines for feminists, whose social
media tactics have pushed feminism into popular culture and yet who continue to make
zines. While much has been written about feminist zines, little research has considered
their relevance in the digital age, nor have researchers grappled with the complex relationship between digital and print activist media. Drawing on interviews with zinesters,
I argue that feminist zines and online feminism are not materially polarized outlets, but
practices with distinct yet symbiotic advantages working in tandem within a repertoire of
feminist media tactics.
Keywords: Feminism, Zines, Digital Media, Online Feminism, Activism, Alternative Media,
Media Practices.
doi:10.1111/cccr.12172
On an unbearably hot August aternoon in 2015, approximately 50 zine-makers, or
zinesters, and distributers (distros) pack into the Rotunda, a university-owned community center in West Philadelphia, for the annual Philly Zine Fest, their handcrated
pamphlets and other homespun goods spread across a few dozen folding tables. In
an age of the ubiquitous Internet, the death of print, and the monopolization of commercial media, perusing an exhibitor’s photocopied and stapled paper magazines,
typically exchanged through barter or trade, feels like a throwback to simpler times
for activist life in the United States. he festival’s broad selection of feminist-inspired
media, for example, harkens back to the Riot Grrrl punk zines of the late 1980s
and 1990s, their historical roots stemming forth from the alternative presses of the
Civil Rights Era and even reaching as far back as the pamphleteers of the sufrage
Corresponding author: Rosemary Clark-Parsons; e-mail: rosemary.clark@asc.upenn.edu
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movement. And yet, in leeting moments, a paradox manifests: Zinesters use iPhones
to snap photos and share their displays on Instagram; distros hand out business cards
directing future consumers to their websites; organizers update the festival’s Facebook
event page and Twitter hashtag in hopes of boosting attendance; readers who have up
to this point only purchased zinesters’ work through Etsy shops meet their favorite
makers in person for the irst time; unclickable URLs and e-mail addresses printed
across inside covers direct readers to connect with zinesters online. Underlying the
zine fest’s commitment to alternative print media and the tangible communities and
face-to-face encounters they foster are digital networks whose virtual connective
tissue enabled the logistical execution of the day-long event, distributed the call
for exhibitors far and wide, and brought attendees from the Philadelphia area and
beyond.
Over the last decade, zines, or self-published booklets ranging dramatically in
style and content, have made a resurgence. It is impossible to estimate the number of
contemporary zinesters in the United States, whose subversive, hodgepodge texts are
not catalogued in the Library of Congress or issued ISSNs, but recent mainstream
news headlines have heralded their comeback: “Zines Have a Resurgence Among the
Web-Savvy” (Wortham, 2011); “Are Zines Making a Comeback, Too?” (Bose, 2014);
“How Zines Survive in the Internet Age” (Carville, 2015); “Yes, Zines Still Exist, and
hey’re Not Antiques” (Berube, 2013). Today, there are more than 60 active zine
festivals (Stolen Sharpie Revolution, 2016b), dozens of distros and stores (Stolen
Sharpie Revolution, 2016a; Stolen Sharpie Revolution, 2016c), and nearly 120 zine
libraries and archives across the United States (Barnard Zine Library, 2016). he
humble do-it-yourself (DIY) zine perseveres, in spite of, but perhaps more accurately,
because of the meteoric rise of blogging and social media platforms.
Why are zines making a comeback now? What function do zines perform in
the current U.S. media environment, where digital reigns supreme? In this article,
I explore these questions speciically in relation to U.S. feminists, whose energetic
adoption of social media has pushed feminist ideas into mainstream media, creating
a cultural moment that Sarah Banet-Weiser (Banet-Weiser, 2015) has called “popular
feminism,” and yet who continue to produce zines and host zine festivals across the
country. Why do feminists zine when they can, and have with great success, blog?
How do zines, despite their intrinsically limited audience, advance feminist goals?
While much has been written about feminist zines, little research has considered the
continued relevance of zines for feminists in the digital age, nor have researchers
grappled with the complex relationship between digital and print activist media. I
draw on interview data with zinesters alongside the theoretical frameworks of media
as practice (Couldry, 2012; Williams, 1977), counterpublics (Fraser, 1992; Warner,
2002), and material culture (Barassi, 2013) to begin developing answers to these
questions. Feminist zines and online feminism are not, I argue, materially polarized
outlets, but practices within the same repertoire of contemporary feminist media
activism. Whereas existing scholarship positions zines and digital media in tension
with one another, my interviewees’ experiences illuminate a symbiotic relationship
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between the two genres. Zine-making is a digitally networked feminist practice, in
which social media platforms act as porous yet protective boundaries, providing
access to the zine community, but not to the actual content of zines themselves. he
relationship between feminists’ print and digital media practices fosters a supportive,
safe, subaltern counterpublic, open to newcomers but closed of from the harassment
that tends to plague online spaces. Putting these practices in conversation with one
another highlights both the political salience of print media and the democratic
shortcomings of digitally mediated activism.
Theorizing feminist zines in the age of online feminism
he existing research on feminist zines is broad in depth and breadth, ofering a range
of studies across multiple geographic and cultural contexts but nevertheless weaving
a coherent narrative about the functions zines fulill within feminist movements.
Feminist zines open up productive third spaces for authors who, ranging widely
in age, gender identity, race, and sexual orientation, fall outside the boundaries of
White, heterosexual masculinity and who, consequently, lack access to or representation in media outlets (Licona, 2005). Stemming from broader DIY lifestyles and
movements (Kempson, 2014), the exchange of zines forges communal bonds that
encourage the collective formation of critical feminist subjectivities (Harris, 2003).
hrough the processes of inter- and intrapersonal subjectivity formation, zines ofer
space for the negotiation of complex feminist identities that allow for wide-ranging
expressions of gender (Piepmeier, 2009). his feature has been especially empowering
for adolescent girls weighing feminine desires against irst encounters with feminist
politics (Guzzetti & Gamboa, 2004). Feminist zines create accessible venues for
self-expression, unfettered by the restrictive norms encoded into commercial media
representations of gendered, racialized, and sexualized bodies (Chidgey, Payne, &
Zobl, 2009). Feminist zinesters oten do the important work of making those encoded
norms visible, cutting and pasting dominant images from commercial print media
to critique them and ofer alternatives, a vital form of countercultural production
(Zobl, 2009). Moreover, feminist zinesters’ politics extend beyond content to infuse
the production and circulation processes, which typically unfold through alternative
economic practices that subvert capitalist marketplace norms and blur the boundaries
between producers and consumers (Chidgey, 2009). he democratic exchange and,
more recently, the diligent eforts to archive these feminist ephemera have created
a vibrant, rhizomatic record of feminist history grounded in the work of grassroots
activists and makers, whose extrainstitutional voices are typically underprivileged
within dominant discourse (Chidgey, 2013; Eichhorn, 2013).
he question remains—why do feminists continue to produce zines? he
push-button publishing platforms of Web 2.0 streamlined all of the aforementioned
qualities of photocopied and hand-stapled zines; like the zinesters of previous
decades, feminists have coopted digital media platforms, especially blogs and Twitter, to create accessible, participatory spaces for alternative expressions, activist
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communities, and the formation of critical subjectivities. he longevity and, more
importantly, the apparent resurgence of zines within U.S. feminism suggest that (DIY)
print media, despite their limited circulation, serve a need let unfulilled and/or
potentially exacerbated by the Internet. To date, however, the dynamics between
feminist zines and online feminism remain largely underexplored, with the exception
of historical analyses situating zines as the precursors to the feminist blogosphere
(Keller, 2016; Piepmeier, 2009) and cursory allusions to digital networks’ facilitation
of zine production and circulation (Bayerl, 2000). Research that brings digital media
and zines into conversation together oten polarizes them on opposite sides of
the digital/print binary, juxtaposing their respective material compositions instead
of tracing the connections forged between them in practice. For example, Alison
Piepmeier (Piepmeier, 2008), author of the earliest academic writing on feminist
zines, argues that zines “leverage their materiality into a kind of surrogate physical
interaction and ofer mechanisms for creating meaningful relationships,” producing
“embodied communities” (p. 215) in stark contrast to the “disembodied format of
electronic media” (p. 224). his material/virtual binary logic, however, dangerously
parallels the cyberutopian promise of leaving the body behind, as if sex, gender,
sexuality, race, ethnicity, ability, religion, and so on do not reinscribe oppressive
power relationships online (Brophy, 2010), a feminist fantasy ruptured by recent
high-proile cases of online harassment against women (Hess, 2014). Signiicantly
for this project, the polarization of zines versus blogs also precludes a more nuanced
framework that positions zine-making as a feminist practice working in conjunction with digital media, distinct but symbiotic discursive strategies for coping with
structures of power that privilege some bodies while marginalizing others within the
public sphere. As Piepmeier’s own groundbreaking ieldwork suggests, many feminist
zinesters also blog or use other forms of social media, indicating a need to theorize
the relationship between digital media and zines.
To move toward a more nuanced theory of zines in the digital age, I work from an
understanding of media as not simply materials, tools, or texts but as social practices,
as habits, techniques, values, and relationships that emerge from the conventions,
resources, and needs of a particular cultural context. In his essay, “From Medium
to Social Practice,” Raymond Williams (Williams, 1977) argues that a medium is
more than the materials of which it is composed. Rather, according to Williams, a
medium is a “practice, which has always to be deined as work on a material for a
special purpose within certain necessary social conditions” (p. 160). Conceptualizing zines within Williams’s framework of “material social practice” highlights both
the material and the social, cultural, political, and economic relationships and conditions, including the broader media environment, which both give rise to and are
enacted through zine-making. Nick Couldry’s (Couldry, 2012) “media as practice”
framework directs researchers toward a media sociology approach that “is concerned
with the speciic regularities in our actions related to media and the regularities of
context and resources that make certain types of media-related actions possible or
impossible, likely or unlikely” (p. 33). Media sociology takes a user-centric approach
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that identiies what people do with media and the social conventions and needs yielding particular media practices. I draw on such an approach here to understand the
full breadth of feminist zinesters’ media practices, each of which stem from particular
conditions, foster diferent relationships, fulill distinct needs, and act in tandem with
other media practices. Rather than opposing digital media against zines on the basis of
their materiality, a media-as-practice approach sheds light on their coexistence within
a broader repertoire of feminist media tactics.
Paralleling the emphatically social nature of the media as practice model, much
research on feminist zine-making and online feminism draws on counterpublic theory to frame both practices as performing subversive community-building work (e.g.,
Keller, 2016; Zobl, 2009). Nancy Fraser’s (Fraser, 1992) critique of the Habermasian
public sphere advances the notion of subaltern counterpublics, “parallel discursive
arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of
their identities, interests, and needs” (p. 123). Counterpublics mitigate the many informal impediments restricting marginalized groups’ access to discourse within more
mainstream publics while also creating an outlet through which the subaltern might
broadcast her claims to broader audiences. Michael Warner’s (Warner, 2002) work
highlights the role media texts play in the formation of publics and counterpublics
through their circulation and the discursive exchanges they inspire. I draw on Fraser’s
and Warner’s work to consider the ways in which feminist print and digital media,
through both their production and circulation, bring communities into being.
But what particular needs do feminist print and digital media fulill within
today’s feminist counterpublics? Social movement researchers’ struggle to keep up
with advances in digital media erases the particular work print media continue to
perform within contemporary movements. Barassi’s (Barassi, 2013) ethnographic
analysis of the role magazines play among activist organizations in Britain and Spain
importantly draws attention to print within the web-centric literature on social movement media. Drawing on anthropological theories of material culture and exchange,
Barassi frames activist magazines as “objects of mediation” (p. 138), whose material
not only conveys content, but also plays “a fundamental role in the construction of
relationships through processes of ownership and exchange” (p. 145). She also notes
the interplay between digital and print media, which “do not replace one another,
but enable diferent and at times contrasting communication and social processes”
(p. 148) within movements. Barassi’s theorizing of activist material cultures ofers a
helpful framework for considering the persistent relevance of feminist print media
practices in the digital age.
Taken together, these three theoretical resources—media practices, counterpublics, and material cultures—provide a robust methodological approach and
interpretive framework for exploring the functions feminist zine-making fulills in
the digital age. he media-as-practice framework calls for a user-centric approach
to the study of zines, one grounded in practitioners’ own words and experiences, in
order to understand why Internet-savvy feminists continue to make and read print
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media and how print media relate to their digital media tactics. Heeding this call,
I describe my interview-based method in the following section. hen, connecting
counterpublic theories with the relationships fostered through the exchange of print
materials among activists, I consider how my interviewees’ media practices contribute to the feminist goals of community-building and free expression. Ultimately,
I argue that feminist zine-making is a digitally networked practice that combines the
authenticity and privacy granted through zines’ materiality with the accessibility and
reach of online platforms.
Method
his project stems from a broader ethnographic inquiry into grassroots feminist
media making in the city of Philadelphia. As a participant observer, I have worked
with a network of feminist collectives whose activism involves the production of both
print and digital media. My experiences producing and circulating media alongside
these feminist practitioners inspired the research questions motivating this current
project: Why do feminists continue to make zines in the digital age? What functions
do zines fulill? How do feminists’ print media practices relate to their digital media
practices?
Given that both “feminist” and “zine” are highly contested, diicult to deine
terms, I drew my sample of interviewees from a zine exhibition with an explicit link
to feminism—the Philly Feminist Zine Fest (PFZF). Held most recently in June 2014
and distinct from the more general annual Philly Zine Fest, PFZF is one of the three
most visible feminist zine exhibitions in the United States, alongside NYC Feminist
Zine Fest and Feminist Zine Fest Pittsburgh (Stolen Sharpie Revolution, 2016c). I
invited each of the more than 50 PFZF exhibitors listed on the 2014 fest’s website
to participate via e-mail. Twelve exhibitors agreed to participate, and I conducted
each interview through the medium of the participants’ choosing: via e-mail or
face-to-face in a public setting. Table 1 lists the interviewees, their recent zine titles,
and the interview format. Two interviewees requested anonymity and appear under
pseudonyms in this article; others requested to be referred to by their actual names
or their pen names in order to retain attribution for their work.
Interviews were semistructured, with a loose agenda open to participants’
directions and interests, and included questions related to participants’ zinester
biographies, motivations for zine-making, processes of zine production and circulation, understanding of zines’ political roles, reach, and eicacy in comparison
to and in conjunction with digital networks, and experiences within feminist zine
publics. Using NVivo, I coded interview transcripts following Miles and Huberman’s
(Miles & Huberman, 1994) two-level qualitative coding scheme: a general etic level
of coding including categories related to the three key analytics outlined above (practices, publics, and material cultures) and a speciic emic level of coding grounded
in participants’ own terminology for describing their experiences. To develop a
holistic understanding of participants’ media-making practices, I also analyzed
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Table 1 Participants
Interviewee
Zine titles
Interview format
Adelaide Barton (pen name) I Just Can’t Have his Conversation
Anymore; Lady Gardens; Menstrual Cup:
A Love Story; Non Monogamy 101, Stop
Telling Women To Smile; So You Found Me
Running; You Should Know About Zines
Annie Mok
No No No: A Guide to Girling Wrong +
Mija’s Mirrors: Two Stories; Shadow
Manifesto; Worst Behavior + Like a
Lighthouse: Two on Creativity and Trauma
Christine Stoddard
Quail Bell Magazine
Dre Grigoropol
Dee’s Dream, She Magazine, Lupa Cachula’s
Life
Candice Johnson
Permanent Wave Philly
Dee (pseudonym)
Permanent Wave Philly
Jenny (pseudonym)
Permanent Wave Philly
Katie P. Bennett
Sticking Around, Cakes on the Loose: Free
Cake for Every Creature’s First Tour,
Eating Love: In the Kitchen with Katie &
Mom; Kid Katie on the Microcassette
Kerri Radley
Deafula
Moose Lane (pen name)
Don’t Put Trash in my Toilet; Get the Fuck
Outside; Stuck; Truck Stops
Nicole Rodrigues
Bump-Ins; Cave Royalty; Incognito Jams;
Level Up; Nola Travelogues Book; Quake
Remains; Watch Over; Which Way?
Sky Kalfus
Analytical Girl Manifesto
E-mail
In-person
E-mail
E-mail
In-person
In-person
In-person
In-person
E-mail
E-mail
In-person
In-person
print copies of their zines and, when applicable, zinesters’ websites or online zine
shops.
Zines as digitally networked feminist practice
While zines vary widely in content, genre, aesthetic, size, length, form, and purpose,
my interviewees consistently pointed toward fundamental elements and norms signature to zine-making as whole: For these makers, zines are handcrated, self-published,
self-funded, physical ephemera, usually resembling a magazine or book, on any topic
that interests the author(s) and can be shared with few or many readers. Moose Lane
explained, “What separates zines from other self-publications is a commitment to
do-it-yourself ethics (or do-it-together ethics) and the prioritization of the spread of
ideas and art over making money” (personal communication, 29 March 2016). While
my interviewees’ zines are oten explicitly feminist in content, dealing with questions
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related to gender-based inequities, the zine-making process itself preigures feminist
ideals in ways that mainstream commercial media outlets simply cannot. Christine
Stoddard observed that
Zines are about as approachable as media-making gets. As long as you have a pen
and paper, you can make a zine. If you have access to a copier, you can make
multiple copies of it … You can be the writer, artist, and publisher. Because the
barrier to entry is low, making zines is very empowering. Anybody can make
their voice heard … Traditional media is full of barriers and, historically, those
barriers have been less amendable to female creators. hose barriers don’t exist
in the zine world. (personal communication, 26 March 2016)
Feminist zine-making, in other words, constitutes an alternative media practice,
whose production, circulation, and consumption processes eschew marketplace values, democratize access to media outlets, subvert the producer/consumer binary, and
foster counterpublic discourse and communities (Sandoval & Fuchs, 2010).
As Stoddard and other participants made clear, it is the materiality of zine-making
practices—the pen, the paper, and the photocopier—that imbues the humble
ephemera with such political afordances. Still, none of my interviewees described
turning to zine-making as an act of digital media refusal; rather, the Internet, along
with computer sotware, factors centrally into both the material and social practices
of zine production and consumption. Consequently, Moose Lane pointed to the need
to trouble the digital/print binary in the discourse surrounding zines:
I don’t think it’s an “us versus them,” “digital versus print” debate. Most zinesters
do both. Zines are just a diferent format, just like published books are a diferent
format from zines. As are blogs, Twitter, radio, podcasts, YouTube, public art
installations, punk rock bands, newspapers, comic books, etc. hey all allow
diferent kinds of expression, in diferent media, with diferent levels of exposure
and creator-control of content. And moreover, there are diferent types of
communities surrounding each. (personal communication, 29 March 2016)
In what follows, I cite my interviewees’ experiences and practices as evidence that
feminist zine-makers’ print and digital mode of production, circulation, and consumption work in tandem to produce a particular kind of networked counterpublic,
one whose material social practices forge protected but porous boundaries around
feminist spaces for free expression. his protected counterpublic fulills needs for feminists unmet in the broader media landscape and the boundary work invested into
its maintenance gestures toward the democratic strengths and shortcomings of both
digital and print media.
Production
As a testament to zines’ accessibility and lexibility, the tools and materials zinesters
use to practice their crat range in degree of professionalism, from paper, pens,
Sharpies, glue sticks, scissors, and stolen time on the oice’s Xerox machine to
cardstock, artist-grade inks and paints, silk screens, lithographs, letterpresses,
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Photoshop, and professional printers. he costs of producing a zine vary along with
this range of artistic practices. But while each of my interviewees makes diferent
upfront investments into their zines, taken collectively, their experiences shed light
on the strengths of zine-making as medium for feminist discourse.
Repeatedly, participants described zines as an outlet for open expression, free of
censorship, limitations, and interruptions. “Zines are a medium where it is easy to
express ideas without (much) fear of repercussion, or without bending to outside
inluence,” Moose Lane explained. “his makes it a good medium for feminists to
express personal experiences, stories, theories, etc.” (personal communication, 29
March 2016). With the zinester as author, editor, and producer, she subverts the
producer/consumer binary and is not beholden to ilter her work through the perspectives and expectations of anyone else. his is crucial for contemporary feminists,
given, as Fraser (Fraser, 1992) observed, the “informal impediments to participatory
parity that can persist even ater everyone is formally and legally licensed to participate” (p. 119) within public sphere discourse. Adelaide Barton’s gendered experiences
as a woman zinester speak to this: “here’s something about the expression of a zine
which doesn’t allow for interruptions. I feel that as a woman, I’ve been socialized to
tolerate interruptions, even when it results in me not being able to inish articulating
my point” (personal communication, 6 April 2016).
he materiality of zines enables this uninterrupted freedom of expression. Zines,
unlike digitally mediated expressions, are not easily traceable back to their authors,
granting zinesters the option to publish under true anonymity. As Dee, a member
of the grassroots feminist collective Permanent Wave Philly, explained, “With zines,
you have a little more control than the Internet. Google is a helpful tool, and also
a very hurtful tool. here are things that you can write about in zines, various hard
things, that you don’t want Google-able, that you don’t want associated with your
name” (personal communication, 24 May 2015). Zines, as ephemera, are temporary
and potentially anonymous material artifacts, providing zinesters an outlet for deeply
personal stories and the freedom to experiment with feminist identities and theories
without worrying about damage to their future reputations. Moreover, several of my
participants related to Moose Lane’s observation that “Digital media also tends to
reward short pieces or snippets, where zines can really be as long as you want” (Moose
Lane, personal communication, 29 March 2016). Free from digital surveillance, the
capitalist value of fast production and consumption, and the approval or resources of
a commercial host, zines ofer feminists an unrestricted and unregulated medium for
expression.
Zine-making, as an accessible DIY media practice that operates outside of both
marketplace logic and sociopolitical constraints, enables the invention and circulation of counterdiscourses that might otherwise ind no outlet within the commercial
media landscape. Almost all of my participants described zines as afording them
more authentic, intimate, or personal expressions than other media outlets. According
to Kerri Radley, for example, “Digital expression is much looser and less controlled,
more exhibitionist and a curated expression of the self. Zines are more intimate and
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truer to the self” (personal communication, 19 April 2016). he uniltered, slow, and
low-risk process of zine production lends itself to personal meditations one might
not otherwise share publicly. As Candice Johnson, a Permanent Wave Philly member,
explained, the materiality of zines also ofers a degree of personalization not readily accessible through digital platforms: “here’s more of a human imprint on a zine,
because you can see the way that they chose to type it and design it, whether it’s collage or there’s doodles and drawings and stuf. It feels personal, and its tangible, so
you can have it and refer back to it and keep it in a collection” (personal communication, 24 May 2015). he topics considered across my interviewees’ zines attest to
the medium’s intimate nature: personal experiences with street harassment, disability,
sexism in academia, menstruation, sexual health, gender identity, familial relationships, trauma, and more all ind an outlet in their handcrated booklets.
In addition to sharing stories from their personal lives, some participants also
found zines to be a productive space for social critique via representation. Conirming previous research, contemporary feminist zinesters continue to use the medium to
represent bodies and subjectivities excluded from dominant discourse or commercial
media. Moose Lane’s zine series, Get the Fuck Outside (GTFO), focuses on exploring
the great outdoors and represents a diversity of characters in the process: “he illustrations in GTFO are centered around ladyfolk, though the content is for anyone. I
do this deliberately because, socially, men tend to have easier access to the outdoors,
either due to social expectations growing up, or due to perceived dangers for women
of traveling alone in remote places” (personal communication, 29 March 2016). Generating visibility through alternative media representation is especially important to
Kerri Radley, whose zine, Deafula, shares her experiences navigating the world as a
deaf woman:
Deafula has garnered a wider reach than I ever expected or thought possible,
reaching into the thousands annually. Given how near and dear the topics I cover
in Deafula are to my heart, and how important it is to me to increase visibility for
deaf and disabled folks, my zine having reach is meaningful to me. (personal
communication, 19 April 2016)
While a commercial outlet, such as a corporately owned social media platform
or an advertiser-supporter glossy magazine, would undoubtedly provide feminist
zinesters with greater visibility, their DIY ethics prioritize what many of my interviewees referred to as “personal impact” over readership numbers. Christine Stoddard,
who runs a popular online magazine that generates ad revenue, also makes zines in
small runs, producing no more than 100 copies of a single title. “I’m not looking to
communicate en masse with a zine,” Stoddard said, “that’s what the Internet is for.
I’m looking to make that personal impact, to give someone a print artifact to cherish
and remember” (personal communication, 6 April 2016). Moose Lane, who also
publishes work on a Tumblr blog, expressed a similar sentiment:
I’m on Tumblr, and I post a lot of art there, as well as reblog puns and cat
pictures. A lot of what I post isn’t all that personal, and the stuf that is feels like
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shouting into the void. Sometimes, that’s what I want—self-expression without
examination or response. But I don’t use zines in the same way. (personal
communication, 29 March 2016)
Zines’ materiality also makes the texts inherently scarce and, as Adelaide Barton
explains in her zine, You Should Know About Zines [emphasis added], “not easy to
spam, so folks are more likely to actually read them and consider what they have to
say” (Adelaide Barton, personal communication, 6 April 2016). Other interviewees
also framed zines as objects of mediation that, in comparison to digital media, foster
more authentic relationships between makers and readers:
So much web content is meant to be consumed quickly. People usually are
clicking around too much to really focus on any single piece for too long. Zines
require a longer time commitment. hey engross you in a way that most web
content does not. hat alone can impact the reader very personally and make
your message resonate with that person for years to come. (Christine Stoddard,
personal communication, 26 March 2016)
Feminist zinesters do not describe their goals in marketplace terms, but instead,
in terms of inter- and intrapersonal connections. Feminist zines call a counterpublic into being that legitimizes the intimate politics of everyday life through discursive representations and fosters deep, rather than far-reaching but fast, engagement
through uninterrupted expression. Zines’ material nature combined with the DIY
ethics behind their production is crucial to these processes.
Circulation and consumption
But how do feminist zinesters connect readers with their content in order to foster
these counterpublic bonds? While zines’ materiality provide feminist makers with a
wide range of political afordances, the countercultural paper-based goods have an
intrinsically limited reach, making the accessible DIY practice ironically inaccessible
to readers not yet acquainted with the zine world. Several of my participants, though
passionate about zine-making, expressed some cynicism about the degree of countercultural capital that, since their inception, has been required to access zines. Stephen
Duncombe (Duncombe, 2008) documents the history of zinesters’ potentially exclusive countercultural circulation practices. During the 1980s and 1990s, makers mailed
their zines to Factsheet Five (F5), itself a handmade periodical regularly published
by future computer programmer Mike Gunderloy, for review. Never turning down a
request for a review, F5 grew to catalog thousands of zines and their creators’ mailing
addresses with each issue. In the decades prior to e-mail and social media, F5 became
a vital network hub for zinesters and readers. As Duncombe argues, however, most
F5 subscribers were already producing and consuming zines, and the periodical simply gave shape to what he calls a pre-existing, “self-ghettoized” (p. 176) unsustainable,
and even “elitist” (p. 174) underground network. his is especially problematic given
that many zinesters are not inspired to start making zines until they get their hands
on someone else’s self-published work (Piepmeier, 2008); repeatedly in interviews,
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feminist zinesters reported that it was a serendipitous irst encounter with zines in
an obeat bookstore, a public library, or a classroom that sparked their zine-making
careers.
Digital media have democratized access to zines and, as several interviewees speculated, may have much to do with zines’ apparent resurgence. Christine Stoddard
reported that “the Internet has made it so much easier to discover new titles and zine
festivals” (personal communication, 26 March 2016). In contrast to the underground
F5, mainstream social media platforms have become central to feminist zinesters’ circulation practices. While, true to their roots, interviewees reported selling zines at
alternative bookstores, 10 out of 12 interviewees also sell their zines online, through
their own personal websites or through shops on Etsy, a popular crat website that
attracts approximately 170 million visitors per month (SimilarWeb, 2016). Others
send their zines to distros, who sell and ship zinesters’ work, almost always through
an online store, to readers for a portion of the cover price. All interviewees have
blogs linked to their zine projects, usually hosted on Tumblr, which has garnered a
reputation as a platform for letist “social justice warriors” (Brandt & Kizer, 2015).
Importantly for the zine community as a whole, social media have also facilitated what
my interviewees described as the recent surge in zine festivals. While, like all aspects
of zine culture, the history of zine fests has not been well documented, interviewees
suggested that these exhibits and pop-up shops, oten hosted in community centers
and open to zinesters who pay small tabling fees, are a recent phenomenon. “I have
seen more zine fests pop up in the last half-decade and many more are continuing to
go strong,” Moose Lane observed, suggesting parallels between the rise of zine fests
and the development of Web 2.0 (personal communication, 29 March 2016).
For my interviewees, modern-day zine-making is a material social practice
channeled in large part through digital media, mirroring the structure of what danah
boyd (boyd, 2008) called networked publics, or “spaces and audiences that are bound
together through technological networks” (p. 125). Feminist zinesters, readers, and
newcomers to the zine world use digital media to facilitate interactions online and
face-to-face. While Factsheet Five, the once-primary resource for circulating zines,
“ghettoized” (to use [Duncombe, 2008] terminology) zine discourse, social media
platforms have contributed to what Rauch (Rauch, 2015) calls “a converged media
environment” (p. 126), blurring the boundary separating zinesters’ alternative discourse from the mainstream. Nonetheless, the boundary remains, and feminist zine
communities, while networked, are counterpublics, purposefully formed in juxtaposition to wider publics, whose formal and informal impediments marginalize the discourse of women, trans* and queer folks, and people of color. he boundary encompassing feminist zine counterpublics, while made permeable via digital networks,
is protected through many zinesters’ strict policies against scanning and publishing
their zines online. Kerri Radley, for example, never shares digital copies of her zines:
I’m a irm believer in my zines remaining in physical form and on paper only
and I do not allow any of my zines to be digitally archived … Even though I can
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never truly 100% control what happens to my zines or their content, keeping
them out of the digital sphere does allow me better control over what happens to
my writing—where it’s shared, who it’s shared with, who it’s attributed to, and
who makes money of of it. (personal communication, 19 April 2016)
In addition to this desire to maintain control over the dissemination of their work,
interviewees also reported that their zines lose value once published online: “Once
something is freely accessible online, the majority of folks who want to read it will not
pay for it. I feel that making my content available digitally to the masses will make
it immediately less valuable by 95%” (Adelaide Barton, personal communication, 6
April 2016). Feminist zines, as a material social practice that oten involves the sharing
of personal experiences and politics typically silenced in wider publics, are valuable
and, as such, require a certain degree of protection. To ensure this, most of my interviewees only make their zine content available to those who take the steps necessary
to acquire physical copies, through online shops or in-person festivals. Anyone interested in a feminist zinester’s work is likely to be granted access, as zines, following
DIY ethics, are oten made available at low prices, on a sliding scale, or for barter
or trade, but the reader must irst invest energy into obtaining a copy of her work.
Feminist zinesters merge digital and print media practices to cultivate a distributive
communication structure (Rentschler, 2015), forging network ties with new readers,
maintaining relationships with existing readers, and connecting with one another.
Digital networks, then, constitute a boundary space between zine-makers and readers, providing entry to the feminist zine counterpublic, but not immediate access to
feminist zines, themselves.
In contrast to feminist zinesters’ practices, existing research on alternative media
suggests that activists should aim to produce highly visible discourse that engages
directly with political opponents. Sandoval and Fuchs (Sandoval & Fuchs, 2010),
for example, argue that “the success of alternative media depends on their ability to
gain public visibility for their critical media content … to do more than to ‘preach
to the converted,’ they have to try to increase their public visibility and to attract as
many recipients as possible” (p. 148). Reaching wide audiences and preaching to the
unconverted, however, are not the primary purposes that zines fulill within feminists’
repertoire of media practices; like Christine Stoddard said, “that’s what the Internet
is for.” Rather, in conceptualizing feminist zines as networked counterpublics, it is
important to keep in mind Kearney’s (Kearney, 2006) reminder that networks not
only extend outward to broadcast media messages, but can also draw people inward,
together, for community-building purposes. his latter function of networks maps
on to Fraser’s (Fraser, 1992) argument that counterpublics, in addition to ofering
“training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics,” also
“function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment” (p. 124) for marginalized individuals alienated from one another within wider publics. Several of my interviewees
suggested that, given the politics behind the DIY ethics that inform zine production
and circulation, people who show an interest in reading zines are likely to share at
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least some of their makers’ political values: “he zine community, for the most part, is
such a welcoming and supportive space, that it makes sense that feminists have been
drawn to the medium,” Kerri Radley explained. “It’s a space that is generally safer,
one in which they have a voice and can be heard” (personal communication, 19 April
2016). he feminist zine counterpublic, in other words, is a space for engaging with
fellow converts, who share similar experiences and politics, whereas, for my participants, digital feminist counterpublics ofer spaces for planning and executing broader
outreach.
As boundary spaces, digital networks democratize access to zines, while also
throwing in sharp relief the democratic failures of the Internet for feminist political
engagement. Digital networks may be crucial to feminist zine-makers’ and readers’
circulation and consumption practices, but zinesters’ refusal to share content online
indicates that zines ofer particular political afordances unavailable online. his has
implications for the democratic and feminist politics of the Internet. In addition to
the previously mentioned strengths of zines as a medium for feminist expression,
the diiculty to “troll” or harass zinesters factored centrally into my participants’
turn to zine-making and refusal to publish zine content online. It is precisely zines’
intrinsically limited audience that makes the genre so attractive to feminists in an
age where reaching large audiences is easier than ever, but oten comes at the cost of
harassment, violent threats, and hate speech. In Adelaide Barton’s experience, “Zines
don’t really provide a platform for abusive comment sections. Anyone who wants to
harass a feminist zine-maker must put in more efort to do so, and do so in a way that
is not immediately attached to their zine” (personal communication, 6 April 2016).
Moreover, as Moose Lane observed, zine communities also take steps to create productive discursive spaces free of harassment: “In the Internet era, zines are also a place
much freer of harassment than online feminist spaces. Most zine fests have safer space
policies, and most of the rabid misogynists/transphobes/homophobes/racists/etc.
you meet online don’t read zines” (personal communication, 29 March 2016). If, as
Williams (Williams, 1977) and Couldry (Couldry, 2012) argue, media are practices
that emerge in response to users’ needs within a particular context, zine-making practices supplement feminists’ digital media repertoire with a networked counterpublic
free of the harassment and vitriol that has characterized web 2.0 platforms. Zines’
resurgence comes at a time when feminists are seeking alternatives to digital media
platforms, where violent threats and hate speech continue to suppress marginalized
voices.
Conclusion
Christine Stoddard, a feminist media maker whose practices bridge the presumed gap
between digital and print, relected on her decade as both a highly successful blogger
and zinester in an interview:
I still remember zines I read when I was 14. here’s not much web content I
remember from that age. I love that people will pick up a Quail Bell zine that’s
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three or four years old and send me an e-mail or even write me a letter about
how much it made them think or feel. Touching people’s minds and hearts is
how you begin to build communities. (personal communication, 26 March
2016)
Drawing on the experiences of 12 U.S.-based feminist zinesters, I have explored
the political afordances of zines as a material social practice whose personal
touches foster deep and authentic connections between makers and readers. Digital media, I argue, enable these points of contact, as zinesters and their readers
connect through social media, online shops, and digitally organized and promoted
zine fests. Given this, zines and digital media should not be seen as materially
polarized outlets on opposite sides of the digital/print binary, but as practices with
distinct yet symbiotic advantages working in tandem within a broader repertoire
of feminist media tactics. Feminist zines, as practices that bridge print and digital
media outlets for marginalized voices, constitute a networked counterpublic. he
Internet serves as a porous boundary space around this counterpublic, simultaneously providing access to the zine world while also protecting feminist discourse,
since many zinesters refuse to publish zine content online. he boundary work
invested into the maintenance of this networked but protected counterpublic
sheds light on the limitations of the Internet as a space for feminist discourse
and democratic participation. Among the many beneits that stem from zines’
materiality, interviewees reported that freedom from harassment at the hands of
online “trolls” is the most important contribution zines make to feminist media
praxis.
While the words of my participants no doubt underscore the continued signiicance of zines, they also ofer an opportunity for critical relection on marginalized
users’ experiences online and the political constraints and challenges facing digitally networked feminism. Analyzing online feminism and feminist zines as two
practices that coexist within the repertoire of contemporary feminist media tactics sheds light on the political afordances of each medium, which productively
compliment one another. Although social media may constitute the most visible
activist media tactics, future research should draw on ethnographic methods and
take user-centric approaches to trace the full breadth and complexity of feminists’
media practices. Research that destabilizes web centrism within social movement
scholarship leads the way toward more nuanced theorizing at the intersection of
media and activism.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to the twelve feminist zinesters who generously shared their passion, work, and experiences with me. I would also like to thank Victor Pickard, Guobin
Yang, and Jessa Lingel as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on
early drats of this article.
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