The Personal, Political and Local: A Feminist Analysis of Grrrl Zines

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These are a few of the unique creations from my friend Ryder's zine archive in Vermont.

I have been completely engrossed and inspired by Alison Piepmeier’s new research: Girl Zines: Making media, Doing feminism. Her book is a vibrant mixture of girl power, art history and intelligent feminist analysis of do-it-yourself political action. Professor Piepmeier examines various ways in which women in the United States have expressed themselves and chronicled their experiences, tracing a historic lineage from the handmade personal scrapbook of suffragist Ida Harper, to Nomy Lamm’s fat-positive xeroxed zine, i’m so fucking beautiful.

Local Resistance that Fits in Your Hand

In her engaging book Piepmeier explains that part of the beauty of hand made zines is that they are:

“…intensely and intentionally local, individualized and eccentric…Zines configure resistance at the microlevel; rather than a grand revolution, they offer resistance in small, particular and utterly grassroots manifestations.”

And therein lies their power and appeal. Each paper booklet functions both as a tiny window of insight into someone else’s existence, and as an individual political act that empowers the creator to seize the means of production with her own hands.

Several publications that started out as small local zines, like Bitch and Bust, eventually evolved into widely distributed glossy magazines with huge followings. Zines can also provide individuals with a format for social activism. Important issues that don’t get much coverage in the mainstream media, like rape, body image, racism, queer culture and globalization, are the fodder for some of the most interesting and engaging local publications. Being able to articulate one’s own reality, even on a small scale, can help the transformation from being a passive object, to an active participant engaged in the world.

Greenzine creator Cristy Road used it to help deal with the trauma of being raped.

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Piepmeier, who is also the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, contextualizes the political act of creating zines:

“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. 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.”

Make Your Own Zines

After I started reading Girl Zines, I discovered a huge basket of old zines that my friend Ryder Cooley had collected from the last few decades. I spent all day looking through scores of beautiful creations, many from people I knew, and even some of my own. The smell of the xeroxed text,  the feel of the hand-sewn tattered pages and cut and pasted images transported me back to a different place and time.

I was surprised by how much power the individual physical objects still had over me. I fondly remember perusing the zine racks at Portland’s Reading Frenzy and San Francisco’s Epicenter; friends eagerly traded their most recent personal copied creations with one another, and we all shared hope that real political change was actually possible. Many of the ideas and complex issues raised in Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism continue to resonate with me, and have totally inspired me to start making my own books and zines again.

This is more of Ryder's eclectic zine collection from the nineties.