Girl Zines

October 15, 2009
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.

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