Another form of crying: Girl zines as life writing

Prose Studies

Volumn 26, Issue 1-2, 2003, Pages 240-264

  Sinor, Jennifer ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149085610     PISSN: 17439426     EISSN: 01440357     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/0144035032000235909     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. Stephen Duncombe writes about " selling out" the underground culture of zines to the world of academia and its current fascination with cultural studies. He gives four justifications for his own actions. First, the "alternative culture has already been discovered." In fact, he points out, the very forces zinesters are working against, the media in particular, now regularly employ "alternative culture" to sell their products to the cloying masses. Second, he knows this world, has been a part of it, and therefore can do the best job representing these writers. Third, he is a "conscientious observer and careful listener," an observation borne out by the care with which he writes about zinesters. And finally, what zinesters have to say, he feels, is too important to "stay sequestered within the walls of a subculture ghetto." Stephen Duncombe, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (London: Verso Books, 1997), 16
2. Cynthia Huff, "Reading as Re-Vision: Approaches to Reading Manuscript Diaries," Biography 23/2 (2000), 506
3. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narrative (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 3
4. Though, as Julie Chu points out, the history of self-publishing could be traced back to the early sixteenth century when Martin Luther posted his treatise on the door to the church. Julie Chu, "Navigating the Media Environment: How Youth Claim a Place Through Zines," Social Justice 24 (1997), 73
5. Duncombe, Notes from Underground, 6
6. Chu, "Navigating the Media Environment," 80
7. Karen Green and Tristan Taormino (eds), A Girl's Guide to Taking Over the World (New York: St. Martin's, 1997), xi
8. Ednie Kaeh Garrison, "US Feminism - Grrrl Style! Youth (Sub)cultures and the Technologies of the Third Wave," Feminist Studies 26 (2000), 142. As will be the case for nearly everything I say about zines, the opposite is also true. Zinesters resist all categories, especially those that have been historically damaging to women. Their desire to destabilize and confuse makes it risky to say anything about zines and zinesters globally. To the point, Alex Wrekk in Brainscan #18 writes that the punk movement saved her and that she "always felt an equal there." She goes on to say that she never felt "an outcast because [she] was a girl." For her, the punk scene (as opposed to Riot Grrrl) was only liberating
9. Garrison, "US Feminism," 153
10. Amanda Cutting, personal interview, 5 April 2003
11. Kate Eichhorn, "Sites Unseen: Ethnographic Research in a Textual Community," Qualitative Studies in Education 14 (2001), 566
12. Stephen Duncombe, "Let's All Be Alienated Together: Zines and the Making of Underground Community," in Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America, ed. Joe Austin and Michael Nevin Willard (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 427-51 (430)
13. Eichhorn, "Sites Unseen," 572
14. Duncombe, "Let's All Be Alienated," 441
15. Jessica Rosenberg and Gitana Garofalo, "Riot Grrrl: Revolution from Within," Signs: Journal of Women's Culture and Society 23 (1998), 823
16. Amanda Cutting, personal interview, 18 June 2003
17. Felicity A. Nussbaum, "Towards Conceptualizing Diary," in Studies in Autobiography, ed. James Olney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 128-40 (134)
18. Chu, "Navigating the Media Environment," 81
19. Duncombe, "Let's All Be Alienated," 433
20. Brandi Leigh-Ann Bell, "Women-produced Zines: Moving into the Mainstream," Canadian Woman Studies 20-21 (2001), 56
21. Derek Chezzi, "The Counterculture Zine," Maclean's 113 (20 Nov. 2000), 139
22. Cutting, personal interview, 5 April 2003
23. Rosenberg and Garofalo, "Riot Grrrl," 823