Zines: for activists and academics

Why Zines?

Zines are a quintessential DIY medium of information-sharing, popular in punk scenes and grassroots activist communities. At the crossroads of third wave feminism and punk subculture, zines were a particularly powerful tool for bands and collectives like Riot Grrrls, as they helped to challenge dominant assumptions while remaining relatively easy to create and accessible for readers. Zines are a reflexive form of pedagogy, critiquing not only power hierarchies in the dominant society, but also look inward at their communities. 

The activity of zine-making has served as an opportunity for community-building; a way to forge new alliances and spaces of collective resistance across different ethnic, religious or other identity-based boundaries (Goulding, 2015, p. 183). In seizing back the right to publish which has been co-opted by capitalism (Guerra, 2018, p. 250), zine-makers engage with a form of grassroots activism that celebrates feminism and social justice (Weida, 2013, p. 80). Female-authored and produced zines empower and amplify the voices of women, while also tangibly attesting to their role as active cultural producers (Dunn, 2016, pp. 170, 196). 

Zines are a great example of how politically-conscious women have performed creative resistance through DIY cultural production, but this is only one form among many.