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). In seizing back the right to publish which has been co-opted by capitalism (Guerra 2018), zine-makers engage with a form of grassroots activism that celebrates feminism and social justice (Weida 2013). Zines authored and produced by women empower and amplify their voices, while also tangibly attesting to their role as active cultural producers (Dunn 2016). This extends to all demographics who find themselves at the fringes or who are systematically excluded and censored: gender non-conforming, trans, and queer folks, people of colour, people with disabilities, people with lived experience of addiction and homelessness, etc. 

Zines are a great example illustrating how people - often excluded from other forms of conventional political participation - have performed creative resistance through DIY cultural production, but this is only one form among many.