Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism. Alison Piepmeier. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009. 272 pp.
Although the study of feminist zine culture that blossomed in the 1990s might strike the casual reader as a snapshot of an underground phenomenon in a brief historical moment, Alison Piepmeier makes the point in Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism that so-called grrrl zines are, in fact, a bedrock of third-wave feminism. In this well-researched book about the preferred media of the riot grrrl culture, she makes a compelling case for us to view the publications produced by young women in this time period as an important marker in the long history of the feminist movement.
Piepmeier, an assistant professor and director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the College of Charleston, constructs a history of grrrl zines and weaves a theoretical understanding of them through a multi-method, interdisciplinary approach that borrows from “participatory media to print culture studies to art theory” and uses oral history, critical content analysis of both zines and comments of the women who produced them.
In the process, she leads readers on a thoroughly interesting journey. Even as her book situates her subject matter very carefully within the late 1980s and 1990s, Piepmeier is careful to give credence to the past, evoking suffragists from the late nineteenth century to Betty Freidan to pivotal figures in the radical feminist movement of the 1970s. She contends that their ideological connections might not have been overt in the zines themselves (the defaced female body icon that ran on the cover of Sisters Stand, a women’s lib publication from 1971, subtly resembled the Riot Grrrl NYC cover in the 1990s), but many grrrl zine producers demonstrated a sense of feminist history in their republishing various seminal pieces—including Judy Syfer’s “Why I Want a Wife” and Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto from the second-wave feminist movement.
Despite that attention to history, Peipmeier differentiates grrrl zines and their producers in a way that makes clear how their cultural and historical circumstances make their case unique among other feminist media. Many women were already involved in a male-dominated punk/DIY culture, and yet, they realized that even within an enlightened countercultural movement they were marginalized or ignored for their cultural contributions. For example, when Sarah Dyer began distributing a zine she titled “ALL MINE!” (signifying it contained her vision, preferences, and work), she found readers focusing on the male friends she asked to provide comics and interviews for the zine.
Those who produced the zines used their innate media savvy and critical media literacy skills to create complex stories and imagery about what it meant to be a woman in the 1990s. Often borrowing from the popular culture of the time and from the nostalgic culture of their girlhoods, the women producing zines delivered a pastiche of discursive resistances—from a paperdoll that readers could dress comfortably in a sports bra, to a riff on toy Transformers as metaphors for fragmented cultural identity. In chapter 4 (titled “We Are Not All One: Instersectional Identities in Grrrl Zines”), Piepmeier notes that at a time when mainstream media made claims to better represent diversity within society, the zine producers viewed this representation as “both apoliticized and flattened.” She writes, “It is the newest guise of a backlash culture, the image of success—empowerment as media visibility—masking widespread failures.“
Conversely, the zines provided authors with “space for them to spin out multiple possibilities rather than pin down any sort of essential or ‘true’ identity.” In one example, producer Lauren Jade Martin allows her identity to be ambiguous (“Martin resists the notion of being ‘just Lauren’” but also specifically “Chinese and Jewish,” Piepmeier notes). This idea of intersectional identity is articulated throughout grrrl zines, and, in effect, third-wave feminism. Piepmeier notes that this ambiguity also allows readers to see a more complex articulation of what it meant to be a young woman in the 1990s in a way that resonated with zine readers more than mainstream magazines’ representations of femininity that were largely hetero-normative, simplistic, and grounded in consumerism.
In the introduction, Piepmeier addresses the proliferation of interactive media shortly after the grrrl zine book and articulates how blogs are quite different from the zines she studied, which is why Web-based zines are not part of the discussion. Digital media strikes the zine creators as “atemporal and ephemeral in a way that zines are not,” and the materiality of the zines themselves make them an important artifact for the audiences and communities that grew around them. I found this explanation lacking and also somewhat dismissive of what younger feminists are doing online now. Moreover, many of the women who created the grrl zine culture are now using blogs, social media tools, and a growingly visual Web to further their goals, and a more nuanced explanation would have been helpful.
This is a small critique, though. Girl Zines functions as an eloquent media history that truly embodies the spirit of the 1990s and strongly situates third-wave feminism within that history. The book is a great addition to the past literature on third-wave feminism and riot grrrl culture, and it will undoubtedly be a lasting text within feminist media studies. It should also be considered as a strong historical text within all media studies, too.
SHAYLA THIEL-STERN
University of Minnesota