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. [Read more...]