Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Persephone Is Pissed! Grrrl Zine Reading, Making, and Distributing across the Globe

2004; Springer International Publishing; Volume: 30; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

0311-4198

Elke Zobl,

Media Influence and Politics

A growing number of young women and queer and transgender youth from around the world are finding an empowering outlet for artistic expression and social and political criticism in the medium of zines. In the United States, Great Britain and, to a lesser degree, Australia, both academic analyses and popular readers of grrrl zines have played an important role in raising awareness about the subject. Little attention, however, has been paid to international zines and the communication network that has evolved around them. In this paper I argue for an international approach to zine and girls' studies. My main point is that grrrl zines are read, published and exchanged in many countries around the world. They are part of an international communication network because zinesters from various countries interact with each other on-line and face-to-face, and exchange and distribute zines across national borders. Drawing from an extensive review of literature on grrrl zines, and on observations and information gathered from my online archive Grrrl Zine Network (1) (a comprehensive listing of worldwide, multi-lingual, feminist-oriented zines, distros--distribution providers, and projects, as well as interviews with zine editors), this study focuses on the producers and the processes of international grrrl zine making and distributing, and elaborates three main questions: What does this international grrrl zine network look like? What does feminist zine reading, making and distributing mean to young women and queer and transgender youth? And what is the personal and political potential of international grrrl zines? Grrrl zines Mainstream media fail to provide a venue for many people--women foremost among them, particularly women of colour, working-class women and queer youth, who find themselves excluded or grossly misrepresented. In response, some have taken the tools of cultural production into their hands and created their own symbols, cultural codes, and images of (self-) representation. In zines--'noncommercial, nonprofessional, small-circulation magazines which their creators produce, publish, and distribute by themselves' (2)--a growing number of young women and queer and transgender youth from around the world are finding an empowering outlet for expressing experiences, thoughts, anger, and pain that result from growing up and living in patriarchal, homophobic, and racist societies. As such, zines reflect the unfiltered and resistant personal and political voices of youth. Grrrl zines, zines made by and for female, queer and transgender youth with feminist viewpoints, offer not only a forum where women's and queer voices can be expressed and heard but also a zone of freedom from societal pressures and symbolic control. When in 1991 the riot grrrl movement emerged out of the alternative and punk music scene in the United States, (3) thousands of young women began to produce zines with explicitly feminist themes. Nowadays, some 'grrrls' who grew out of the riot grrrl movement have chosen to reclaim and call themselves 'ladies.' They produce 'lady' zines and organize 'Ladyfests.' (4) Instead of using the 'politically correct' word 'woman,' 'lady' (like 'gift') becomes removed from its old-fashioned, traditional connotation, and takes on ambiguous meaning. In recent years, an increasing number of zines have appeared expressing the unique personal experiences of queer and transgendered people and voicing criticism of the women's movement for heretofore excluding their perspectives. At around the same time, the feminist zine network expanded enormously into the realm of e-zines which became known as 'gURL's.' Topically, grrrl zines cover just about anything that concerns women in their daily lives. Some may commit themselves politically; others may primarily tell personal stories, following the slogan of the women's movement in the 1970s: 'The personal is political.' They can vary widely in their design, from low-budget photocopied collages to slick magazines, and in their content, from sharing intimate personal experiences to political activism. …