Reassess Your Weapons : the making of feminist memory in young women's zines
2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 22; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09612025.2012.751773
ISSN1747-583X
Autores Tópico(s)Gender, Security, and Conflict
ResumoAbstract This article argues that young women's zines—non-commercial, small-scale magazines published with few resources—are sites of feminist memory work in which the personal and political are fused. Building on previous scholarship in 'cultural memory', 'feminist cultural memory' and 'memory work', this article offers a revised concept of 'feminist memory work' to refer to a set of intentional and unintentional narrative and material practices upholding representations of feminist pasts, presents and futures in grass-roots feminist media. Taking the UK zine Reassess Your Weapons (2002–9) as a case study, this article suggests four interrelated modes of feminist memory work at play in grass-roots media production, which I term citational practices, memorialisation, autobiographical acts and movement traces. Notes Melanie Maddison (2008) RAYW 9 (Leeds: Self-Published). Sheila Rowbotham (1973) Hidden from History: 300 Years of women's oppression and the fight against it (London: Pluto Press); Krista Cowman (2009) 'There is so much, and it will all be history': feminist activists as historians, the case of British suffrage historiography, in Angelika Epple & Angelika Schaser (Eds) Gendering Historiography: beyond national canons (Frankfurt am Main: Campus), pp. 141–162; Mary Lee Sargent (2007) Feminist Mirroring and Multi-tasking: women activists as producers, publicists, historians and copy cats. Paper presented at Purdue University, 'Pen and Protest: Intellect and Action: A Symposium in Honor of Berenice A. Carroll', Purdue University, November 16–17. http://www.maryleesargent.org/papers/Feminist_Mirroring_and_Multi_tasking.html Sue Morgan (Ed.) (2006) The Feminist History Reader (London and New York: Routledge). Rachel Blau DuPlessis & Ann Snitow (Eds) (1998) The Feminist Memoir Project: voices from women's liberation (New York: Three Rivers Press); Ann Cvetkovich (2003) An Archive of Feelings: trauma, sexuality and lesbian public cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press); Brigitte Geiger & Margit Hauser (2010) Archiving Feminist Grassroots Media, Interface: a journal for and about social movements, 2(2), pp. 103–125. Zines are non-professional, non-commercial, amateur publications made by individuals or groups on a shoestring budget. These publications emerged historically from early twentieth-century fan-based subcultures yet can be placed within broader trajectories of political and participatory media. Feminist zines, for example, have historical antecedents in pamphlets and journals from the women's liberation movement and suffrage cut and paste scrapbooks. See Stephen Duncombe (1997) Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (London: Verso); Teal Triggs (2010) Fanzines (London: Thames & Hudson); Alison Piepmeier (2009) Girl Zines: making media, doing feminism (New York: New York University Press); Dawn Bates & Maureen McHugh (2005) Zines: voices of third wave feminists, in Jo Reger (Ed.) Different Wavelengths: studies of the contemporary women's movement (New York: Routledge), pp. 179–194. Maria Grever (1997) The Pantheon of Feminist Culture: women's movements and the organization of memory, Gender & History, 9(2), p. 364. Email correspondence with Melanie Maddison, 20 August 2011. Melanie Maddison (2006) RAYW 6. Astrid Erll (2010) Cultural Memory Studies: an introduction, in Astrid Erll & Ansgar Nünning (Eds) A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter), p. 2. Grever, 'The Pantheon of Feminist Culture', p. 370. Margaret Henderson (2006) Marking Feminist Time: remembering the longest revolution in Australia (Berlin: Peter Lang), p. 18. Frigga Haug (1992) Beyond Female Masochism: memory-work and politics (London and New York: Verso), p. 207. For an overview see Jenny Onyx & Jennie Small (2001) Memory-Work: the method, Qualitative Inquiry, 7(6), pp. 773–786. Memory-work has also been used by feminists looking at constructions of 'self' and 'community' in racialised, gendered and classed ways, as celebrated in Feminist Review's 100th issue (2012), produced in response to Avtar Brah's influential article, The Scent of Memory: strangers, our own and others, Feminist Review, 61, 1999, pp. 4–26. Haug, Beyond Female Masochism, pp. 20, 21. Annette Kuhn (1995) Family Secrets: acts of memory and imagination (London and New York: Verso), p. 3. Kuhn, Family Secrets, p. 4. Red Chidgey (2006) The Resisting Subject: per-zines as life story data, University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History, 10. http://www.sussex.ac.uk/history/research/usjch/pastissues Zine makers' memory work can be an intentional strategy, with the author/artist specifically drawing on the language of 'cultural memory', 'legacy' and 'learning the lessons of the past' and/or reflecting critically on past and present identity formations and experience. At other times, however, this memory work may happen in more subtle ways, with the author/artist drawing on past events or figures in passing to illuminate arguments or invoke certain feelings or histories. Such 'banal commemorations' can demonstrate how cultural memories infuse everyday life. See Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi (2011) 'Round Up the Unusual Suspects': banal commemoration and the role of the media, in Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers & Eyal Zandberg (Eds) On Media Memory: collective memory in a new media age (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 48–61. Clare Hemmings (2011) Why Stories Matter: the political grammar of feminist theory (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press). Ibid., pp. 16–20. Johanna Fateman (2010) Her Jazz, Bookforum. http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/017_03/6325 Nadine Monem (Ed.) (2007) Riot Grrrl: revolution girl style now! (London: Blackdog Publishing); Sara Marcus (2010) Girls to the Front: the true story of the riot grrrl revolution (New York: Harper Perennial). The exhibition The Quiet Rrriot: Megan Kelso, Stella Marrs & Nikki McClure makes this connection explicit. 7 September 2011, Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery, Seattle, USA. Anonymous (2008) Manifesta/LIME calendar, RAYW 9, p. 29. Mary Celeste Kearney (2006) Girls Make Media (New York: Routledge), p. 175. Julia Downes (2007) RAYW 7. Sandra (2002) Dead Women You Should Know About, AYW. Melanie Maddison (2005) RAYW 2. 'The Domestic Violence Memorial' (http://dvmemorial.wordpress.com) is a UK blog honouring women and children killed by their partners and ex-partners (reports cite around 2–3 women a week), whose stories are rarely reported in the media. Melanie Maddison (2008) What You Know is the Time of the Day, and That's All—Really?, RAYW 8, pp. 47–48. Piepmeier, Girl Zines, p. 2. Julia Downes (2007) Reflections and (Re) evaluations of Collectivity, Community, and Communication, RAYW 7, p. 72. Elke Zobl cited in Amy Spencer (2005) DIY: the rise of lo-fi culture (London and New York: Marion Boyars), pp. 37–38. Mimi Marinucci (2006) Zines, in Leslie Heywood (Ed.) The Women's Movement Today: an encyclopedia of third wave feminism, vol. 1 (Westport: Greenwood), p. 374. The concept of 'third-wave feminism'—generally used to discuss a generational cohort in the West who came of age after the women's liberation movement and who respond to the challenges and opportunities of a media-saturated, increasingly globalised world of late capitalism—is a highly contested one, especially when such a categorisation focuses on the 'new' rather than aspects of continuity between generations of feminists. For an examination of British third-wave feminist activism see Jonathan Dean (2010) Rethinking Contemporary Feminist Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 127–162; Catherine Redfern & Kristin Aune (2010) Reclaiming the F Word: the new feminist movement (London and New York: Zed Books). See Anna Poletti (2003) Life Writing in Zines: memory, public spaces and intimacy, New Media Poetics, 3, pp. 1–7. Chidgey, 'The Resisting Subject'. Chris Dodge (1995) Pushing the Boundaries: zines and libraries, Wilson Library Bulletin, 69(9), p. 27. Melanie Maddison (2006) RAYW 4. See Anne Elizabeth Moore (2006) Unofficial Histories: zine and ephemeral print archivists, Punk Planet 75. http://zinewiki.com/Unofficial_Histories:_ Zine_and_Ephemeral_Print_Archivists; Anna Leventhal (2006) The Politics of Small Strategies and Considerations in Zine Preservation, DOCAM. http://www.docam.ca/en/seminars/seminar-2006/152-qthe-politics-of-small-strategies-and-considerations-in-zine-preservationq-anna-leventhal.html; Melissa L. Jones (2010) DIY Digitization: creating a small-scale digital zine exhibit, in Kwong Bor Ng & Jason Kucsma (Eds) Digitization in the Real Word: lessons learned from small and medium-sized digitization projects (New York: Metropolitan New York Library), pp. 1–22. Additional informationNotes on contributorsRed Chidgey Red Chidgey is a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Media and Culture Research, London South Bank University, UK, researching feminist cultural memory. Her work has appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Feminist Media Studies, Feminist Review, and n.paradoxa, and she has been involved in digital archiving projects such as Fragen: Sharing Core European Feminist Texts Online (www.fragen.nu) and Grassroots Feminism: Transnational Archives, Resources and Communities (www.grassrootsfeminism.net). She blogs about her research interests at http://feministmemory.wordpress.com.
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