Working Out What Kind of Scholar I Hoped to Be

A zine is an informal publication, produced and circulated in small numbers. Some zines are personal, created in very limited ways, while others are elegantly crafted. While photocopier technology made this form of personalized, low-cost publication possible, zines are still being produced as paper documents in an age of new technologies.

Zines got started in the 1970s, but the world of zines was initially dominated by men. My work has focused for several years on zines created and distributed by girls and women, with a primary emphasis on the girl zines of the 1990s.

It is very easy for us to dismiss zines—and scholars often have. Scholars are stuck on examining cultural artifacts that seem “important,” and so they miss the everyday gestures, the forms of expression and resistance adopted by ordinary people in everyday life. People were reading and making zines because they wanted to, not because it was required—they had things to say that they could not say elsewhere.

No one would doubt the cultural significance of the topics explored in zines. Zines let us see the deeply personalized explorations of issues like violence against women, the nature of motherhood, what it means to be feminine, and how to create meaningful communities. Zines let us see how girls and women grappled with those issues in the 1990s, but, even now, people continue to create zines. Rather than serving as relics of the pre-internet past, zines persist, and their creators maintain that a zine’s significance cannot be separated from its existence in the physical world, where the zine can be felt and smelled, where a material connection exists between reader and creator.

I saw my first zine in the late 1980s, and I made zines of my own before I knew what they were called. However, I turned to zines as a scholarly interest only after I finished graduate school, when I realized that I could choose to study whatever interested me most. My first book, imperfect though I find it today, was written to impress others. My work on zines, leading to the publication of this American Periodicalsarticle and, later, my book Girl Zines, was in some respects a working out of what kind of scholar I hoped to be and of the personal and political work I wanted to explore and to celebrate.