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Reviewed by:
  • Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism by Alison Piepmeier, and: Making Feminist Media: Third-Wave Magazines on the Cusp of the Digital Age by Elizabeth Groeneveld
  • Jenna Danchuk (bio)
Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism. By Alison Piepmeier. New York: New York University Press, 2009. 272 pp. $89.00 (cloth), $25.00 (paper).
Making Feminist Media: Third-Wave Magazines on the Cusp of the Digital Age. By Elizabeth Groeneveld. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016. 250 pp. $36.99 (paper).

Alison Piepmeier’s Girl Zines (2009) is the first academic book to address zines—small-scale distributed, do-it-yourself (DIY), participatory media publications—produced by women and girls. Girl Zines addresses a range of periodicals, many emerging out of Riot Grrrl and punk communities, including Jigsaw, Action Girl Newsletter, Evolution of a Race Riot, Bitch, and Bust, among others. Girl zines are sites where women and girls negotiate their identities and experiences through representations, and create both imagined and embodied communities rooted primarily in a gift culture of exchange and care. Piepmeier positions girl zines as a feminist participatory media practice with historical origins in earlier waves of feminist cultural activism and women’s intimate cultural practices, yet she notes the specific material and cultural contexts of zines as a DIY media technology of the 1990s and early 2000s. Girl Zines argues that the self-aware style and ideas found in the pages of zines by women and girls redefine gendered concepts such as femininity and motherhood; represent the complexities of gender, race, class, and sexual identity; and enable hopeful feminist pedagogies of process, active criticism, and imagination. The content and rhetoric of girl zines reflect their origins in girl culture of the late 1980s and 1990s, and—through their use of “discourses, media representations, ideologies, stereotypes, and even physical detritus”—they negotiate complex and contradictory late capitalist subjectivities (2). It is through these tensions that they collectively craft “a vernacular third wave feminist theory” (197).

In many ways, Groeneveld’s Making Feminist Media (2016) picks up where Piepmeier’s important study leaves off by addressing the relationship between public feminist discourses and the marketplace. Making Feminist Media is the first academic project to take an extensive look at third-wave magazines, considering the qualities of feminist publics and magazine readership as well as developments over time (between issues and throughout staff and proprietorship changes), and examining at the complex relationship between pleasure and consumption, feminist activisms, and third-wave cultures. She shares extensive primary source research on what she terms third-wave magazines: commercially involved publications first produced in the early to mid-1990s that began as feminist zines, including HUES, ROCKRGRL, Shameless, Venus Zine, as well as Bust and Bitch (61). As Groeneveld notes, these publications—especially the long-running Bust and Bitch—also had [End Page 182] an affective impact on third-wave feminists and have come to define the intellectual culture of a generation of feminists. Groeneveld’s study also addresses the monumentally influential teen magazine Sassy as well as Tavi Gevinson’s Rookie, “an online post-wave magazine” that grew out of the teenage blogger’s personal website, the Style Rookie (47). Groeneveld also considers representational and readership issues, and the ways “in which for- and not-for-profit status” and changing technological landscapes affect the kinds of media being produced (17).

The second half of Making Feminist Media looks at closely debated feminist political issues within the magazines, including questions of representation and the politics of alliance, the “reclaiming” of domestic and feminine practices such as crafting and fashion, and tensions around sexual politics and idealized forms of feminism. Overall, the book presents an impressive archive of feminist material culture while at the same time offering critical analyses of issues that provide detail and context for further understanding the politics of third-wave publishing practices.

Girl Zines and Making Feminist Media both make significant contributions to historicizing feminist periodicals, adding to the literature of material culture studies, media and communications history, and periodical studies. Read together, they make an impressive case for cultural production as a site of feminist theory creation within the late capitalist marketplace, work complex in its...

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