Romanticizing Ghettos, and Other Bored Elitisms

Suburban kids old enough to remember the mildly progressive book and record stores of the 1980s and 1990s will recall the mostly black-and-white zines lined up on racks or tables in the back. Usually produced locally, these independent magazines covered a wide range of cultural topics, especially music but also art, culture, and politics. It was not uncommon to even find a white supremacist zine tucked among the more progressive ones.

Stephen Duncombe's book Notes from the Underground, which was first published in 1997 and again in 2008, reappeared recently in its third edition, with a new afterword titled "Do Zines Still Matter" exploring the current significance of zines as online culture continues to dominate indie media. The book offers both a thorough exploration of this indie-publishing wing of alternative culture and a celebration of its attitudes. Zine culture was, and is, diverse, but the book covers only some facets of it. Duncombe, a professor at New York University who once was a member of a punk rock band, is interested in "alternative" culture, which used to offer an oasis to mostly white youth bored by corporate-run media and terrorized by the idea of having to make money.

While independent publishing has always been around, it was usually available only to the affluent, like Ralph Waldo Emmerson and Virginia Woolf. A drop in printing costs a few decades ago allowed any enterprising artist or writer to publish a zine for just a few hundred dollars. Zines, like silent films, popped up for a time, and many have now been replaced by digital comics, blogs, online videos, and podcasts.

As in any other underground enterprise, the zine world's most commodifiable ideas have invariably been picked up by corporate media. The book concerns itself with the major discomfort in selling out. For Duncombe, monetization means impurity, and impurity means horror. The book offers deep insights into a white-male-dominated wing of progressive politics that distinguishes itself by a seething rejection of the corporate.

As a cisgender woman, I know that sexual assault, demeaning comments, and the male gaze are just as common in corporate jobs as they are at punk clubs. I also know that a well-paying job with benefits can be a lifeline to financial stability and safety—not the death of one's soul. Some zine makers would have never dared dream of being able to make a living off their art, because it was never possible.

But Duncombe, who embraces anticorporate sentiments, fails to notice that both the corporate world and the self-described ghetto of alternative zines have been driven mostly by angry, white, and heterosexual gatekeepers. Yes, feminist and queer zines were sometimes allowed to enter, but only if they rejected all things corporate.

In the afterword, Duncombe admits to being deeply uncomfortable with the internet's enabling of diverse voices, which have polluted the zine world he loves: "There is no cultural price of admission into the digital realm, there are no arcane rituals to master or even to follow (or even debate). The result is a multiplicity of voices and values. There is nothing wrong with this; indeed, a lot of it is good. But this diversity does not constitute a community and, as such, there are no coherent community values" (219).

The truth is that zines have always been produced by diverse voices. Transgender people of color produced zines. Immigrant kids produced zines. Drag queens produced zines. Underground hip-hop artists produced zines—even when that now-dominant genre was dismissed by gatekeepers as a wing of disco that stole beats from others. People produced zines celebrating fashion rather than rejecting it as stupid and corporate. Fans of the New Kids on the Block and the Backstreet Boys produced zines. Fans of Star Trek, Star Wars, and other geek cultures produced zines full of fan art, fan fiction, and cosplay ideas. I knew someone in high school who produced a Beverly Hills...