From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century

1. Zines Then and Now: What are They? What Do You Do with Them? How Do They Work?

[ 27 ] 1 1 ZINES THEN AND NOW What Are They? What Do You Do With Them? How Do They Work? Janice Radway Z ines are peculiar.1 There’s no way around that fact. They are well known enough to have been the subject of a number of compilations, anthologies, books, and films devoted to their analysis, most issued since 1990.2 They are considered significant enough to be archived at a number of university, state, and big city libraries in the United States.3 Collections have also been developed in Europe, the UK, Canada, and New Zealand.4 The wealth of online material relating to zines includes an alternative online encyclopedia dedicated to zines in general, known as Zinewiki, as well as an elaborate site, Grrrl Zine Network, providing access to a huge amount of material about girl zines, the Riot Grrrl movement, and third wave feminism.5 Yet more often than not, if you explain to someone that you are researching girl zines, the immediate response is to ask, “What’s a zine?” This is as true for me as it was for Stephen Duncombe in 1997, when he began the first full-length academic book about the recent zine explosion, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture, with the sentence “But what are they?”6 A more recent how-to book on the subject even underscores the familiarity of the question with its zine-speak title, Whatcha Mean, What’s a Zine?7 The ubiquity of this question even in the face of the increasing legitimacy enjoyed by zines has meant that the initial gesture on almost all the websites and in nearly every published discussion is to venture some kind of a definition while acknowledging how difficult a task that is. Most agree with Duncombe and Julie Bartel, both of whom suggest that it is difficult to convey the true essence of zines “without a show-and-tell session.”8 Indeed, after agreeing that “zines are not easily defined,” the Duke University Library’s website for the Sarah Dyer Zine Collection nonetheless ventures a definition by foregrounding [ 28 ] Janice Radway their distinctive physical characteristics and by highlighting their do-it-yourself production and circulation beyond the mainstream: “They can be a messy hodgepodge of personal thoughts or an expertly designed political treatise. They can fit easily into a pocket or take up an entire 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper. They can be heavily collaged or minimalist; colored or black-and-white; handwritten or typed; stapled, sewn, or loose. The unifying thread is their outsideof -the-mainstream existence as independently written, produced, and distributed media that value freedom of expression and freedom from rules above all else.”9 Defining zines abstractly is difficult, nearly everyone agrees. Better to invoke their materiality, their particularity, and their modes of production, distribution, and circulation. And yet, however often definitions like these focus on zines as unique forms of material culture that circulate socially through do-it-yourself distribution and informal social networks, those offering the definition more often than not move quickly past materiality and sociality to focus intensively on their textuality and therefore on the content of zines.10 They do so by likening them to magazines and books and by highlighting their status as part of the underground or alternative press. As a result, most accounts move on to analyze the politically and ideologically alternative nature of what is contained within them. In doing so, such studies designate zines as booklike texts. What you do with zines, they suggest, is read them. Library-based zine collections underscore this move by providing topical finding aids that direct zinesters, fans, and researchers alike to the subjects covered in zines. This practice assumes that all of these groups are interested principally in what zines “say.” A number of the compilations assume the same thing by organizing their zine excerpts, which are rendered in the uniformity of print, according to the topics they take up. Though several of the compilations reproduce actual pages from zines in an attempt to convey their material specificity and in exemplification of their graphic creativity, none of them insists on the aesthetic integrity of the zines themselves by reproducing them in toto.11 Even the book Zine Scene by Francesca Lia Block and Hillary Carlip, which was designed to encourage young people to produce their own zines and therefore highlights the materials and practices involved in making them, begins by discussing...