College of Charleston Professor Alison Piepmeier’s just released her second book, Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism. It is the first book-length exploration of the girl zine era – feminism’s third wave. Piepmeier, the director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the College, argues that these quirky, personalized booklets are tangible examples of the ways that girls and women ‘do’ feminism today.
“Zines are these quirky, deeply personal publications that girls and women use to reflect on their own lives as well as the larger culture,” Piepmeier explained. “Even in an age of blogs and Facebook, people are taking the time to create these paper documents and copy and distribute them. They’re messy and charming and very revealing.”
NYU Press says, “The idiosyncratic, surprising, and savvy arguments and issues showcased in the forty-six images reproduced in the book provide a complex window into feminism’s future, where zinesters persistently and stubbornly carve out new spaces for what it means to be a revolutionary and a girl. Girl Zines takes zines seriously, asking what they can tell us about the inner lives of girls and women over the last twenty years.”
“Before you could Tweet your every thought to the world, young women cut, pasted, Xeroxed, and traded their own handmade magazines through the mail. In fact, the gorgeously glossy mag you’re holding in your hands right now started off as a ’zine. Girl Zines analyzes the beginning of the movement and its ’revolution grrrl style’ roots, as well as the way ’zinesters used the medium to explore race, sexuality, and identity,” said Bust Magazine.
Piepmeier is the co-editor of Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the Twenty-First Century and author of Out in Public: Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America.
