Life Lessons: Experiences of Gender Studies in Zines in the 1990s and 2000s

ABSTRACT

The early years of gender studies in the US academy can be traced through their impact on zinesters, who parsed their interactions with these studies in their self-made and distributed publications. In this paper, I argue that the way that these young people used the space of the zine to make sense of feminist theory in their lives and to understand their experience of thinking through gender and sexuality within the college setting can serve as a reminder of the necessity for feminist theory to be transformative to students’ lived experiences, and of the critical importance for feminist studies in the academy to primarily enable students to, in Sara Ahmed’s words, ‘live a feminist life’. The zines discussed here show both the excitement and promise that arose for student zinesters in their work with feminist theory at college, but also the inequalities perpetuated by the gender studies classrooms of the 1990s and 2000s. As we reach a critical moment in reimagining and rebuilding institutions of higher education, zines discussing early gender studies courses offer a rare insight into the lived experience of historical efforts to address educational inequality, and can serve to refocus conversations on the role of studying liberation in the academy today.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminism
• zines
• gender studies

Introduction

In 2012, Cathlin Goulding, a graduate student at Columbia Teachers College, was penning an essay on ‘pedagogical possibilities’. After some thought, Goulding decided that ‘it made sense to re-examine my own history as a zinester’. This was true for Goulding because of the ways in which her zine-making, her education and her feminism collided. Her career as a zinester started ‘in college, when I had my eyebrow and nose piercings, organized Take Back the Night Rallies, and listened to Bratmobile, Bikini Kill, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on insane volume levels’ (Goulding 2012, 2). It was there that she had also ‘made a zine called Freeze Dried Noodle about Asian supermarkets in San Diego’ and her ‘mixed-race Asian American identity’ (2012, 2).

Goulding was not alone in her intertwined experience of the ‘Do It Yourself’ (DIY) subcultural movement and of feminist education. The history of academic gender studies and the history of hand-made, self-distributed ‘zines’ were inextricable for a particular set of college-bound young people in the US in the 1990s and 2000s. Courses and departments that were at first known as ‘Women’s Studies’ (and have since for the most part been amended to more inclusive and expansive titles such as gender, women’s and sexuality studies) emerged in American universities as a challenge to the institutionalized inequality of the canon and curricula of the US educational system.¹ They were brought about by ‘feminist agitation across college campuses’ in the 1960s and 1970s, and their introduction in to colleges followed the model set by new Black and Ethnic Studies courses that had been fought for by anti-racist and anti-imperial campus activists (Dayton and Levenstein 2012, 793; Kwon and Nguyen 2016). At the same time that women’s studies courses, programs and departments found steadier footing, underground DIY print culture became increasingly utilized by young feminists in various contexts across the US. Starting in Washington, D.C. and the Pacific Northwest, young women involved in DIY and punk rallied against sexual violence in their own communities and systemic misogyny on a global scale via the Riot Grrrl movement, spreading their message through music and zines by bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile.

Outside of Riot Grrrl, teenagers and young people also proliferated a great number of feminist and queer zines during this period. Zines – still an important tool for feminist and queer communities to this day – are handmade, hand-copied and hand-distributed publications. Aesthetically, they range from the collaged, abstract and avant-garde to the diary-style personal zine, or ‘perzine’. They are personal and political documents that allow the creator to use them as anonymous confessional and/or political pamphlet, to reprint and circulate important feminist writings, to make original poetry and art, or all of the above. Physically, as feminist scholar Adela C. Licona describes them: ‘While they can be sleek productions, zines are often put together in a raw cut-and-paste style, copied, and traded or sold for a nominal fee’ (2012, 2). During the 1990s and 2000s, these self-published documents created a space for students of women’s and gender studies to parse and understand difficult feminist theoretical texts and to make connections between what they read in class and their own lived experience. The circulation of these intellectual ideas and experiences via a nonacademic print culture sometimes served as a form of radical redistribution of knowledge, one which echoed early, informal feminist theory-making and dissemination. The way that zinesters experienced and parsed their education through zines of this period points to some of the most crucial and urgent potential that remains in feminist and queer studies in the academy – that which can be immediately applicable to unequal social relationships. They applied existing feminist theory to their own lived experience, whilst doing away with the more obscure or opaque parts of the field, which demonstrated their engagement with a more radical hope for feminist education. This is similar to that which bell hooks described in her 1994 book Teaching to Transgress: ‘I continue to be amazed that there is so much feminist writing produced and yet so little feminist theory that strives to speak to women, men and children about ways we might transform our lives via a conversion to feminist practice. Where can we find a body of feminist theory that is directed toward helping individuals integrate feminist thinking and practice into daily life?’ (hooks 1994, 70). I argue in this paper that students' zines were one place where such theory was experimented with.

The aesthetics of zines were critical to the way that zinesters thought through their educational experiences. The use of scrap and collage helped zinesters and women’s studies students in the 1990s and 2000s relate to the thinkers who produced the theory they were reading in class and parsing in their zines. In 2010, popular feminist writer Susan Faludi penned a diatribe on the state of modern feminism for Harper’s magazine, taking issue in particular with its place in the academy. She argued that in the past, feminisms were more unified, and that it had become splintered, with this past now ‘hurled onto the scrap heap’ by ‘poststructuralist’ or ‘postmodern’ feminism (as quoted in Eichorn, 2013, 26). In her analysis of this moment, zine archive scholar Kate Eichhorn, resisting Faludi’s interpretation, argues that far from dismissing earlier feminisms into the ‘scrap heap’, herself and her generation of zinesters saw the scrap heap ‘not as a site of refuse/refusal but a complex site where the past accumulates in the present as a resource to be embraced and rejected, mined and recycled, discarded and redeployed’ (2013, 29). Such a process was happening in both the incorporation of older feminist texts into women’s studies courses in the 1990s and 2000s, and then further recycled through the incorporation of such theory texts into the zines of young people taking these classes.

In researching this history, I visited two zine archives: the Barnard Zine Library and the collections in the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University.² In each place, I consulted with the archivists who held expertise in zine collections to discover the zines which contended with the writer’s time at college, and searched for related terms to my research in the finding aids of the zine collections. While this brought up many zines which showed the maker discussing their time at university, this is in no way an exhaustive survey of zines of this period, and many more that I have not seen or heard of would have included similar conversations. At times, the zines do not specifically mention that the student was enrolled in a women’s or gender studies class, though their discussion of studying feminism at university during this period warranted inclusion in this project. There are also no ways, in this particular methodology, of figuring out important trends in what kinds of zines were most used to think through experiences of gender studies in this era in the US: instead, I have seen a range of perzines (personal zines), compzines (compilation zines) and zines made for institutional circulation by official university groups.

Despite these challenges and limitations, understanding zinesters’ experiences of gender studies in the academy in the 1990s and 2000s remains important, particularly in this moment of crisis for many universities in the wake of Covid, economic crises and sector cuts, across the US context of which this study focuses and the UK context in which I work. In an environment where interdisciplinary and liberatory programs are under economic threat, how do we not only defend these programs as they stand but also actively work to redefine what they might achieve for young people – and for the social movements they draw from in their teaching and scholarship – in decades to come? I argue that zinesters’ handling and then application of (sometimes opaque) feminist theory to their own lives is a reminder of the greatest potential that gender studies could have within the academy: to have material impact on the ways in which students face and confront intersecting inequalities in their own lives and to inform their activisms. This is a political motivation for theory that was first drawn out at length by hooks in Teaching to Transgress, where she argued that if we created feminist theory which could have such an impact, ‘there will be no gap between feminist theory and feminist practice’ (hooks 1994, 75). Zines as a place where traditional theory informs a potentially transformational theory does not suggest that zines are or were the only place that this could happen, but that these historical writings might inform this transitional moment in teaching and scholarship.

Many scholars within the extant, and growing, literature on zine culture that spans historical and archive studies have noted the porous borders between grassroots and academic feminist cultures, and specifically the extent to which college experiences are a common theme in zines, including in the work of Alison Piepmeier in Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism (2009) , Adela C. Licona in Zines in Third Space (2012), Kate Eichhorn in The Archival Turn in Feminism (2013), Alana Kumbier in Ephemeral Material: Queering the Archive (2014), and in a number of article-length pieces by Janice Radway over the past ten years (2011, 2016). This article takes this widely acknowledged set of college experiences by zinesters as a starting point and focuses on the importance of the way in which they discussed their studies and applied what they learned to their lived experience. The zines discussed here demonstrate both the excitement and promise that their formal studies produced for them, but also the inequalities of both the women’s and gender studies classrooms of the 1990s and 2000s and the feminist activist cultures that zine-making was a part of. Zinesters’ writing on their time as students demonstrates what they were learning through their classes, but it also shows the limitations of accumulating this knowledge in such historically unequal spaces. However, as this paper shows, zine cultures were also places wherein inequality and exclusion were present. The purpose of this piece is not to glorify any particular historical or contemporary grassroots space as one which automatically mitigated the elitism of university spaces. Rather, it was the act of repurposing and applying theory to lived experience – and the constant questions asked in many zines of how exactly one might continue to do this – which suggest the radical possibility of theory to this day.

Theoretically, my archival research was underpinned by hooks’s ideas on liberating education in Teaching to Transgress, and by British-Australian feminist Sara Ahmed’s writings on inequality in higher education, and on feminist interventions in the university setting. In particular, Ahmed’s formulation of the inherent overlaps between academic and activist feminisms informed my understanding of students’ zines from the 1990s and 2000s: ‘feminism is my theory class’ (2017, 40, and Licona 2012, 22). Further, for Ahmed, becoming a feminist ‘is to stay a student’ (2017, 11).³ This framework both validates formal studentship and liberates the study of feminism from the academy, which encapsulates the affect that was woven throughout the main archival sources of this study, and the lessons that feminists working in academia today can glean from DIY thought experiments with formal gender and sexuality studies. The article that follows contends with zinesters’ experiences of gender studies in three main sections. First, I follow the way that students ‘made sense’ (Ahmed 2017, 11 and; hooks 1984, 61) of difficult theory in their zines and found ways of applying it to their own experiences. Next, I discuss the way in which the lived experience of studying feminism at college and being at college more generally was thought through in these zines. Finally, I explore the use of ‘radical methods’ in zines to understand and make relevant ideas learned in the classroom. In conclusion, I discuss the legacy of zinesters’ writings, and what lessons contemporary feminist academics stand to learn from the way they processed formal feminist education into lessons for life (Ahmed 2017; hooks 1994).

‘The Sense-Making Process’ (Ahmed 2017, 11)

Zinesters undertaking feminist studies at college in the 1990s and 2000s used their zines as a companion or exercise-book in which to work through the theories they were being presented with in class. The methods used by these young people to understand what they were learning constituted a form of what Sara Ahmed calls the ‘sense-making process of becoming feminist and navigating a way through the world’ (2017, 20). Unlike a graded essay, zines allowed their creators to admit challenges, safely work out problems, and eschew the judgement of fellow students or a professor while doing so. Jesse, in the zine The Tea for One Issue, was forthright about her own ‘sense-making process’ of trying to understand her classwork. ‘Things I have to do’, a list in the zine, included number 13: ‘stop thinking that one day I will eventually be smarter than everyone and it is only then that I am allowed to be content with myself (Oh, to be Milton)’ (1997, 13). Still, in the zine Jesse gingerly applied the theory she was studying in class, in a more colloquial tone than she might have used in an essay. In trying to understand what ‘sort of a socialist version of human relationships’ might look like, Jesse hesitantly tried out: ‘I’m not really sure if this is maybe what Shulamith Firestone was talking about when she compares the radical socialist movement to the radical feminist movement. I guess it probably is’ (1997, 17). Student zinesters used this medium as a companion to formal learning, as a space to complain about how hard theoretical language can be to understand. Alison Piepmeier, invoking the call of critical race theorists such as Patricia Hill Collins for necessary ‘theoretical grappling’ to take place among feminists, posited that zines are one key site of this process (2009, 127). For students of feminist theory, zines – that would not require students to finalize their responses to hard questions or receive the scrutiny of professors – allowed for such ‘grappling’ to take place.

However, zinesters did not always express joy or ease at unpacking the theory they were exposed to in classes. In the fifth issue of the zine Girl Fiend, the writer Christina described the challenges she was facing at college, and wanting to drop out: ‘all my reading has been extremely hard for me to plow through, and I have not been able to get much out of it since I can’t understand it’ (1993). For this writer, this problem represented a political inconsistency in feminist theory. ‘I’m sick of pointless ideas and theories being disguised through massive words and idiotically complex sentence structures’, she vented. ‘What’s the point of sayin something if no one can understand it?’ (1993). Zinesters’ occasional frustration with the challenges of reading feminist theory is one of many ways that late twentieth-century DIY cultures reflected wider trends in feminist thought and the women’s studies project. The impenetrability of some feminist theory, and the political problem with this, was confronted by bell hooks in her 1984 text Feminist Theory from Margin to Center, written at a moment where women’s studies courses were proliferating. ‘The focus on written material’ she argued, ‘actually prohibits many women from learning about feminism’ (1984, 109). hooks noted that this posed a particular challenge to young women’s studies students, who had to ‘grapple’ – again this verb was used to describe the process of sense-making – ‘with the issue of whether or not their intellectual and scholarly pursuits are relevant to women as a collective group, to women in the “real” world’ (1984, 110). hooks wrote further on the problems with impenetrable theory in feminist studies ten years later, in Teaching to Transgress: ‘Imagine what a change has come about within feminist movements when students … come to Women’s Studies classes and read what they are told is feminist theory only to feel that what they are reading has no meaning, cannot be understood, or when understood in no way connects to “lived” realities beyond the classroom. As feminist academics we might ask ourselves, of what use is feminist theory that assaults the fragile psyches of women struggling to throw off patriarchy’s oppressive yoke?’ (hooks 1994, 64–65). This issue is still a challenge for feminists. In Sara Ahmed’s recent work Living a Feminist Life, she notes that ‘academic language is one of my tools. But I also aim to keep my words as close to the world as I can’ (2017, 11). The inaccessibility of some feminist theory for many young zinesters studying it at university in the 1990s and 2000s reflected a growing debate of the usefulness of opaque theoretical writings to wider social change. Looking at these zine discussions now should bring the importance of guiding students through such language, and of writing in and encouraging writing in language that does not participate in exclusion, to the forefront of conversations amongst educators today.

One major way that zinesters confronted this challenge was through the characteristic cut and paste aesthetic that is associated with this medium. This method of understanding, as opposed to prose, was uniquely useful to students confronting theoretical texts for the first time. Through collage, zinesters could boldly put forward their own fragmentary formulations of difficult ideas. This could be seen in the zine Yummi Hussi, edited by Yan Sham-Shackleton and other students at UC Santa Cruz in the late 1990s. On the same page as a comic and a collage, they included a box with a citation from a text about the nature of women’s studies:

One can appropriate patriarchal genres of expression by using them in a consciously oppositional/subversive manner … The task of feminist epistemology invites a broader conception of knowledge, practice & beliefs that constitute women’s own understanding of their experience and labor (challenging the canon, by M. Jane Young & Kay Turner, p 19)

(cited in Yan Sham-Shackleton et al., 1996–1998, 20). In this way, the writers for Yummi Hussi could layer their own ideas with those of others, without having to expound on the links between them. Cut and paste also at times allowed zinesters to highlight the words of feminist writers who resonated with them, without revealing too much in their own words. In student Lan Nguyen’s 1998 Behind these Fragile Walls zine, for instance, she included a pasted quote from Maxine Hong Kingston in The Woman Warrior: ‘you have no idea how much I have fallen coming to America’ (quoted in Nguyen 1998), without further context. In an academic essay, Nguyen would have been asked to unpack the quote or her connection to it, to adhere to academic convention: the ability to paste this in a zine without doing so tells us of the importance of interacting with texts found whilst at university, without necessarily needing to interact with them in traditional methods for them to feel impactful on one’s lived experience.

Cut and pasting citations into decontextualized collages also meant that zinesters sometimes utilized feminist theorists with controversial politics, whilst avoiding engaging with the challenges presented by these thinkers. In a 1992 copy of Riot Grrrl New England, for instance, the anti-pornography feminist Andrea Dworkin was cited in the author’s exploration of male violence, which she had been thinking about a lot since reading a book called Women Who Kill that cited Dworkin. She cut and pasted a fragment of Dworkin’s writing from the set text: ‘No one misses the wife who disappears … wives, after all, belong in the home. Nothing outside it depends on them’ (quoted in Riot Grrrl New England, February 1992). By collaging Dworkin’s ideas into her work, the author could utilize it for her project without having to draw out the historical significance of Dworkin in the 1980s feminist pornography wars, as she might have been required to do in an essay. Similarly, in the zine Scarbaby (1996), Johanna Novales pasted in a quote by French feminist writer Hélène Cixous. Without needing to give a longer backstory about the debate in the 1990s over what constituted ‘French feminism’, Novales was able to lift Cixous’s words out of context in their zine, and sift through what was most useful in Cixous’s writing for their own feminist ‘sense-making process’ (1996, and quote from Ahmed 2017, 20). This form of ‘sense-making’ by college feminists has gone on to inspire theorists in the years since. For instance, affect theorist Ann Cvetkovich has recognized how zinesters’ methods ‘reflect a resistance to the scholarly injunction to analyze and connect in order to make a coherent whole’, and that she has mimicked the ‘short forms of the zine’ by doing ‘little spurts’ of writing to resist the ‘protracted temporality of academic scholarship’ (2012, 76–77). Arguably, young people’s contemporary social media engagement with theorists on platforms like TikTok shows a similar ability to cherry-pick choice quotes from theorists whose entire back catalog they might not find compelling, had they had to contend with it for an essay. It might be a mistake to encourage students to do this as a rule: for instance, to encourage a student to overlook a theorist’s bigotry in one area in order to enjoy an isolated quote. The traditional educational model of encouraging students in their research to spend a good deal of time getting to know a particular topic in their research is not an aspect of teaching that necessarily needs to be done away with in attempts to reshape education ‘as the practice of freedom’ (hooks 1994). However, it could be an important part of feminist praxis to encourage students to feel free to engage on a surface level with certain quotes and ideas, and to not feel the weight of needing to be an expert before daring to speak about enjoying a particular quote or theorist, which could be seen to perpetuate patriarchal forms of exclusion (hooks 1994, 64–65). TikTok has already been utilized pedagogically in some gender studies modules in the US, suggesting that some educators are already encouraging the kind of intellectual exploration that students have historically found useful in zines and in other youth media (Lampe, 2023).

There was also a radical redistributive politics and critical pedagogy behind the sharing of academic ideas outside of the university setting in the way that student zinesters circulated their zines to young people who weren’t at college (Licona 2012, 2; Radway 2011, 145, and; Klein 1997, 213), one which chimes with a larger move to share and redistribute academic resources that exists to this day. In this way, a key part of zinesters’ ‘sense-making process’ with feminist theory was to also try and make sense of it for others. Zinesters engaged with the feminist politics of accessibility described earlier in this piece, including bell hooks’s call for feminists within the academy to ‘“translate” ideas to an audience that varies’ (1984, 112). In some zines made by those in the Riot Grrrl movement, the creators consciously attempted to reach out to Grrrls not based in college towns, and to younger readers (‘Riot Grrrl Test Patterns’ date unknown, Klein 1997; Licona 2012; Radway 2011). ‘So far, everyone who has been active in the RIOT GRRRL! Group is a student at one of the 5 colleges in this area’, wrote one contributor to the zine Riot Grrrl! A Valley Grrrl Production no 2. ‘We’d like to invite all other wmn, including those of you not in college, to contact us and get involved’ (1992). Following this statement, the writer went on to list helpful definitions of terminology (including ‘PATRIACHY, “ANARACHY”, and “YEAST INFECTIONS”), and cut and pasted in a quote by early twentieth-century anarchist activist Emma Goldman (Riot Grrrl! A Valley Grrrl Production no 2, 1992). The overlapping of theory and action in these Riot Grrrl zines demonstrated feminist studenthood as a state that, while for them was synonymous with college, was a form of sense-making that could happen outside of this context too (Ahmed 2017, 11). The inclusion of self-compiled essential reading and viewing lists in zines can also be interpreted as syllabi, which not only documented what Sara Ahmed would call the zinesters’ feminist ‘tool kits’ but also informed those who were curious where to begin their reading. This can also be seen in prolific zinester Lauren Jade Martin’s ‘bookwork lists’, which included literary and theoretical texts by Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston, avant-garde writer Kathy Acker, and AIDS activist and writer Sarah Schulman, and in Radigals, the zine of the Women’s Studies Association of Rutgers University, which included an annotated ‘Radigals Book List’. In Radigals, the writers described how Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s 1997 history of teenage girls, The Body Project, was ‘easy yet interesting’, and that she ‘writes about menstruation, dieting, clothes, skin, and how the standard of beauty has changed over the past century’ (The Undergraduate Women’s and Gender Studies Association at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, Spring 2006). The fact that this last zine is an institutional zine, made within a university assumedly primarily for its students, shows that even students undertaking the study of feminism in a formal setting were interested in thinking about the reading list as something which felt urgent for their own lives and interests, rather than just for traditional modes of accumulating knowledge and demonstrating expertise. Johanna Novales did this in their zine too, in a list called ‘word list’, an example of hooksian ‘translation’ in which they sought to make the texts appear more accessible. On Women Who Run With Wolves, Novales explained both how it was about women ‘reclaiming themselves creatively’ and that: ‘you don’t have to read it all the way through; pick chapters that pertain to yr situation’ (1996). The reading list feature was so prevalent in students’ zines in the 1990s and 2000s that there are too many to mention here. This method of praxis, which saw an exchange between DIY culture, feminist theory, and gender studies in the academy, has remained popular among contemporary feminists. Sara Ahmed mirrors zines’ dissemination of reading lists in Living a Feminist Life (2017, in which she lists the most formative feminist texts in her ‘tool kit’, including Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, Feminist Theory by bell hooks, and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (2017, 240). The importance of wide access to reading lists was raised most recently by anti-racist activists in the Summer of 2020, following the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota in May 2020, and the Black Lives Matter movement which resurged in response. In the US and in the UK, reading lists and syllabi on a wide range of topics contending with histories and theories of racism and colonization and movements against these systems – which included both academic and non-academic texts – were circulated widely by some academics to whoever wanted to access them. The continued call for this kind of redistribution suggests that it might be important to continue this move as a regular part of social justice praxis in the academy.

One major part of the feminist ‘sense-making process’ for zinesters involved ‘grappling’ with their simultaneous involvement in both DIY and academic settings (Licona 2012, 60; Piepmeier 2009, 127), examples of which often demonstrate that it is not zines or DIY communities per se that liberate academic feminisms, as often they have replicated similar power dynamics to those of academic institutions. Mimi Thi Nguyen grew up in punk and Riot Grrrl scenes in Minnesota and California and is now an academic. In her zines from this period, Nguyen was critical of both DIY cultures and of women’s studies. She saw women’s studies in her University and the most visible factions of Riot Grrrl and zine culture in her region as being ‘the space of white women’ and described gender studies at her school as ‘healing each other for class credit’ (1997-1999). ‘You know what I mean’, she wrote in her zine Slander in 1997. ‘therapy-style, you’re ok, I’m okay, and the Man is Bad … All about personal experiences and validation and affirmation and vulnerability’ (1997-1999). She directly compared the lack of inclusivity in academic women’s studies with that of ‘grrrl zines circa ‘95’ (1997-1999). This critique is important, as it demonstrates a unique area that scholars of gender studies have to pay attention to: not only do we inherit the elitist trappings of being within the academy, we might also bring systems of inequalities from the activist settings that inform our work. Nguyen’s experience of both, as described in her zine, is a reminder that angling scholarship and teaching towards grassroot activist practices will not automatically undo its harms or exclusions, particularly if those activist spaces have been predominantly white and cisgender.

The Personal, the Political and the Punk

Nguyen was not alone in her critique of early women’s studies. The next part of this essay explores other ways that zinesters related to what and to how they were being taught, to their wider educational environment, and how they used zines to work through the impact of these experiences. These zine entries describing experiences of studenthood suggest that the physical and affective space of the campus impacts upon a student’s access to the lessons about gender, sexuality, and feminism that they might be taught in class.

These kinds of relationships to their new institutions were explored in zines long before classes started. In her zine Caught in the Act, Hannah Hafter wrote of her fear of leaving her hometown of Burlington, Vermont, a space where she had found herself politically and socially. ‘I know exactly who I am in this context’, she wrote, and expressed fear of leaving this ‘safety net’ for the unknown (Around 2000). Young people who had been consuming the zines of college-going individuals had already had some access, through these documents, to the joint worlds of feminist studies and DIY music that awaited them. In a letter to Riot Grrrl zinesters and Bratmobile bandmates Molly Neuman and Allison Wolfe, published in their zine Grrrl Germs (3), high-schooler Laura signed off a letter to the editors with: ‘Things suck and hopefully in college I’ll start a new wave band called 40 Flamboyant Godfast Days’ (1993). These writings depict both hope and fear in zinesters’ anticipation of entering university spaces. Some campus feminist groups, aware of these mixed feelings, used zines as a part of the orientation process to help welcome new students. In 2007, Barnard student Jennie Rose Halperin made a zine for incoming first year students titled So, you’re a freshman? Or how I learned to stop worrying and love college or top ten things I wish someone had told me about my first year. The things she wished someone had told her were both personal and political. Her advice included ‘YOU WILL MEET BOYS, GIRLS, AND ANYONE ELSE YOU ARE ATTRACTED TOWARD’ and ‘YOU ARE SMART, YOU WOULD NOT BE HERE IF YOU WERE NOT’ (August 2007). Halperin’s zine spoke to both the queer potential of attending a women’s college and to the structures of power that might intimidate or exclude a student from accessing the potential freedom to be found in the dorm or classroom.

Once classes were underway, zinesters applied gender studies lessons to their own lives, working through their critical and affective relationship to the texts they encountered. Ahmed’s work resonates here, in that she views feminist theory inherently as ‘homework’, which applies to the way that zinesters discussed their time at university in their zines: feminist theory was homework in a literal sense for these individuals, but it also describes the work they did in relating the theory they were studying to their own lives. ‘Reading Carolyn Heilbrun’s Reinventing Womanhood & Adrienne Rich’s “What Does a Woman Need to Know?”, I began to examine what I had been doing’, wrote Johanna Novales in Scarbaby zine in 1996, on the subject of gendered ‘tokenism’ . ‘So why do I feel so lucky,’ they pondered, ‘to be...allowed to play w/ the boys.’ (1996). Jesse, writing in The Tea for One Issue in 1997, mentioned that learning about ‘myths and stereotypes’ in women’ studies classes had helped her to be ‘quicker to analyze situations in my personal life using these ideas’ (1997, 22). Cvetkovich has spoken in her work about borrowing from the confessional mode of zines, as well as from the collaged methods. Cvetkovich wrote that zine writing emboldened her to include sections of memoir in her 2012 book Depression: A Public Feeling: ‘it took a younger generation of feminists who refused to be intimidated by the critiques of confessional discourse’ to ‘return to the promise of the personal as political’ (2012, 75). In her important work Depression, Cvetkovich, then, has already demonstrated what feminist academia could learn more broadly from zine writing: both the methods and the personal nature of many zines are forms of writing that can encompass a broad range of experiences, knowledge systems and writing styles, which could be transformative to university spaces and the ways of researching and writing that are traditionally taught. This would respond further to hooks’s conviction in Teaching to Transgress that while traditional, exclusionary modes of writing sometimes ‘undermines and subverts feminist movements’, that ‘despite its uses as an instrument of domination, it may also contain important ideas, thoughts, visions, that could, if used differently, serve a healing, liberatory function’ (hooks 1994, 65). Zine writers of this era, and a number of scholars since, have taken on this kind of commitment to bringing new forms of writing to the academy as an aspect of bridging the ‘gap between feminist theory and feminist practice’ (hooks 1994, 75).

Zines were also a space in which the wider experience of being a student of gender studies could be untangled by their writers. For Christine, a women’s studies student at Antioch College in the early to mid 1990s and the author of Not Your Bitch zine, it was evidently at times a total riot. She set the scene of her first day of university as if it were a queer DIY fairytale:

So that was my first day in a nutshell. The first day I met 16 women who would change my life. The first day I felt real freedom. The first day I met a woman I would fall in love with. The first day I realized I could be or do anything I wanted. The first day I truly believed in myself. The first day of Antioch women’s studies … (Christine, Early-mid 1990s)

The rest of the mini-essay continued in this utopian vein: the author sports a ‘classic “Don’t fuck with me I’m a Goddess” shirt’, meets a women’s studies professor who was a ‘strikingly attractive avant garde dyke from NYC’, and eventually takes a women’s studies field trip across Europe (encountering a Koffee house in Holland, Lesbian Avengers in Berlin and ‘cool girl zines’ in England) (Christine, Early-mid 1990s). For Christine, the joy of discovering women’s studies and zine culture simultaneously made each sphere all the more exciting and revelatory: she would even go on to write a ‘research project’ on ‘girl zines’ (Christine, Early-mid 1990s). Other zinesters described the feeling of learning about feminism and radical politics, inside and outside of class, and what it felt like to deploy that knowledge in other spaces in the university. Ginny, writing for the compilation zine Beyond gallery walls, described starting a ‘radical feminist cheerleading squad’ at Georgetown University, and how being a student of women’s studies in the ‘pro-business, and pro-government and pre-business and pre-government’ student body allowed her to ‘sit in class and hear someone say that he deals with women as irrational beings because they are and then argue with him’ (2003). Zines and DIY culture, as well as other aspects of feminist activist life, seemed for many college-attending zinesters to create the conditions that made studying bearable. Johanna Novales, who self-described as ‘middle class, half-white, half filipin(x)’ and ‘originally fr. Long Island,’ had been attending ‘snooty rich old-boy conservative skool’ Southern Methodist University in Dallas. For Novales, the prospect of studying abroad at the University of York in the UK promised a more ‘openminded’ community, including ‘a riot grrrl chapter’ and ‘an abortion fund if you need one … rock on!’ (1996). Novales’s discussion in their zine demonstrated the importance of grounding, extracurricular spaces.

Zines also allowed students a space to process the difficult feelings that came up as they experienced learning feminist theory, taking part in activist cultures and existing in college life more generally. Zines did not always depict delight in academic and activist crossovers, as in the accounts above, which is another reminder that simply drawing from activist cultures – particularly for white scholars and teachers – is not enough to ensure the radical teaching of gender studies. What these kinds of accounts reflected was that zines could function as what Cvetkovich has called an ‘archive of feelings’: ‘cultural texts’ that can be ‘repositories of feelings and emotions’ (2003, 7). For some students, being a good feminist became yet another form of high achievement to be attained in a college setting. In a 1997 edition of Helen Luu’s zine Paint Me a Revolution, for instance, she wrote that ever since she ‘started reading feminist theory aged 17’, she had ‘wanted so badly to be accepted by a group of women who seemed incredibly tough’ and ‘smart’,’ including her ‘professors, teaching assistants, resident advisors.’ (1998). Luu wrote, seven years after her experience of college feminism, that she had since moved on from viewing feminism as something ‘policing’ her actions (1998).

The most critical problem that zinesters expressed with coming to feminist, queer and other radical politics at university was the whiteness of the spaces and syllabi of academic gender studies in this period. In many zines by students of color, zinesters voiced frustration at the predominance of whiteness within their own academic and DIY communities, and with specific white women. In some zines, the writers encouraged white readers to further educate themselves. For instance, Lauren Jade Martin encouraged white women to listen and learn. This included: ‘Acknowledging your privileges, whatever they may be. Reading about different cultures and taking the time to listen to other people. Including them in your ideas and in your words and in your art and in your revolution’ (Martin 1997a, 16). In Bamboo Girl 3, Sel Hwahng also described the kind of self-education that they hoped white women would do more of in queer, feminist and DIY circles: ‘...when it comes to actual work around race – reading about painful issues and stories, dredging through histories and pedagogical research – that’s when the whitegirl’s attention (and commitment to knowledge) suddenly vanishes’ (Hwahng 1997, 64). Other Black and POC zinesters, however, wrote of the limits of education as a vehicle for anti-racist action. Chandra Ray, in a piece included in Mimi Thi Nguyen’s compilation zine Evolution of a Race Riot, reminded white women that they should not see their college education as making them knowledgeable about her experiences: ‘You could NOT possibly understand what it is like to be a black woman, or any woman of color for that matter. Don’t assume you know everything about blacks or any other nonwhite group just because you took a couple classes in college’ (1997, 7–8). Ray’s assertion speaks to an inherent danger in the model of helping students gain research knowledge or ‘expertise’ in formal intersectional feminist education, particularly in a classroom where white students are learning from texts written by Black feminists or by other people of color (hooks 1994, 62).

The shortcomings of formal educational spaces, with the historical and ongoing inequalities that underpin them, to foster social change were noted in a number of zines of this period. For some, their role within underground subcultures or feminist movements sat uncomfortably within the halls of universities. Dylan Miner and Estrella Torrez have described this in their writing on punk within the university space. ‘Any hardcore kid who has spent time in a university classroom will recognize the inherent contradiction’, they note, between their ‘anarchic and activist desires to create an alternative and equitable society and the university’s ability to restrict all counter-hegemonic voices within it’ (2012, 27). Novales, in Scarbaby, wrote that they were involved in ‘at least’ these ‘two spheres’, but that they didn’t ‘want to belong exclusively to either’, because ‘some punks scorn education’ and ‘on the other hand, academics can be quite staid & unmoved to action’ (1996). Lauren Martin’s zine you might as well live also reflected this tension. ‘I am experiencing the dreaded sophomore slump’, she wrote in 1997, ‘and will be taking a temporary break from Bard then’. She went on to describe her need for a break as a ‘kind of reality check from elitist academia. Bard’s rurally isolated, small, claustrophobic, white, and affluent. And well, sometimes it just gets to me’ (1997b). Though work, volunteering and ‘assorted campus activities like the zine library’ kept her ‘very occupied’, she wrote that the academic setting of Bard College for learning about ‘gender, race, class, sexuality’ troubled her. ‘College cannot be the sole revolutionary training ground because it is a privilege to attend school, and keeping revolution wrapped up in academia is incredibly classist and elitist and would result in some lame vacuum that does not exist in reality’ (1997b, 7). For Martin, even the act of theorizing via zine-writing might have been too close to traditional knowledge systems for comfort: ‘And argh, reading this whole thing over I can see that I am getting very caught up in language, which is another way that distance has been created between the academic world and reality. Blah’ (1997b, 7). Martin’s writing in her 1997 zine demonstrates the troubling aspect of studying liberation movements and histories of oppression formally for many zinesters. Particularly in the context of a period of feminist ‘backlash’ in the US, in a period many in the mainstream were calling ‘postfeminist’, the thought that these movements would exist only in a historicized form within institutions that still had such a long way to go to be inclusive might have been deeply worrying to students (Faludi 1991). Though young people’s social activism in the US is now more visible than ever, the question of whether deep knowledge about social justice movements is still ‘wrapped up’ in institutions remains important today.

Radical Methods

Because of the limitations and inadequacies of early gender studies in the academy for fostering inclusivity, zinesters utilized a number of methods in an attempt to make academic feminisms more accessible to themselves and to others. One such method was the use or re-use of college essays as zine material, in which zinesters could facilitate wider readership of the potentially exclusionary form of the essay. For instance, in The Tea for One Issue, author Jesse noted that in the zine there were ‘a few reports in here that were directly from classes’, letting the reader know that ‘even though they read as reports and make reference to books one might not have, there are still some base ideas that can be noted’, continuing that as ‘Not everyone is in school’ or undertaking women’s studies classes, she had made certain sections of the paper into ‘appendices A, B & C so that one can overlook them if they so choose’ (1997, 2).

In addition to including essays from class in their original arrangement, zinesters at college also incorporated essay-style approaches to writing in their zines, though with a freedom to tweak or develop that style that was afforded to them by the form of the zine. Christine of Not Your Bitch, who wrote the romp-like piece on the women’s studies students ‘let loose’ on their trip to Europe, summed up this method when describing her zine-writing as: ‘short essay-ish pieces’ (Early-mid 1990s). In 1998, Bikini Kill lead singer Kathleen Hanna, under the pseudonym Maggie Fingers, described the writing in her zine Fuck Me Blind as one such simultaneous expression of and rebellion against academic form: ‘A girl was supposed to write a college paper but couldn’t because she refused to only pick one point and then prove how this point was right. And then one day she got depressed. And then one day she decided that maybe the way her teacher said to write was fucked up and not her. This is the paper she handed in’ (Spring /Summer 1998). Hanna’s writing here points out how deciding a writing style was ‘not her’ could be a praxis encouraged by teachers to students today: what would it look like to encourage students to write in ways which reflected their personalities more? In which their individual voices were front and center? (hooks 1994, 70). Toying with the meeting points of academic, personal and political speech, as Hanna did here, is something Cvetkovich has theorized in her writing on queer artistic diversions from academia. ‘This way of working can be particularly useful for those whose usual idioms and practices are scholarly because such writing can make speculative and personal claims rather than requiring the validations of research’, she writes. ‘It produces what Audre Lorde describes as forms of truth that are felt rather than proven by evidence, the result of ‘disciplined attention to the true meaning of “it feels right to me”’ (2012, 77). Zines provided a crucial platform for taking traditional academic forms of writing and reworking them in both minor and major ways in order for students to find more purpose in writing them. Changes made to old essays in zines made these writings more widely accessible, allowed students to describe the moods, feelings and working conditions around the writing of the papers, and enabled them to express how they related to the materials in ways that are traditionally discouraged in the teaching of academic writing. In turn, these zinesters’ experiments with academic writing in new forms in their zines hint at the potential for current students to utilize a multitude of writing styles, rather than one imposed set of indisputable methods (hooks 1994, 70) Though many educators already embrace this across a range of institutions, zines from this period demonstrate the importance of experimenting with form, as well as content, in teaching activist histories.

The application of gender studies methods in zines sometimes worked the other way around too, with students handing in zines in lieu of traditional essays: this also suggests that pedagogical experimentation was happening in this emerging field, a historical tradition we should re-engage with. In 2003, a ‘photography major’ and a ‘women’s studies major’ who were both also ‘long-time activists’ at Georgetown submitted a zine titled Beyond gallery walls and dead white men: anarcha-feminsim in action for their thesis project. Their dual identities as students and activists fueled their desire to make this piece, the ‘culmination of two people’s undergraduate “careers”’ into something that would also ‘benefit our community’. ‘We also knew that we weren’t interested in creating dead art or theory that couldn’t go much further than the halls of academia’, they wrote (Ginny and Lauren 2003). In this case, the zine form made the product of their academic labor more inclusive in that it could more readily be distributed amongst a non-academic community. This was also part of the rationale for Rae Licari, whose goals for their 2005 ‘zine-focused independent study’ whilst at university included ‘complete, publish, and distribute at least one zine’ of their own, but also ‘finish establishing the Women’s Studies Zine Library’ at their university, and ‘work toward making the zine community’ in their city ‘more cohesive and visible by establishing a monthly meetup in the local area’ (Spring 2005). Again, the zine-as-academic-work served to foster community, against the more individualist form of the traditional, non-published, term paper. That is not to say, however, that zines weren’t also an intellectually enriching personal project as classwork. As Licari reflected after finishing the project: ‘this particular academic exercise was not at all redundant- in fact, it was quite enlightening’ (Spring 2005). Zines are not the sole method through which contemporary students might be encouraged to explore knowledge production systems outside of traditional Western academic ones. Rather, Licari’s comment suggests that students found that which applied to their lived experiences, that which promoted community or self-reflection, was the most useful – particularly when it intersected with the study of women, gender and sexuality (hooks 1994, 70).

Conclusion

Zines continued to play a role for many of these makers in post-graduation life, which sometimes included graduate study in women’s, gender and sexuality studies and related disciplines. Some of those involved in DIY cultures of the 1990s and 2000s would go on to work in archives of related sources in their professional futures (Licona 2012, 63; Radway 2016, 29–30). In her 2016 study on ‘girl zine networks’, cultural studies scholar Janice Radway details how she was ‘struck by how many of these former zine producers recount post-zine lives as cultural workers and activists’. She also notes how ‘several others are graduate students or young professors working on subjects such as postcolonial Asian studies, transgender subjectivities, and transnational American studies even as they contribute to various activist organizations beyond the academic world’ (2016, 29–30). Despite the aspects of campus life and feminist education that were constraining, some former zinesters remained in or returned to the university to fight for educational equality and wider social change from within those spaces (Radway 2016, 29–30).

As with all other aspects of college, zinesters utilized their publications to process the move out of studying and into the next stages of their lives. As zinesters neared the end of their degrees, their discussion of what to do next reflected the feminist, queer, and other critical lenses they were grateful to have developed in college, but also reiterated the inequalities that remained in higher education, and the lived experience and non-academic knowledge forms that had been just as formative. Lauren Jade Martin, who was described above during her college years encouraging white women to educate themselves and, later, taking a break from Bard during her ‘sophomore slump’, would go on to enter academia professionally following work in the ‘anti-domestic and sexual violence movement’ (Martin’s website, 2020). In 2002, she wrote a piece titled ‘on being critical’ which was included in Mimi Thi Nguyen’s compilation zine Race Riot 2, wherein she discussed her relationship to her own critical practice, stating ‘I have dreams of being a cultural critic ‘when I grow up’, alongside ‘nightmares of succumbing to the status quo’ (Martin, 2002 featured in Race Riot 2)’. Though she may have acquired some new ways of thinking from academia and DIY organizing, she was adamant that learning the skills to be ‘critical’ should not only be attributed to these spheres. ‘I was critical long before I ever did a zine, discovered punk rock, or went to college (although it helped provide me with critical language and analytical tools)’, she wrote, insisting: ‘My anger is a legacy passed down from immigrant generations, yellow ancestors, queer patriots, centuries of marginalized peoples’ (Martin, 2002 featured in Race Riot 2). In another contribution to the same zine, Chandra Ray discussed her disappointment in college’s promises, whilst still imagining a future for herself in academia. ‘Living in a false liberal haven like Berkeley has only brought home those lessons I learned growing up in the South’, she wrote. ‘Even those of us who attend universities’, she wrote, ‘“making it” does not guarantee that one will be free from the harsh realities of racism, colorism, sexism, heterosexism, homophobia.’ (Ray, featured in Race Riot 2, 99). Despite these vast limitations, she also acknowledged that: ‘Part of me wants to be an academic. I want to be a professor that the critically aware kids of color can learn from and talk to’. Perhaps in an academic future, she mused, ‘I think that in some way by helping them – I will heal myself’ (Ray, featured in Race Riot 2 2002, 99). Both Martin and Ray had contributed to Nguyen’s earlier zine, Evolution of a Race Riot, in 1997. Some years later, in this next edition of the zine, both writers considered their futures and reiterated an earlier struggle over to what extent liberationist politics could be lived out in a university setting, and more broadly, to what extent the teaching of critical thinking could be liberated from the deep inequality in the history of so many institutions of higher education in the United States.

Mimi Thi Nguyen’s zine Slander also depicted the continued usage of zines by those transitioning out of college life. In it, she told her story of continuing with an academic career despite many personal and political problems with that system, and wrote as both ‘grad student and lecturer’ (1997-1999). In the zine, she described the better aspects of this career move post-graduation (‘I practically read for a living’), but she also parsed the challenges of doing one’s radical political work within the academy. This included microaggressions from colleagues. In an issue from 1997, she described a ‘white male co-worker’ who ‘describes his mini-safaris through the florescent-lit jungles of Little Saigon’s markets’ (Nguyen, 1997-1999). She also used the zine to describe the politics of her department in a document that was unlikely to be observed by colleagues. For instance, she mentioned a September 1999 strike by members of her then-department, Ethnic Studies at Berkeley, in a fight against the ‘downsizing’ of the Ethnic Studies faculty. In this piece, Nguyen was critical of placing her politics within the academy, but nonetheless fought to defend the existence of those spaces. While contemplating a potential coalition between the departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies at Berkeley, she admitted in her zine that ‘I honestly don’t know that any of it is worth saving’, but she also described a moment during the strike in which she and a colleague ‘hijack’ a protest banner about saving Ethnic Studies and ‘added ‘women’s studies’ with great big fat markers” (Nguyen, 1997-1999). Now an academic, Nguyen remains insistent that these spaces are important, but only if they do not lose sight of those liberationist voices behind them. In an article for the Barnard Center for Research on Women’s Scholar & Feminist Online in 2016, Nguyen and Soo Ah Kwon argued that: ‘Academic pursuits, divorced from community concerns, at least in this narration, become arcane, exclusive, and even useless’ (Kwon and Nguyen 2016). This more recent writing is evidence that hooks’s assertions in Teaching to Transgress have remained, and remain to this day, as urgent as ever (1994, 70)

We must pay attention to Kwon and Nguyen’s warning here in our attempts to understand both the past and future of women’s and gender studies in the academy. The use of zines to document gender studies in the 1990s and 2000s was inevitable, not only because feminist zine culture emerged as gender studies programs and courses proliferated in American universities but due to the fact that the entire project of studying gender in the academy started with underground feminist print cultures. As bell hooks wrote in 2000 in Feminism is for Everybody, feminist theory was initially circulated through ‘word of mouth’, then written in to ‘cheaply put together newsletters and pamphlets’, and then, following in the footsteps of the introduction of Black Studies into universities, ‘women’s studies became the place where one could learn about gender’ (hooks 2015 , 19–20). As Nguyen reminds us above, the activist roots of formal feminist study must again become central to the individuals, pedagogies, texts, ethics and methods involved in women’s, gender and sexuality studies programs.

The zines discussed in this piece, which contained the makers’ ideas and feelings about the study of gender and sexuality in the US academy in the 1990s and 2000s, revealed a number of potential avenues for the development of an applicable, radical, feminist education in years to come, including the encouragement of accessible writing, the wider distribution of feminist theory outside of the academy, and the design of pedagogies that genuinely value and center a wide range of knowledge production systems. Because many zine collections in the US reside in university spaces, those involved in their archiving have also been fighting for the activist potential of these university spaces (Licona 2012, 63; Radway 2016, 29–30). At Barnard College, former zinester Jenna Freedman founded and now heads the Barnard Zine Library, where many of the zines explored in this essay are cataloged and available to all who are interested. Her goal for the project was to ‘expand the discourse of women’s studies materials available in our academic community and to a greater extent, the world’ (Freedman, quoted in Eichorn, 2013, 129, see also Kumbier 2014). What other lessons might be learned from engaging with historical and contemporary student thinkers and activists in the development of inclusive, transformative educational spaces for the study of liberation movements?

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Jenna Freedman of the Barnard Zine Library for her insights and advice. I would also like to thank the IHR North American History Seminar in London for their feedback on an early version of this article that I presented online in 2020. Finally, I am very grateful to Jess Cotton for her feedback and guidance on this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Charlie Jeffries

Charlie Jeffries is Lecturer in American and Media Studies at the University of Sussex, and her research focuses on the history of sexuality and the history of social movements in the late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century United States. She is the author of the new book Teenage Dreams: Girlhood Sexualities in the US Culture Wars, which came out with Rutgers University Press in 2022, and the co-editor of Resist, Organize, Build: Feminist and Queer Activism in Britain and the United States in the Long 1980s, which was published by SUNY Press in the same year.

Notes

1. I refer to the courses as both women’s studies and as gender studies throughout, using the former to describe historical courses and the latter to describe how the field is known today.

2. In undertaking this study of the ways in which zinesters experienced formal feminist education in the past, there are a number of ethical concerns I had for my methodology. Firstly, I knew that I might be in danger of mistaking from the facts available to me that the feminist theory mentioned in these zines was learned in a formal classroom setting. To assume that young people’s ideas about sexual violence, pornography or body image necessarily came from a classroom would be to ignore the grassroots feminist activism that led to the inception of gender studies in the first place. I also had to consider my positionality in relation to these archives. As a queer white woman in academia, who has been both gender studies student and teacher, and who is simultaneously a part of feminist DIY bands and activist communities, there are of course ways in which I can see my own experiences reflected in these zines. For example, I have of course made the personal decision to work within feminist academia – therefore, I come to these zines with a dedication to what hooks calls ‘education as the practice of freedom’, which may not have been what these then-students ultimately believed was possible. In other words, I might be looking for radical possibility in formal feminist education that these young people did not experience. Critically, as a white scholar, I do not share the experiences of Black and POC zinesters for whom the experience of coming of age in these spheres intersected with experiences of racism. In many of the zines here that were written by young people of color, they asserted a resistance to being interpreted by their white peers at college: it is therefore crucial that I avoid doing exactly this in my scholarship, thirty years later. Therefore, in terms of my methodology, I have tried to both highlight the work of young feminists of color within zine cultures of the 1990s and 2000s, and their experience of feminism in the academy at this time, whilst taking care not to interpret these individuals’ emotions or lived experiences from what they have written.

Finally, and relatedly, there are important ethical considerations that must be made when utilizing zine archives, mostly in terms of how to gain permissions to quote from these often intimate sources. For example, many zines do not include the author or creator’s real name in the bi-lines (Kumbier 2014, 207). It is therefore often impossible to gain permission from individual zinesters to reproduce their writing, even though most of the makers of these recently archived materials are presumably still alive. Zine collections in formal university archives (including the Riot Grrrl Collection at NYU and the Barnard Zine Library, which I predominantly utilized for this paper) are usually donated by collectors of zines, not by their producers (Zine Librarians Code of Ethics 2015). To use the words of someone who thought they were working through feminist ideas in a document with a small circulation and then to put it in a widely available academic journal without their consent – while they are most likely still alive – is ethically uncomfortable (Licona 2012, 9; Zine Librarians Code of Ethics 2015). In my wider work with zines, I have spoken with zine librarians, with peers who also work with these kinds of sources, and spoken on this topic at research methods seminars to build my decision-making on whether or not to include passages from a zine. To give an overview of this rubric: if a person cannot be contacted for consent, any potentially revealing data or sensitive information is not included. I also use the guidelines put forward in the Zine Librarians Code of Ethics (2015) to think through this, though that guidebook is predominantly aimed at zine archivists. This is, however, a working approach to the ethics of utilizing zines in my research and one which I regularly revisit.

3. It is worth noting that in 2016, Ahmed resigned from her post as Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London ‘in protest at the failure to deal with the problem of sexual harassment’ (see ‘Resignation is a Feminist Issue’, her essay about this decision on her blog, Feminist Killjoys at https://feministkilljoys.com/2016/08/27/resignation-is-a-feminist-issue/, accessed October 5 2020). She is now an independent scholar.