WS 2013: Intro to Women's Studies (Estrada & Luna)

With names like The East Village Inky, Mend My Dress, Dear Stepdad, and I'm So Fucking Beautiful, zines created by girls and women over the past two decades make feminism's third wave visible. These messy, photocopied do-it-yourself documents cover every imaginable subject matter and are loaded with handwriting, collage art, stickers, and glitter. Though they all reflect the personal style of the creators, they are also sites for constructing narratives, identities, and communities. Girl Zines is the first book-length exploration of this exciting movement. Alison Piepmeier argues that these quirky, personalized booklets are tangible examples of the ways that girls and women 'do' feminism today. 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.

In the 1990s, a generation of women born during the rise of the second wave feminist movement plotted a revolution. These young activists funneled their outrage and energy into creating music, and zines using salvaged audio equipment and stolen time on copy machines. By 2000, the cultural artifacts of this movement had started to migrate from basements and storage units to community and university archives, establishing new sites of storytelling and political activism.   The Archival Turn in Feminism chronicles these important cultural artifacts and their collection, cataloging, preservation, and distribution. Cultural studies scholar Kate Eichhorn examines institutions such as the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University, The Riot Grrrl Collection at New York University, and the Barnard Zine Library. She also profiles the archivists who have assembled these significant feminist collections.   Eichhorn shows why young feminist activists, cultural producers, and scholars embraced the archive, and how they used it to stage political alliances across eras and generations. A volume in the American Literatures Initiative

What are `alternative media'? Are they the same as underground, radical or oppositional media? In this book, Chris Atton offers a fresh introduction to alternative media: one which is not limited to `radical' media, but can also account for newer cultural forms such as zines, fanzines, and personal websites. Alternative Media: #65533; Examines how and why people produce and use alternative media - to make meaning, to interpret, and to change the world in which they live #65533; Encompasses a wide range of alternative media and draws on examples from both the United States and United Kingdom #65533; Locates contemporary alternative media in their cultural, historical and political contexts Alternative Media provides a timely corrective to media theorizing which focuses almost exclusively on the output of the media conglomerates. As such it will be an essential purchase for all students and researchers with an interest in the true nature of the contemporary media environment.