Zine

Let us start with a succinct definition of zine from Janice Radway, echoed across the academic literature: “Until zines emerged as digital forms, they were generally defined as handmade, noncommercial, irregularly issued, small-run, paper publications circulated by individuals participating in alternative, special-interest communities” (2011, 140). From here, the familiar story of the zine unfolds: the term zine is a recent derivation of fanzine, itself coined in the 1930s to refer to self-published magazines of science fiction, punks in the 1970s adopted the form to create an alternative infrastructure for a global phenomenon, and (some) girls and young women in the 1990s used zines to build a revolution of some kind—what kind exactly remains up for debate—upon a foundation of emotional intimacy and immediacy. Indeed, in academic studies and adjacent histories, the zine is most often heralded as a material form for the marginalized, as a medium of self-expression (without editors, advertisers, or censors) made through accessible means (using low-cost technologies of reproduction) in search of community (rather than audience) and infused with the tempo of immediacy, even urgency. These qualities of self-expression and community building are common themes for zine study, as found in Stephen Duncombe’s Notes from Underground (1997), the first academic monograph about zines and “alternative culture”: “The tension in the punk scene between the individual and the community, between freedom and rules, is a microcosm of the tension that exists within all the networked communities of the zine scene. Zines are profoundly personal expressions, yet as a medium of participatory communication they depend upon and help create community” (65).