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Alison Piepmeier (1972-2016) was the director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the College of Charleston. She is known for her research and activism within third-wave feminism.
Her most famous work is the 2009 book Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism, the first academic study of zines and women as their creators. She was also interested in the intersection of feminist and disability studies.
I've come to feel that the political work of grrrl zines is more subtle and differently resistant than my earlier line of questioning allowed me to see. What I'm interested in now are these new modes of doing politics, these micropolitical pedagogies that operate in the fissures and forgotten places, that offer dreams on display, that provoke outrage, that invite all kinds of emulation. Viewing grrrl zines in this way not only makes their interventions more visible and valuable but also gives a framework for evaluating the larger world of third wave feminism. These zines become case studies that materialize the arguments that third wave scholars and girls' studies scholars have been making—arguments about girls' and women's agency and about what it means to resist in the current cultural moment.
Piepmeier, Alison. Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism. New York: NYU Press, 2009. Print. 190-191.
A next life without work, without purpose, would be disappointing.
Alison Piepmeier, the journalist who passed away Friday from a brain tumor, via ABC News
To my brothers, parents, friends, teachers, students, co-workers, lovers, and readers, I ask forgiveness for anything I've done to hurt you. Thank you for my beautiful life. If there's a heaven, or whatever, I'll see you there.
From Alison Piepmeier's final column in Charleston City Paper. She is dying from brain cancer. Alison is also professor/director of women's and gender studies at College of Charleston Please, please take a moment to read this today. http://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/charleston/thank-you-for-my-beautiful-life/Content?oid=6044154
The idea of zines as sites of theory production may be somewhat surprising, as theory is generally associated with elitist academic practices, and zines occupy the opposite end of the spectrum, so intentionally lowbrow as to be able to be mistaken for trash.
Alison Piepmeier, Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism
Zines have a gendered origin story, which has mostly gone untold. Most studies of zines identify them as resistant media originating in male-dominated spaces. They are positioned as descendants of the pamphlets of the American Revolution and Dadaist and Samizdat publishing, emerging from the fanzines of the 1930s and the punk community of the 1970s. According to this narrative, the zine proliferation was triggered by the convergence of punk culture and technology. Punk culture provided the "zine" terminology, along with a non-elitist, do-it-yourself (DIY) structure and aesthetic, and these ideologies were channeled into the production of zines because of technological innovations such as desktop publishing and inexpensive, widely available photocopying.
Alison Piepmeier, Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism
The author goes on to explain that this narrative is insufficient, because it ignores the involvement of suffragists and women’s involvement in the history of zines in general.
Personally, I think that it is important to note, that throughout every analysis of culture and counter-culture and sub-cultures that we partake in, we are still viewing things as people who have grown up internalizing and ingraining in our views: the oppressions dominant in our times. When we look at history, so much of what has taken place has been erased by not only the narrative of male dominance, but of all the different aspects of intersectional kyriarchy that we face. Even this analysis ignores racial discrepancies in the narrative, and the all too real and harsh elitism within punk culture.
Part of what makes girl zines remain so vital as a feminist project is that they are an ongoing conversation, a way to be achingly immediate yet also provide a link to the printed matter that came before.
Zeisler, Andi. "Foreword." Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism. By Alison Piepmeier. New York: NYU Press, 2009. xiv.
...the familiar understanding of the Civil Rights movement is that Martin Luther King, Jr., was the person who initiated it—but in fact, ass-kicking investigator and activist Rosa Parks was initiating resistance while King was still in high school. She wasn’t an elderly woman who happened to sit on the bus: she was a radical activist who saw what needed to be done, and then kept her mouth shut so that she could become a strategic symbol.
Alison Piepmeier (author of Girl Zines) gives us her take on Women's History Month and the histories it omits. Check it out!
