Zines Then and Now- Janice Radway (2009)
Where are zines collected?
Did anyone look at Zine Wiki?
DIY production, non mainstream circulation- How do you get self-made content out? In this class, it’s Tumblr, but where else? We all act as consumers and producers- what do you produce? Music, photography, writing?
What kind of content tends to go to zines vs. mainstream production? Fanzines, perzines, alt music, feminist, focused on race and ethnicity, preoccupied with questions of sex and gender identity what do these things have in common?
"Book historians have taught us that books are more than texts and that people do more with their books than read them.” (5)
"books and other forms of mediated communication must be approached at once as signifying texts, as materially crafted
objects, as occasions of and for social exchange, and as incitements to reading and writing” (6)
"Zines deliberately confound the boundary between the particular and the generic, for example, between the unique and the formulaic. They prompt us to wonder, are they unique art objects or ritualized forms of communication? Zines also disrupt the boundary between the materialities of writing and typeface and the signifying capacities of language. Should they be considered forms of material culture, then, or texts demanding to be read? Zines play, too, with the dividing line between orality and print as well as that between affect and reason. Should we attend to their rhetorical effects or primarily to their ideological content? Zines also disturb the categorical distinction between production and consumption, between writing and reading. As a consequence, they trouble the too-easy dichotomy between author and reader. Most significantly perhaps, zines worry the distinction between object and event, between text and the activities it sets in motion.” (7)
What does it say rhetorically when something is handwritten vs. typed?
"I first marvelled at the way zineing expanded Jess’s social world beyond her local relations with her family, friends,
and high school classmates.” (13) How do you communicate with your social circles? What do you pass along? Memes, links, etc? How do you know your audience? Do you belong to different social circles? How does your communication change?
"When first encountering the girl-produced zines in Jess’s collection, one can’t help but notice that they mobilise a range of aesthetic and rhetorical strategies as if deliberately to escape the condition of being inert. They display a wild mixture of
handwriting and print, nearly all of which refuses to stay put within the lines. They sport images that overlap and bleed into one another. In many cases, those images strain to burst from the page and sometimes narratives do not follow serially, page by
page. Indeed zines are nothing if not motley. Ordered reading is constantly disrupted, as a result, by jagged, nervous, zig-zaggy motion, by the sense that one is encountering random miscellany rather than ordered sequence. Zines display a protean energy that refuses to be circumscribed within the decorous confines of print form or the ordered circuits through which print and books usually circulate. As hand crafted material objects, therefore, they constantly call attention to the conventional limits of the handwriting, print, and paper out of which they are fabricated. As much as they demand to be read, they also foreground their status as ‘not books.’” (14)
"Zines gesture insistently toward the rich densities of the social world not simply through indexical reference and representation but, literally, by incorporating bits and pieces of that world within their pages. This is done through practices of collage, bricolage, citation, and cultural recycling.” Why is remix an important form of art?
“[Z]ine-ing is a social phenomenon, a form of social action driven by desires for new forms of sociability and new ways of being in the world. Yet it is important to note that zine-ing is not just any kind of social action. It is both a communicative practice and an aesthetic one, an activity that draws people into conversation with one another and one that results not only in the creation of an
aesthetic object but also in the execution of an aesthetic performance.” (24) What does zine-ing as a verb encompass? How did zine-ing construct new social networks?
"It is significant, I think, that zinesters seized upon older, book production technologies at the very moment they were being superseded by the explosion of electronic and digital forms of communication. Reclaiming print materials and publication practices that for three hundred years at least had served as the material basis for the commercially organized production and reproduction of legitimate knowledge as well as virtually all literary communication, they insisted on the viability of do-it-yourself publication.... At the same time, they revelled in the specificities of old typewriters, outmoded and highly variable typefaces, the
individuated nature of handwriting, and the materialities of reproduction, folding, binding, stapling, and distribution. Thus they doubly refused corporately produced mass culture by defying its ideological strictures and by insisting on the materiality of
the actual and quite varied forms of labor involved in publication.” Why does it matter that this happened in the 90s? What similar movement is happening today?
