Independent Feminist Comics and Zines: An Introduction
A zine is an independently created, self-published, small circulation work that may include text, photographs, illustrations, or any number of such combinations, and may appear in a variety of formats as well as be on any number of topics and themes. They may be messy or clean but tend to offer evidence of the authors' hand. They may be created by a single person or be multi-authored, may focus on one theme or touch on many varying topics. Zines may include art, poetry, fan fiction, or storytelling. They may cover areas such as art, politics, music and film. Zine expert Alison Peipmeier explains that “zines are quirky, individualized booklets filled with diatribes, re-workings of pop culture iconography, and all variety of personal and political narratives” (2008, 214). Additionally, zines tend to be photocopied, hand-assembled, and individually mailed to subscribers. Peipmeier also explains how zines are “analogous to a letter from a friend, and the materiality of the zine—the visual style, the size and shape, the fact that it comes in the mail, and that the reader can hold ‘actual paper’—leads to this personal connection” (2009, 224). Zine makers and readers embrace “scrappy messiness,” as it is an aesthetic that serves to humanize the creator and the zine (Peipmeier, 2009, 67). Liana Scalettar asserts in, "Resistance, Representation, and the Subject of Violence," that a zine "is a cultural product whose popular form and format seems wholly commodified, whose principal selling point seems to be a release from anger and a subsequent acceptance, of current political systems and discourses, [...] is a text whose content provides abundant material for fantasies--potential acts--of political resistance"(261-262). Because zines are rooted outside the mainstream, they provide many alternative perspectives. They collect and make visible the voices, stories, and histories of otherwise erased or ignored people. Undoubtedly, zines are potent, personal and political.
In “Theorizing Sexuality in Comics,” Joe Sanders has explained that the Comics Code was a tool for creating a mainstream and censoring deviant material that in turn, had the unintended consequence of presenting alternative sexualities as rather potent (154). Therefore, sexuality became one of the distinctions between mainstream and alternative comic publications (Sanders, 154). At the intersections of sex, sexuality, race, gender, age, and/or class third-wave feminist zines are deeply rooted in the corporeal experiences of femininity, maternity, gender, and sexuality. In these ways, such feminist comics and zines are from the margins and inexplicably tied to oral culture and history, activism and community, intersections and identity, and materiality. Scalettar also asserts that zines provide a version of feminist political resistance to our mass-mediated world of the 'everyday' (273). Zines also have a rich history tied to DIY ethos, as small-scale independent and political publications. Therefore, zines often reflect politics through alternative lenses such as feminism, black culture, anarchism, and civil rights. Adrienne Shaw asserts, in “Women on Women: Lesbian Identity, Lesbian Community, and Lesbian Comics” that the experiences, politics, and ideas made visible in these feminist comics and zines are what appeal to a wide variety of readers (91). Likewise, Roberta Smith states that, "comics have a freedom and tenderness that enables them to do things that other forms of expression can't manage nearly as effectively" (4). Zines are also a potent medium for creators, because there is total freedom of expression within the form. Anyone can make a zine.
While the zine goes back to the early pulp Science Fiction fanzines of the 1930s, many zines emerged from the Punk movement in the 1970s. Third-wave feminism that emphasized inclusion and multiplicity provided the backdrop for the feminist zines that emerged during the Riot Grrl movement of the 1990s. The first feminist zine was Not Your Bitch in 1989, published out of Minneapolis. Subsequently, BUST appeared as a photocopied zine in 1993, followed by Bitch in 1996. Both are still in print today, and are well-regarded feminist magazines now available at many mainstream bookstores including Chapters and Barnes & Noble.
A popular sub-genre of the feminist zine is the mama zine. A self-published book by The Lesbian and Feminist Mothers Political Action Group, Children and Feminism, came out in 1982. In 1989, China Martens produced the first mama zine, The Future Generation, opening the gates to a huge movement of feminist mama zines including Ariel Gore’s HipMama Magazine in 1992 and Ayun Halliday’s The East Village Inky in 1999. Mamaphiles #1 – Birth, a 132-page anthology mama zine collected work from 33 mama zinesters and was released in 2003. Two follow up compilations, Mamaphiles #2 – Cutting the Cord and Mamaphiles #3 – Coming Home, were released in 2005 and 2007 respectively. While Ariel Gore's HipMama is not a comic it is one of the more popular alternative feminist mama zines, and is widely credited with influencing the mama zine scene. It has also spurned several books including the HipMama's Survival Guide, Breeder, and The Essential HipMama.
The scope of the mama zine scene is vast and varied. Poet Noemi Martinez's Hermana, Resist was a Chicana mama poetry-zine that presented frank discussions on racism, feminism, motherhood, and poverty that ran from 2000-2007. Chicago zinster-librarian Celia C. Pérez has recently collected twenty years of her zines, in the compilation Ofrenda: A Zine Anthology. Pérez zines include I Dreamed I Was Assertive, Roots and Wings, Hickey Underworld, Sherman Sez. Activist Vikki Law has published several zines including Family Values: a Parental Approach to the Republican National Convention, Mama Sez No War, and Tenacious: Writings from Women in Prison. Tenacious: Writings from Women in Prison started in 2003 and is comprised of articles, poetry, letters, and art by incarcerated women. Additionally, feminist father Tomas Moniz publishes the radical parenting zine Rad Dad. Out of the sea of mama zines came the sub-genre, the mama comic-zine.
These, and other types of sub-cultural feminist zines and comics have created powerful and meaningful connections between creators and readers, and Peipmeier suggests that these connections form embodied communities that are made possible by the materiality of the zine medium (2009, 58). Peipmeier describes that by "mobilizing particular human experiences that are linked to the body, including vulnerability, affection and pleasure, these zines leverage their materiality into a kind of surrogate physical interaction and offers mechanisms for creating meaningful relationships" (2009, 59). She claims that "in a world where more and more of us spend all day at our computers, zines reconnect us to our bodies and to [each] other" (2008, 214). Rooted in our bodies are our experience of gender, sex, and sexuality, therefore both lesbian and maternal experiences are corporeal. These embodied experiences and complicated by many intersections of oppression, particularly age, race, class, and sexuality, to which mama zines often speak. Also rooted in our bodies, are the emotions that the individual style of DIY various comics and zines convey through their illustrations, be they realistic or abstract, detailed or sparse.
This is an exploration of independent feminist lesbian comics and mama comic-zines. This project looks at two lesbian comics, Diane DiMassa's Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist and Alison Bechdel's Dyke's to Watch Out For, and four mama comic-zines, The East Village Inky, Hathor the Cow Goddess, Hausfrau Muthuh-Zine, and The Amazing 'True' Adventure of a Teenage Single Mom. All six zines are deeply rooted in the embodied experience of their main characters, whose gender identities may vary but who are all biologically female--and whom are undoubtedly feminist. These comics and zines have various styles, and reflect strategies such as the active deployment of identity politics, gender-queering, and speaking from the margins, and cultivate embodied communities, make meaningful connections, and help foster the spirit of third-wave feminism.
A zine is an independently created, self-published, small circulation work that may include text, photographs, illustrations, or any number of such combinations, and may appear in a variety of formats as well as be on any number of topics and themes. They may be messy or clean but tend to offer evidence of the authors' hand. They may be created by a single person or be multi-authored, may focus on one theme or touch on many varying topics. Zines may include art, poetry, fan fiction, or storytelling. They may cover areas such as art, politics, music and film. Zine expert Alison Peipmeier explains that “zines are quirky, individualized booklets filled with diatribes, re-workings of pop culture iconography, and all variety of personal and political narratives” (2008, 214). Additionally, zines tend to be photocopied, hand-assembled, and individually mailed to subscribers. Peipmeier also explains how zines are “analogous to a letter from a friend, and the materiality of the zine—the visual style, the size and shape, the fact that it comes in the mail, and that the reader can hold ‘actual paper’—leads to this personal connection” (2009, 224). Zine makers and readers embrace “scrappy messiness,” as it is an aesthetic that serves to humanize the creator and the zine (Peipmeier, 2009, 67). Liana Scalettar asserts in, "Resistance, Representation, and the Subject of Violence," that a zine "is a cultural product whose popular form and format seems wholly commodified, whose principal selling point seems to be a release from anger and a subsequent acceptance, of current political systems and discourses, [...] is a text whose content provides abundant material for fantasies--potential acts--of political resistance"(261-262). Because zines are rooted outside the mainstream, they provide many alternative perspectives. They collect and make visible the voices, stories, and histories of otherwise erased or ignored people. Undoubtedly, zines are potent, personal and political.
In “Theorizing Sexuality in Comics,” Joe Sanders has explained that the Comics Code was a tool for creating a mainstream and censoring deviant material that in turn, had the unintended consequence of presenting alternative sexualities as rather potent (154). Therefore, sexuality became one of the distinctions between mainstream and alternative comic publications (Sanders, 154). At the intersections of sex, sexuality, race, gender, age, and/or class third-wave feminist zines are deeply rooted in the corporeal experiences of femininity, maternity, gender, and sexuality. In these ways, such feminist comics and zines are from the margins and inexplicably tied to oral culture and history, activism and community, intersections and identity, and materiality. Scalettar also asserts that zines provide a version of feminist political resistance to our mass-mediated world of the 'everyday' (273). Zines also have a rich history tied to DIY ethos, as small-scale independent and political publications. Therefore, zines often reflect politics through alternative lenses such as feminism, black culture, anarchism, and civil rights. Adrienne Shaw asserts, in “Women on Women: Lesbian Identity, Lesbian Community, and Lesbian Comics” that the experiences, politics, and ideas made visible in these feminist comics and zines are what appeal to a wide variety of readers (91). Likewise, Roberta Smith states that, "comics have a freedom and tenderness that enables them to do things that other forms of expression can't manage nearly as effectively" (4). Zines are also a potent medium for creators, because there is total freedom of expression within the form. Anyone can make a zine.
While the zine goes back to the early pulp Science Fiction fanzines of the 1930s, many zines emerged from the Punk movement in the 1970s. Third-wave feminism that emphasized inclusion and multiplicity provided the backdrop for the feminist zines that emerged during the Riot Grrl movement of the 1990s. The first feminist zine was Not Your Bitch in 1989, published out of Minneapolis. Subsequently, BUST appeared as a photocopied zine in 1993, followed by Bitch in 1996. Both are still in print today, and are well-regarded feminist magazines now available at many mainstream bookstores including Chapters and Barnes & Noble.
A popular sub-genre of the feminist zine is the mama zine. A self-published book by The Lesbian and Feminist Mothers Political Action Group, Children and Feminism, came out in 1982. In 1989, China Martens produced the first mama zine, The Future Generation, opening the gates to a huge movement of feminist mama zines including Ariel Gore’s HipMama Magazine in 1992 and Ayun Halliday’s The East Village Inky in 1999. Mamaphiles #1 – Birth, a 132-page anthology mama zine collected work from 33 mama zinesters and was released in 2003. Two follow up compilations, Mamaphiles #2 – Cutting the Cord and Mamaphiles #3 – Coming Home, were released in 2005 and 2007 respectively. While Ariel Gore's HipMama is not a comic it is one of the more popular alternative feminist mama zines, and is widely credited with influencing the mama zine scene. It has also spurned several books including the HipMama's Survival Guide, Breeder, and The Essential HipMama.
The scope of the mama zine scene is vast and varied. Poet Noemi Martinez's Hermana, Resist was a Chicana mama poetry-zine that presented frank discussions on racism, feminism, motherhood, and poverty that ran from 2000-2007. Chicago zinster-librarian Celia C. Pérez has recently collected twenty years of her zines, in the compilation Ofrenda: A Zine Anthology. Pérez zines include I Dreamed I Was Assertive, Roots and Wings, Hickey Underworld, Sherman Sez. Activist Vikki Law has published several zines including Family Values: a Parental Approach to the Republican National Convention, Mama Sez No War, and Tenacious: Writings from Women in Prison. Tenacious: Writings from Women in Prison started in 2003 and is comprised of articles, poetry, letters, and art by incarcerated women. Additionally, feminist father Tomas Moniz publishes the radical parenting zine Rad Dad. Out of the sea of mama zines came the sub-genre, the mama comic-zine.
These, and other types of sub-cultural feminist zines and comics have created powerful and meaningful connections between creators and readers, and Peipmeier suggests that these connections form embodied communities that are made possible by the materiality of the zine medium (2009, 58). Peipmeier describes that by "mobilizing particular human experiences that are linked to the body, including vulnerability, affection and pleasure, these zines leverage their materiality into a kind of surrogate physical interaction and offers mechanisms for creating meaningful relationships" (2009, 59). She claims that "in a world where more and more of us spend all day at our computers, zines reconnect us to our bodies and to [each] other" (2008, 214). Rooted in our bodies are our experience of gender, sex, and sexuality, therefore both lesbian and maternal experiences are corporeal. These embodied experiences and complicated by many intersections of oppression, particularly age, race, class, and sexuality, to which mama zines often speak. Also rooted in our bodies, are the emotions that the individual style of DIY various comics and zines convey through their illustrations, be they realistic or abstract, detailed or sparse.
This is an exploration of independent feminist lesbian comics and mama comic-zines. This project looks at two lesbian comics, Diane DiMassa's Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist and Alison Bechdel's Dyke's to Watch Out For, and four mama comic-zines, The East Village Inky, Hathor the Cow Goddess, Hausfrau Muthuh-Zine, and The Amazing 'True' Adventure of a Teenage Single Mom. All six zines are deeply rooted in the embodied experience of their main characters, whose gender identities may vary but who are all biologically female--and whom are undoubtedly feminist. These comics and zines have various styles, and reflect strategies such as the active deployment of identity politics, gender-queering, and speaking from the margins, and cultivate embodied communities, make meaningful connections, and help foster the spirit of third-wave feminism.