User:Sarah Schnei/sandbox

The zine sub-genre of 'girl zines' originates with the riot grrrl movement, and both are associated with third-wave feminism. As feminist documents, these zines emerge out of a longer legacy of feminist and/or women's self-publication that includes scrapbooking as well as the creation of women's health literature and a variety of mimeographed pamphlets. For women writing all of these documents, self-publishing allowed them to circulate ideas that would not otherwise be published. As traditional press coverage of riot grrrl zines and music was "superficial, at best, and damagingly counter-productive, at worst," zinesters Erika Rienstien and May Summer founded the Riot Grrrl Press to serve as a zine distribution network that would allow riot grrrls to "express themselves and reach large audiences without having to rely on the mainstream press". Zine scholars Kevin Dunn and May Summer Farnsworth use this excerpt of Erika Reinstein's Fantastic Fanzine no. 2 to explain the relationship between politics and media production for girl zinesters : "''I"

- Reinstein

Girls used these zines to discuss their personal experiences, and commonly discussed themes include body image and sexuality as well as sexual violence, assault, abuse, and incest. As first-person, grassroots texts, girl zines serve to value the knowledge that girl zinesters have with these issues based on their lived experiences. In addition to shared subject matter, girl zines also use a variety of rhetorical tropes that include expressions of intense anger, reclamation and refiguring of femininity, and juxtaposition of unassociated images or ideas. . Riot grrrl zines also employ an "aesthetics of access" that enacts intimacy with imagined readers and notions of riot grrrl community and centers personal experience under the feminist saying "the personal is political." Scholar and zinester Mimi Thi Nguyen notes that these norms unequally burdened riot grrrls of color with allowing white riot grrrls access to their personal experiences, an act which in itself was supposed to address systemic racism.

Many of these zines are now housed in archival collections around the world, which are becoming increasingly important sites of feminist practice. Even to the present women write zines that bear resemblance to those from the 1990's, despite predictions of that zines would die out with the rise of blogging and the internet. Writing zines allow women to avoid harassment they might receive on more public blogs, and allows for a more material record of their work.