Last June, Hillary wrote a post on zines that led several of us here at cac.ophony to “come out” as ex-zinesters. To continue the conversation about zines, I’d like to point out to folks the most recent issue of SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. They’ve devoted a whopping 74 pages to a comparative symposium on feminist zines, featuring both essays and full-page reprints. (Full disclosure here: some of my old zines are cited, including in Barnard Zine Librarian Jenna Freedman’s essay, in which she discusses a zine I edited when I was an angst-ridden teenager. I find this both flattering and terribly embarrassing.)
Over the summer, Jenna invited me and several other people who had donated our zine collections to the Barnard Zine Library for tea (how Seven Sisters!), and we all spent a lot of time in the stacks flipping through the zines that were in circulation. This was certainly a nostalgia trip down memory lane, and a quite physical one at that, as we were literally looking at and holding the very photocopied and stapled pieces of paper that we may have once kept stashed in boxes and bins under our beds and in our closets. Seeing zines in their original form now archived in a college library is quite a different experience from seeing them discussed or reprinted in a fancy academic journal, however. The attention is nice, but one’s interaction with the zines feels at least one step removed. Even if you read the print version of SIGNS rather than online, the reprinted zine excerpts don’t look or feel like the original. (And, in this case, reading this issue of SIGNS online instead of print allows you to see the zine reprints in color).
I am fascinated by the “afterlife” of those objects that were once considered to be—or were created to be—ephemeral. They live on in discussions by critics and historians, and in historical archives, libraries, and museums. These days, they are also being revived digitally, including on Google Books. You know, in the pre-blogging era, when we were sixteen and pouring our angsty hearts out on paper, did any of us have any idea that the words and images we created would still be in circulation? If we did, would that have changed what we produced, how we presented ourselves, or who we considered our audience to be? I wonder.
It’s a really good question that you end up on; sometimes I think that my old zines would be of more interest to high school social workers and psychologists than anyone else! For feminist historians, though, there’s got to be some fascinating stuff in the ramblings of young people who were unencumbered by notions of audience while very much influenced by third wave feminist thought.
I was having trouble loading the SIGNS website, but from past experience I’d guess that my response would be similar to yours– there’s something missing when you re-publish zines. Maybe it’s all about context. And actually, it’s not uncommon to confront similar kinds of questions when looking at performance archiving, too; the weird feeling one gets when watching a video of a play that was all about immediacy is not all that different from the detached feeling of reading a zine reprinted or excerpted.