Zines 101: History
Left: Riot Grrl fanzine cover, ca. 1991
Courtesy The Riot Grrrl Collection, New York University Special Collections
Right: Slash vol.1 no.5 cover featuring Debbie Harry.
History of Zines & Zine Culture
- Beginnings of self-publishing
- Marginalized groups have self-published materials in pamphlets and leaflets throughout history. The concept that a radical idea would be shared in a small, portable print is not one that originated with zines!
- 1930s - Fanzines
- Zines began being created around the 1930s in the U.S. They were originally called "fanzines", which combined the term "fan" and "magazine." The term was created by Russ Chauvenet in his own fanzine Detours, where he denounced the term "fannag" that was gaining popularity, and coined the term fanzine instead.
- A fanzine became known as a small, independently published material about a piece of media (particularly science fiction media), such as Star Trek, or the media's fandom itself.
- 1970s - Punk
- Punk zines emerged as a part of the punk subculture in the 1970s. While also a genre of music, the punk subculture also became a way of life, which centered on disenfranchisement, anti-oppression, anti-capitalist, and more. The embodiment of these themes became intertwined with zines, which we still see attributed to zines today.
- 1990s - riot grrrl
- riot grrl is a feminist underground punk movement that originated in the 1990s and is still alive today. The movement focused on themes similar to the previous punk generation in the 1970s, but also spoke on more feminist themes, such as sexual assault against women, patriarchy, and female empowerment. While also largely a music movement, zines became a way to express themselves and communicate in the community.
- 2000s - the internet
- The internet forever changed the way zines can be made and distributed. At the beginning of the internet, webzines were created, which were digital blogs or webpages dedicated to a subject. Around this time, zines became less popular and faded from more mainstream conversations and even underground movements. With the rise of digital technology, the internet and social media platforms have become the main way to express oneself and communicate with others.
- However, the internet did not kill zines. To this day, zines are created with the assistance of digital tools and are sometimes shared digitally through various social media platforms.
- 2010s - zine resurgence
- There has been a revival of print zines and the punk zine ethos over the last 10-20 years. This is likely due to several factors, including the creation of zine festivals (zine fests), where zinesters can showcase, give away, or sell their work, zine libraries, where zines can be acquired and circulated to the community for free, or zine curriculum, where teachers are implementing zines into their classes as a teaching tool.
References
- Fancyclopedia. Detours. https://fancyclopedia.org/wiki/Detours.
- Joan Marie Verba. Boldly Writing: A Trekker Fan and Zine History, 1967-1987. 2nd ed. chrome-extension://cefhlgghdlbobdpihfdadojifnpghbji/https://web.archive.org/web/20160910042451/http://www.ftlpublications.com/bwebook.pdf.
- Teal Triggs. Fanzines: the DIY Revolution. 2010. https://archive.org/details/fanzinesdiyrevol0000trig/page/8/mode/2up.
- Garrison, Ednie-Kach (2000). "U.S. Feminism-Grrrl Style! Youth (Sub)Cultures and the Technologics of the Third Wave". Feminist Studies. 26 (1): 142. doi:10.2307/3178596.
- Jenna Worthman. "Why the Internet Didn't Kill Zines." The New York Times. 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/magazine/why-the-internet-didnt-kill-zines.html?smid=url-share.
