Do zines remain relevant to the study of subculture? If so, how can zines inform studies of subcultural activity where other mediums cannot?
Francesca Gimson
When studying a particular subculture, there tends to be a focus on overarching themes and the governing ideas behind the movement. This focus often draws attention to the collective body. For example, the history of activism is often taught largely through the “big” events, generally embodied by large protests or events. Perhaps zines are capable of bringing to cultural and historical studies the individual perspective. Given their tendency towards DIY practices, zines carry a lot more of the individual in their presentation. Individuals create and sustain zines and offer a rare glimpse into individual desires and individual ways of interacting with other members of a subculture. So perhaps what zines bring to our study that other materials may not is the documentation of individual activities within subcultural communities.
When considered for the study of human activity, zines can provide insight into what those who subscribe to a subculture wish to portray, rather than what may be portrayed for them by scholars. Kathryn Degraff claims, “If we don’t preserve zines, historians and other researchers are going to have to write about our era solely from secondary sources.” Zines, then, can be viewed as a “purer” source for the study of subcultures, as opposed to any secondary academic sources that have been filtered through the perspective of another who may or may not be a participant and whose participatory history may or may not be acknowledged as one possible history rather than the representative history.
In subcultures, it can be difficult to pinpoint the individual, more casual side of movements. Perhaps zines are a way of accessing precisely this side of subculture. Miletic-Vejzovic points out that “Zine comics can tell us a lot about slang and language in our society, so they are as valuable a special collection as anything a library can collect.” The ability to access such language makes zines integral to the study of human history, and to anyone who wishes to study the nuances of language. The sphere that they occupy proves useful in academic research – whether cultural, linguistic, or literary – as physical realizations of cultural theories and movements that are lived by individuals in different and unpredictable ways. Zines can provide an essential dimension to students and academics for research, especially those interested in seeing an archive for what it is rather than just confirming what others have already said about it.
The significance of the physical embodiment of zines is not lost on the academic community. Alison Piepmeier contends, “Zines instigate intimate, affectionate connections between their creators and readers, not just communities but embodied communities
that are made possible by the materiality of the zine medium” (214). The significance of zines then lies, in part, in their material nature. Where subculture often exists in the background, as a set of governing life ideals, zines put into practice what a subculture declares and assumes. This physical representation of subculture, often realized through artistic expression, has a greater power to connect those in subcultural communities and to inspire those who initially lie outside the zine community. Piepmeier opens up the world of zines to students consistently and 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 other human beings” (214). This contention opens up the world of zines to possible durability against the increasing digitization of media that can lead to the attenuation of human connections. Where print books are becoming less prominent, and face-to-face interaction less constant, zines provide a space for people to live an embodied existence in the presence of others. I wonder, does this sense of community set zines apart from other print media, media in which people often become individually absorbed rather than collectively absorbed? How does the intimate community offered by a zine differ from the much larger notion of a public community sustained by newspapers, for example?
The inspirational characteristic of zines should not be overlooked. Zines are dense pamphlets that spark collective action and reaction. They can be artistic expressions of politics that inspire others to be active and inspire them to change their values. The imprint of zines cannot be ignored given this capacity. When studying movements, and the history of human interaction, we must also look to the ways in which subcultures come together to create community, and how they sustain that community. Zines are an integral part of such investigation, as they exist as “pure” unmediated representations of subcultural practice.
A series of questions regarding the digitalization of zines then come to mind. Can the most important characteristics of zines be recreated in digital archival practice? Must zines be interacted with physically in order to exist as they were intended to? If certain characteristics can be preserved, must others suffer or perhaps become less pronounced online than they are in their physical counterparts?
Punk Pedagogy 