'This is the work that grrrl zines are doing. They break away from the linear models through a fluid pedagogy of process. They offer tools for awakening outrage and engaging in protest through pedagogies of active critique. And they invite readers to step into their own citizenship through pedagogies of imagination. Because of sorts of linear expectations scholars have had of alternative media and activist work more broadly, the resistance and political interventions of grrrl zines (and third wave feminists) have been hard for many scholars to recognise, but by recognising the dominator culture and reframing what it means to be political, these interventions become visible.' (pg.164)
'The word I use to describe these zines' mode of political intervention is 'process', a word which has two distinct but related meanings in the context of these zines. In one sense, process points to the fact that grrrl zines emphasise the means rather than the ends - the means of creating a zine itself, along with creating a network of sympathetic read. In addition these zines offer their creators a space to publicly process the violence done to them and to make their healing a public art. By making visible the emotional, mechanical and theoretical processes involved in creating their zines and by articulating their own healing processes, these zinesters counter consumer capitalism and make use of an embodied community for personal and social transformation' (pg.165)
'By emphasising and making visible the idea of process and processing, zines like Greenzine challenge consumer capitalism and the silencing of women's voices, and they make space for a multivalent micropolitics' (pg.171)
' As I was finishing up this project, a colleague alerted me to the fact that his college-aged daughter, Anna Eisen, was doing what she called "feminist scrapbooking", creating beautiful collages of pictures, comics and typed and handwritten text to document her everyday life. She showed me some of these pages and they struck me as akin to one-off zines and the feminist scrapbooks of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.' (pg.193)
'Furthermore, grrrl zines are sites for the articulation and illustration of third wave feminist theoretical work. Within these documents, girls and women develop conceptual apparatus to identify, make visible, and address long-standing - but shifting and innovative - social justice issues.' (pg.197)
'Because these embodied communities are sites of vulnerability and care, they are part of what makes it possible for girls and women to articulate complex, fragmented identities in their zines and to try out different modes of intervention. They are what inspires the gifting, the generous creativity and expression that keeps mining alive. These embodied grrrl zine communities are linked to feminist communities of the past; examingin these cultural productions as part of the long-term feminist efforts reveals linkages between the incarnations of feminism, even as grrrl zines make visible the innovative ways girls and women in the late twentieth century and early-twenty-first enact agency and resistance.' (pg.198)
'Grrrl zines off unsurpassed access to the stories, struggles and creativity of girls and women since the late 1980's. They are rich primary sources, sites where girls and women document and construct their lives and where they articulate and illustrate third wave feminist theory. In their negotiations with this cultural moment, their bridging of the abstract and the intensely local, their embrace of the utopian at the same time that they grapple with harsh realities, they offer a glimpse of what kinds of resistance are possible. They are, ultimately, hopeful artefacts, bringing their readers into an embodied community and encouraging them to imagine - and work for - a better world.' (pg.200)
No comments:
Post a Comment