Where in our adult-run, globalised and centralized media landscape can critically and politically thinking people – and especially girls and young women - express their voices and opinions without being censored or ridiculed? Where can we as self-identified feminists from various backgrounds and contexts create our own spaces and representations?

These questions have occupied me since a decade. I strongly believe in the concept of “Praxis” – which is the interrelation of theory and research, activism and political action. Consequently, I have been active as an artist, archivist, activist, and researcher, whereby my belief in anti-racist and anti-capitalist transnational grassroots feminism(s) is the red thread through all these roles. I understand feminism not only as an important theoretical undertaking and social movement but also as a non-hierarchical, process-oriented, participatory collaborative practice that spans across borders.

On the The New Women’s Music Sampler, Tammy Rae Carter described feminism as “ [...] a political call to action to bring an end to racism, sexism, homophobia, classism and all other political, social and psychological oppressions”. But feminism is also about having access to information to be able to make informed choices about one’s life, surrounding environment and the world. Hence, one of the main tasks of feminism is, in my view, to enable people – and particularly girls, young women, women of color and of working-class origin, and queer youth - to access information so they can learn about issues and visions of social transformation, use the information to think critically, produce informed knowledge, and to become active – individually and collectively. After all, as US-cultural studies researcher Stephen Duncombe has said: "The first act of politics is simply to act” (2002: 7).

It is also necessary to reflect on who is able to access information, and who not. Who gets to participate in knowledge production and whose voices are left out?  We need to address key issues of the simultaneity of oppressions and privileges at the intersections of class, race, and gender, and of rewriting history and creating oppositional agency from the point of view of the most marginalized and exploited people in the world – those “written out of history”, as Chandra Talpede Mohanty has formulated in Feminism without Borders (2003). Writing and knowledge production play a central role in this:

“Feminist analysis has always recognized the centrality of rewriting and remembering history, a process that is significant not merely as a corrective to the gaps, erasures, and misunderstandings of hegemonic masculinist history but because the very practice of remembering and rewriting leads to the formation of politicized consciousness and self-identity” ( Mohanty , 2003: 78).

Clearly, mainstream media fails to provide a venue for many people who find themselves excluded, or misrepresented. Therefore, in recent years a growing number of marginalized people have taken the tools of cultural production into their hands and have created their very own symbols, cultural codes, and images of (self-)representation. Throughout history, women have consistently demanded and gained the right to vote, study, and participate in political life through self-publishing (Steiner 1992). One of the most direct and fundamental ways the feminist movement has been changing the way people think – and act - is through writing and self-publishing.

The projects I am introducing all center around the production and archiving of knowledge produced by those “written out of history” – in this case girls and young women, and queer youth involved in self-publishing and feminist (sub)cultural production (sometimes called “third wave feminism”) - and to make this knowledge accessible.

Do-It-Yourself: From female sequences to Grrrl Zine Network

Alternative and independent media is vital for any social change and movement. Grrl zines are especially important because we live in a world where male voices reign supreme and strong, independent, feminist women’s voices are few and far between. They are out there, but we don’t often get to hear them... unless you pick up a zine to read! (Kelly, editor of the zine Pretty Ugly, Australia)

I am 33 years old and grew up in a small village in the mountains of Austria where my parents worked as elementary school teachers. After I left home at 18, I studied sculpture, art education, and German literature in Salzburg, and grew more and more frustrated with the great canon of art and literature surrounding the (male) genius. During my exchange year at Duke University in the United States, I began to explore my interest in Women’s Studies and to question that very canon. Upon my return, I moved to Vienna and founded together with two friends a magazine called “female sequences.” Our aim was to document and provide a platform for feminist and lesbian art, music, pop culture and theory in Austria. Although we made it as a collective only through issue number one (one of us continued to publish the magazine), I became more interested in feminist alternative media. I found a number of feminist artists i  n the German-speaking area who use magazines as an alternative outlet to the male-dominated gallery system and to create their own representation, on their own terms[i].

Feminist zines - self-published and –distributed, small-circulation usually photocopied m agazines - represent a continuation of this long tradition of feminist alternative and grassroots publishing. When in 1991 the riot grrrl movement emerged out of the alternative and punk music scene in the United States, thousands of young women began to produce personal and political zines with explicitly feminist themes. Nowadays, many found a place on the Internet and are available as electronic-zines. Do-It Yourself is the central motto of zine publishing. There are no guidelines or rules on how to make a zine; emphasis is put on process-oriented, non-hierarchical action and on the plurality of feminist expressions. I am drawn to zines because they reflect the unfiltered personal and political voices of people from different backgrounds, countries and interests. Zines document not only people’s daily lives and their participation in social and political life but also the cultural zeitgeist and a certain historical moment. Historically, these voices have been erased and forgotten – and that’s why they are so important to document and preserve!

On my consequent search through the online world, I found that there were feminist zines in the US, UK, Peru, Singapore, Mexico, Israel, Poland, the Philippines, New Zealand, Norway, Japan and many other countries! I stumbled across this international network of young women producing their own, unapologetically feminist media - and I was hooked. Yet, I discovered that there was no central online resource site documenting international feminist zines. Most sites focused on English-written zines from the US and the UK but did not include zines from other counties. Because zines often have a short publishing lifetime and are difficult to catalog (e.g. because of the use of nicknames, lacking publishing city or date), many libraries have not archived them. So I decided to create a platform and online archive for international feminist zines as an arena for all those who fell under the mainstream radar, or better, subverted, criticized, and made fun of the mainstream.

In 2001 I went online with Grrrl Zine Network: A resource site for international grrrl, lady, queer and trans folk zines, distros and DIY projects (www.grrrlzines.net). Based on my personal bookmarks I listed around 50 international zines. Today, the site lists and links more than 2000 zines from 43 countries that are written in 15 languages[ii]. The resource section provides information about feminist organizations, art, popular culture, and music projects. Another section compiles books, videos, popular and academic writing on zines. To exchange information and ideas, as well as to announce new issues or calls for submissions, I have also created a mailing list and message board. As I find it also essential to document the thoughts and opinions of zine makers, together with Haydeé Jiménez I have conducted interviews with more than 100 feminist zine producers and distributors which can also be accessed from the site.

By making and distributing zines in print and via the Ithe nternet across national borders, zinesters create transnational networks of like-minded people that are relatively loose but bonded by shared interests in free speech, feminism(s), and politics. The Internet offers a cheap and fast venue with the possibility of reaching a large, international audience which is great especially for zine distros (distributors), mailing lists, and resource sites like Grrrl Zine Network. It is true that zines tend to be published increasingly online but overwhelmingly they are still published in print. People seem to enjoy their physical quality, the cut-and-paste collages, and the fact that you can read it in bed or on the bus. So I think, although zine-makers are increasingly using the Internet, the print zine will never die as long as people have something to get off their chests!

The significance of zines is four-fold: First, young women are actively engaged in critical cultural production and take the empowering leap from consumer to producer. Second, potential lies in the (self-)empowerment of young female cultural producers. Third, local and transnational DIY-feminist networks of knowledge, experiences, and resources are established. This is especially important for the future since resources are compiled and like-minded people are united and activated for social movements. Fourth, significance - and the greatest challenge - lies in consciousness raising and cultural change. Whereas changes in policies and practices, and the creations and sustaining of organizations are more visible successes of social movements, cultural change is perhaps the longest-lasting form of social change.

However, one has to acknowledge that zine publishing is overall a rather small, subcultural phenomena with limited audience mainly in the US and Europe, and for white, middle-class, well-educated people with Internet access – and therefore with privileges, access to cultural capital and power. If you look at zines with an transnational perspective, you will see that there are many more zines created which fall under our radar because they might not have a web site, may not be called “zines” (such as “samizdat”, the Russian word for “self-publication”), are written in a language you don’t speak, and are circulated in local networks. Hence, we should make the effort to look outside our own frameworks and see what work is done elsewhere with little online presence, to create connections and make local endeavors known.

Media activism: Grrrl Zines A-Go-Go