Friday, June 6, 2014

What's a zine?

This post is probably overdue - but since this blog is really an extension of my scigrrrl zine - what exactly is a zine?


Zines are homemade booklets or little magazines that often include personal and political narratives on information that is not readily available in other formats (aka what magazines and newspapers are not talking about). Zines cover a diverse range of subjects; I am pretty certain you could find a zine on absolutely everything. 
A popular subset of zines are called “grrrl zines.” Grrrl zines gained their popularity in the early 1990s with popular zines like Jigsaw and Riot Grrrl (Piepmeier 2009: 2). The rewriting of “girl” for these zines was meant to “incorporate an angry growl” (Piepmeier 2009: 5). These zines are created by women and are used to create discourse (Piepmeier 2009: 2). As Piepmeier states in Girl Zines: making Media and Doing Feminism, “Grrrl zines offer idiosyncratic, surprising, yet savvy and complex responses to the late-twentieth-century incarnations of sexism, racism, and homophobia” (4). My intent is to create a grrrl zine along those very same lines: My zine will be a response to my experiences as a woman who is also a science student, to equity in the field, and to some studies that I find to be backwards. As homage to riotgrrrl/guerrella grrrll, I decided early on to call my zine series scigrrrl.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

update

I have been really bad about updating my blog site since I've gotten home. The first couple of weeks of work/real world life haven't left me with much time :( BUT - there will be new original material up here soon!