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.
