DIY by Amy Spencer
‘Zines are non-commercial, small-circulation publications which are produced and distributed by their creators’ (PG13)
‘Fredric Wertham, a New York psychiatrist, became interested in the fanzine phenomenon in the early 40’s, while researching the links between psychology and literature (PG13) … Wertham explains that: ‘Zines give a voice to the everyday anonymous person’’ (PG14)
‘It exists without any outside interference, without any control from above, without any censorship, without any supervision or manipulation’ (PG14)
‘The zine is passed physically through the network connecting people together, sharing the sense of solidarity in their interest in the underground of independent culture’ (PG14)
‘Zine writers form their own networks around their identities. Many writers create their zines as a conscious reaction against a consumerist society. They adopt the principle that you should create your own cultural experience.’ (PG16)
‘The zine tends to be written by a middle class, white population in their teens and early twenties… a zine is a privilege which many in this demographic do not question’ (PG 18)
‘Zines can be criticised as an elitist form of media. You can only have access to the information if you know exactly where to look’ (PG 18)
‘For many, the focus of zine writing is celebrating their position outside of the mainstream, having unusual interests, being a geek, rejecting the status quo’ (PG18)
‘(In the 1980’s) zine writing became more accessible, it seemed easier, and hundreds of people were inspired to start their own zines. With so many people doing the same thing it was felt that there was strength in numbers and the zine community expanded rapidly’ (PG30)
‘Zine distros have an important part to play. The distro is a distribution centre for a number of zines, much like a little mail order shop. The distro became popular during the 90’s Riot Grrrl era’ (PG 33)
‘(Ericka Bailie) explains that distros play an important role in the zine network… ‘without the distro their readership wouldn’t be what it is’ (PG33)
‘During the 1990’s in the US the Riot Grrrl movement championed the zine as the ideal format to spread their collective manifestos and more personal viewpoints. In the spirit of bringing young women together to discuss their experiences and the impact of riot grrrl, the format of a conference seemed ideal. Conferences specifically devoted to the zine highlighted the importance placed on these little paper magazines that could be easily produced but could contain so much powerful information’ (PG 35)
‘One organization working currently as a resource for potential zine writers to put their words into print is Grrrl Zines A-Go-Go… Elke Zobl is one of the main organizers of this group effort and she explains their aims: ‘The group especially focuses on the empowerment of teenage girls through the production of zines and artist books. The DIY ethic is the cornerstone of the political aspect of Grrrl Zines A-Go-Go. We believe zine-making embodies the phrase “The personal is political” (PG 36)
(Elke Zobl) explains why she feels that the voices of marginalised groups producing zines need to be preserved. ‘I am drawn to zines because they reflect the unfiltered personal and political voices of people from different backgrounds… We don’t get to hear those voices, especially those of girls and young women, women of colour, working class women, queer and transgender youth - in the mianstream, adult-run media’ (PG37-38)
‘Zine culture has primarily been male produced. As a product of its time period, it has historically consisted of male writers involved in sci-fi fandom, 60’s independent newspapers and those at the forefront of punk’ (PG 47)
‘(A) boom in feminist publications began in 1970 with It Ain’t Me Babe. It Ain’t Me Babe lasted just a year, but its anger and energy was contagious. It inspired writers in Washington DC to produce Off Our Backs a few weeks later and this quickly became one of the most respected feminist papers of the era’ (PG 48)
‘Third wave feminism attempts to take notions of feminism away from any stale assumptions and tries to make it relevant to the lives of all women. The riot grrrl movement of the early 90’s was a part of this third wave ambition and organised a subculture of young girls who wanted to express themselves and their experiences as well as their feminist beliefs’ (PG 48)
‘The term ‘riot grrrl’ was first used in zines by musicians and activists in America - Kathleen Hanna from Bikini Kill (and later Le Tigre) and Alison Wolfe from Bratmobile’ (PG 48)
‘As well as forming bands, one of the primary means for them to produce their own cultural experience was by producing zines. This process allowed them to assert their independence while at the same time calling for others to join them. The zines they produced were unique in that they focused on the experiences of young girls who spoke frankly about their experiences… they most closely resembled the punk zines of the late 70’s… riot grrrl zines were also similar to the early dada publications, as part of their stand against mass media involved them taking and subverting images from mainstream magazines’ (PG 49)
‘British zines such as Ablaze, written by Baren Ablaze, and Erica Smith’s Girlfrenzy were linked to this new wave pf riot grrrl zines as they drew strength from what was happening in America’ (PG 50)
‘Other zines… realised how important it was to empower girls through zines. One in particular was FAT!SO? - Marilyn Wann’s manifesto for fat empowerment, calling for women to be happy with their bodies and challenging anyone who disagreed (started in 1994) (PG 51)
(Elke Zobl) ‘Although zines (as well as riot grrrl zines and grrrl zines) have been declared by some as dead, I am still finding lots of amazing grrrl zines and won’t buy into the “zines are dead” cry. I think zines are very much alive and thriving! You just have to make the effort to find them!’ (PG 52)
‘As the (riot grrrl) movement grew in strength and the potential for a large audience was realised, zines began to broaden their scale. In particular, Bust, Bitch, Venus Zine, Chickfactor and Rockgrrrl emerged - zines which developed into slick independent magazines but retained their underground ethos’ (PG 52)
(What impact do you think the internet has had or will have on zines and magazines?) ‘It’s made it much easier to find out about them, and to connect with other people making them. It is easier to make a zine now because you can do it online if that’s easier for you, or you can get access to advice and info about making a print zine. The feeling of a printed document is never going to lose its appeal or be replaced by an electronic alternative’ ( Lisa Jervis of Bitch: A Feminist Response to Pop Culture) (PG 57)
‘The newspapers (and zines) of the underground operated differently and so they were viewed with suspicion… the sources from which they gathered their news were different, causing concern over the possibility that they might relay sensitive information to the general public … the FBI soon instigated an intense investigation into small press activities’ (PG 170)
‘The feminist magazine, Off Our Backs was also allegedly under investigation as part of a wider investigation into the action of the women’s liberation movement’ (PG 171)
(John Hodge of SchNEWS on political zines) ‘Independent publishing is an autonomous, libetarian activity… for me, it’s a political act… in a period where a lot of things are getting privatized and commodified, information being one, it’s important to maintain a media which is directly opposed to this commodification’ (PG 179)
Girl Zines: making media, doing feminism by Alison Piepmeier
‘Jigsaw is a zine, a frontrunner in the proliferation of zines by girls and women that began in the 1990s, catalyzed by the punk movement, Riot Grrrl - a femininst political and musical movement (sometimes identified as a subculture) that began in the 1990s in Olympia, Washington and Washington DC - and the emergent third wave of feminism’ (PG 2)
‘According to girls’ studies scholar Mary Celeste Kearney, zines are “the primary type of media created by contemporary American girls” and I argue that these documents not only reveal girlhood on the ground but are also a site for the development of a late-twentieth-century feminism’ (PG 4)
‘Grrrl zines offer idiosyncratic, surprising, yet savvy and complex responses to the late-twentieth-century incarnations of sexism, racism and homophobia’ (PG 4)
“The Jigsaw manifesto” calls for a revisioning of gender - a “girl revolution” - that links identity with the formation of female-centred community’ (PG 4)
‘The “third wave” is a term that loosely defines a generational and political cohort born after the heyday of the second wave women’s movement… the concept of a third wave of feminism is contested, with some scholars embracing it and others arguing that it should be abandoned’ (PG 8)
(Those opposed to the framing of late-twentieth-century feminism) ‘note that young feminists are still facing many of the same issues that feminists of the second wave fought, and observation that might suggest that we are still in the second wave’ (PG 8)
‘Although there are certainly significant lines of connection between the second and third waves, (Rory Dicker argues) “we no longer live in the world that feminists of the second wave faced” and it’s therefore useful to examine how feminism has changed and how it manifests itself today’ (PG 9)
‘Grrrl zines are often the mechanism that third wave feminists use to articulate history and create community’ (PG 9-10)
‘The materiality of zines differentiates them from blogs, not only in terms of artifacts themselves but also in terms of the communities that accrue around them. Although zines and blogs have relevant similarities, the blog has not replaced the zine. Zines are a living medium with both historical and contemporary relevance for the lives of girls and women and for feminism’s third wave’ (PG 17)
‘The work that girls and women do in through zines may feel personal, but the theoretical structures that zines build and the hope that zines offer point to the larger political project of grrrl zines. Grrrl zines provide a glimpse of the future of feminism. They document feminisms’ ability to transform itself to respond to a changing culture’ (PG 21)
(Sarah Dyer, creator of ALL MINE! zine) ‘There were so many women involved in zines, and they were all treated this way, just sort of, you know, “girls don’t do that”’ (PG 24)
(Dyer) ‘needed to intervene in the larger zine culture, to create a community of women, and thus the Action Girl Newsletter was born’ (PG 24)
(Dyer) ‘was part of a punk community that positioned itself as outside of and superior to the mainstream world, a community that claimed to challenge the power dynamics and oppression that characterised dominant societal practices’ (PG 24)
‘Zines (have a) gendered origin story, which mostly has gone untold. Most studies of zines identify them as resistant media originating in male-dominant spaces. They are positioned as descendants of the pamphlets of the American revolution and Dadaist and Samizdat publishing, emerging from the fanzines of the 1930s and the punk community of the 1970’s… what hasn’t been discussed is the fact that these publications also have predecessors in the informal publications, documents, and artifacts produced by women during the first and second waves of feminism’ (PG 25)
‘Historically, femininst participatory media productions have engaged with some of the themes central to grrrl zines - such as gender, identity community and resistance… Participatory media of the first and second waves of feminism - scrapbooks, health booklets, and mimeographed pamphlets - have significant similarities with grrrl zines’ (PG 29-30)
The 1990’s saw the catalyzation of the third wave; ‘women’s studies classes and programs were becoming institutionalised at many colleges and universities. By 1993 Dyer had been featured in Seventeen magazine, Riot Grrrl had been profiled by media agencies from the New York Times to Newsweek, and grrrl zines were an established phenomenon. Within a few years, edited collections were published which addressed third wave feminism’ (PG 43)
Riot Grrrl and Action Girl Newsletter ‘were instrumental in formulating a style, rhetoric, and iconography for grrrl zines, and these came to define third wave feminism’ (PG 45)
Tobi Vail explains “When we started there wasn’t anything such as third wave, or any kind of feminism that would resemble one - it was solidly second wave. I don’t know if that meant we invented it or what”... Riot Grrrl and Action Girl function as sites at which grrrl zines and third wave feminism emerged’ (PG 45)
‘Femininity was an iconographic terrain that these zines quickly began to mine. Since the second wave had destabilized some of the meaning of femininity, it was available to the next generation to start working in a different way… The manipulation of this pliable symbolism, the celebration and reimagining of femininity, is apparent in the issue of the Action Girl Newsletter’ (PG 46)
‘Action Girl is not thoughtlessly complicit with patriarchal views of women; instead, she represents a deployment of strategic femininity. As such, she is establishing a typical third wave move: the creative deployment of feminine iconography comes to be a central trope of third wave feminism’ (PG 48-49)
‘Another common trope in the early grrrl zines is the juxtaposition of seemingly incongruous - or even contradictory - images and rhetorics… For instance, this trope can be seen in a cartoon that began appearing in each issue of the Action Girl Newsletter showing Hello Kitty wearing a Riot Grrrl vest’ (PG 49-50)
‘In the age of electronic media, when the future of the book itself is often called into question, and when the visual and textual landscape is dominated by an increasing voracious culture industry, zines endure… 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 ’ (PG 58)
‘Zine communities are more like what philosopher Iris Marion Young describes as “the ideal city of life”, characterised by variety, social differentiation without exclusion, and a heterogenous public’ (PG 58)
‘By mobilizing particular human experiences that are linked to the body, including vulnerability, affection, and pleasure, these zines leverage their materiality into a kind of surrogate physical interaction and offer mechanisms for creating meaningful relationships’ (PG 59)
‘Paper is better suited for facilitating human connection than electronic media’ (PG 63)
Stephen Duncombe refers to the physicality of zines, creating what he calls “a style of intimate connection”... ‘one that brings together the body of the zine creator and the body of the reader. Most zine creators reject the commercial aesthetic because they reject the ideology of mass media; rather than positioning readers as consumers, as a marketplace, the zine positions them as friends, equals, members of an embodied community who are part of the conversation with the zine maker’ (PG 70)
‘Zines are generally distributed in ways distinct from the consumer culture industry… their availability is on the rise, but is somewhat limited’ PG74
‘Zine distribution is still mostly personalised and geared towards creating relationships that facilitate self expression… zine distribution is another component of zines’ meaning; it’s a factor that’s easy to overlook but that helps create the embodied community of zines’ PG74
Cindy Crabb refers to the intimacy and sense of community of zine distribution, using Doris as an example: ‘The zine functions to create community between two young women who don’t know each other and may not find community otherwise… the exchange is qualitatively different than the financial exchanges that make up the capitalist distribution methods for mainstream publications. The zine for Crabb is not a way to make money but a way to connect other people’ PG75
‘The embodied community of grrrl zines operates in ways that have particular salience for girls and women. As shown by Lamms’ I’m So Fucking Beautiful, female embodiment is often highly charged terrain in a sexist culture’ PG78
Zines foster ‘two-way connections… connections that are meaningful for girls and women in a culture in which they are often figured as each others’ competition rather than as allies. The embodied grrrl zine community is taking part in these gendered systems, allowing girls and women to negotiate and leverage their own bodies and the kinds of communities to which they belong and providing ways for them to create safe spaces for intimate connection’ PG79
‘Zine makers often up the ante on the zines’ materiality, adding other artifacts and items into the zine exchange. Buttons, letters and stickers often accompany zines; for example, one issue of the zine No Better Voice arrived at my house with a tiny button that said “No Better Voice”. Some of the add-ons are random and somewhat inexplicable, others are explicitly tied to a girlhood gift culture… In all these cases, the zine makers are activating an affectionate relationship by offering material gifts’ PG82
The act of gifting and intimacy also has ‘implications for grrrl zines’ functioning in terms of third wave feminism. For instance, grrrl zines have been a site for affectionate connections between girls and women, and this quality of the zine medium helped propel the Riot Grrrl ideology of “girl love”, an ideology that deliberately countered the patriarchal notion of female relationships being troubled “cat fights”, as well as challenging the hetronormative idea that girls should compete with each other for the affection of boys’ PG84
‘When studied as multilayered artifacts, with visual, material, and distributional semiotics, grrrl zines offer an unsurpassed resource for understanding girls and women and the strategies and mechanisms of third wave feminism’ PG86
‘The zine is a medium that captures flux, contradiction, and fragmentation and uses these things not as problems to be resolved but as sources of creative energy. It is a space for experimentation and play’ PG91
‘Grrrl zines are not simply responding to a series of impossible cultural messages about girlhood and womanhood. They are also offering subject positioning that is congruent with third wave feminism’ PG92
‘Grrrl zines offer a legitimate, timely model of third wave subjectivities that are well poised to negotiate within what Chela Sandoval calls “the co-opting nature of so-called postmodern cultural conditions”... Grrrl zines demonstrate this sort of tactile subjectivity, not permanently grounded in particular identity configurations but mobile, flexible, and responsive to a culture of late capitalism’ PG93
Philosopher Linda Martin Alcoff explains how identity consists of two components; external and internal. Our public identity is ‘external, visible, and under only limited individual control’, whereas our subjective identities are ‘my own sense of myself, my lived experience of myself, or my interior life’. Grrrl zines use this subjective identity to break down societal expectations of girlhood and womanhood, thus developing a rhetoric against the female public identity PG94
‘Grrrl zines don’t simply expose the dangers of being a girl or woman in a patriarchal culture. They also often engage with familiar configurations of girlishness and femininity - playfully reclaiming and reworking them. To a certain extent, this has become an identifiable grrrl zine visual style: the kinderwhore or “kitten with a whip” aesthetic, in which girlish images are given a twist or are recontextualised in ways that change their meaning, making them tough or resistant. For example, Hello Kitty became an almost ubiquitous image in grrrl zines of the 1990s’ PG103
Astrid Henry notes how ‘Women entering feminism today are much less idealistic - and hopeful - about the possibility of revolutionary social change than were early second-wave feminists. Paradoxically then, younger women may have a strong sense of their own personal power while feeling ambivalent about their power to effect real change’
Henry refers to third-wave writings as ‘first-person singular feminism’ critiquing that grrrl zines follow a feminism that is ‘obsessed with itself to such an extent that it might not even fit the label “feminist”’
Arguably, yes grrrl zines are ‘deeply invested in personal reflection, but this is not mere naval gazing. To a certain extent, the focus on the personal operates like second wave consciousness-raising, allowing individual girls and women to recognize inequities in their own lives and then begin to articulate them to others so that outrage - then activism - can emerge’ PG121
‘Intersectionality has been one of the key theoretical ideas of contemporary feminism… it has been a foundational concept for the third wave. Although the term was coined by critical legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989, the concept has been part of the women’s rights activism of women of colour in the US since at least the nineteenth century’ PG126
In 1983, the Combahee River Collective argued ‘we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class opression and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives’ PG126
‘Intersectional analysis allows for more complex accountancy of individual life experiences… not limited to race and gender, the concept of intersectionality allows for analysis of multiple identity categories and the ways in which they influence each other’ PG127
‘Zines are a site where this theoretical work happens because they aren’t bound by the formal or editorial constraints of mainstream publications and media’ PG128
‘Unlike contributors to an autobiographical third wave anthology, (zine creator Lauren Jade Martin) has room to develop ideas and experiment’ PG128
‘The proliferation of zines and their accessibility and mutability as a medium make them a site for different sorts of illustrations of intersectional analysis. Furthermore, the materiality of zines also facilitates theoretical engagement’ allowing zine creators to ‘address the issue of complex, politicised identity’ PG128
‘The embodied community of grrrl zines is not automatically intersectional, but it is a diverse community in which some zinesters are able to articulate intersectional analysis’ PG129
Evolution of a Race Riot (1994) was a zine that took a ‘leading role’ in the discourse of intersectionality in third wave feminism. Chandra Ray writes in her contribution to the zine: ‘until you stop expecting women of colour to conform to the white-girl ideal of feminism, I don’t want anything to do with you’ ‘She points out the hollowness of the sisterhood that many white girls talk about: it’s a sisterhood that flattens differences or, more insidiously, functions to mask racial hierarchies’ ‘Ray is addressing white girls and women who are in a feminist context in which they’re attempting to challenge racism and to be aware of white privilage’ PG131
‘Riot Grrrl and zines by white girls and women often frame racism as a problem that takes place in interpersonal interactions, but Ray and others demand that they recognise them as structural’ PG132
‘Stereotypes and self-representations are almost always intertwined in these zines, because the stereotypic images and ideas are some of the raw material zinesters have to work with, and they are components of the visual construction of race and ethnicity’ PG142
‘Other grrrl zines also demonstrate complex negotiations with racist and sexists cultural iconography, even when this iconography is communicated through ephemera like advertising’ example: With Heart in Mouth by Anna WHitehead using figures such as Aunt Jemima PG144
‘The political work that grrrl zines do may not be immediately obvious because this work doesn’t fit with models of traditional political engagement. It doesn’t fit for several reasons: because grrrl zines are generally acting at the level of the symbolic order rather than at the level of institutional change, because they operate out of personal modes of expression, and because they mobilize small-scale embodied communities rather than large-scale voting blocs’ PG158
‘Grrrl zines like Doris are uniquely situated to awaken outrage and - perhaps more crucially - imagination, and in doing so enact what `hooks and others have called for: public pedagogies of hope. Pedagogies of hope - manifested in a variety of ways in grrrl zines - function as small-scale acts of resistance’ PG179
Stephen Duncombe questions whether zines ‘actually accomplish any significant cultural work: “creating an alternative underground world - no matter how novel and supportive it is - and putting out a ‘radical’ zine - no matter how irreverent, expressive and fun - seem incomplete, and woefully inadequate responses… there has to be something more’ PG160
‘This question of what counts as political is particularly salient for grrrl zines, because the work of young women is also not often recognised as political’ PG161
Anita Harris notes that ‘once young women’s resistance politics, and young women’s feminist activism in particualr, could be easily idenitifed, today they seem more obscure, transitory and disorganised… young women have new ways of taking on politics and culture that may not be recognisable under more traditional paradigms but deserve to be identified as socially engaged and potentially transformative nonetheless’ PG161
‘Grrrl zines demonstrate the interpretation of complicity and resistance; they are spaces to try out mechanisms for doing things differently - while still making use of the ephemera of the mainstream culture. They aren’t the magic solution to social change efforts; instead they are small, incomplete attempts, micropolitical’ PG191
In some ways, grrrl zines merge both intimacy and community, and the need for broader collective action; ‘they are clearly intimate, personal artifacts, and they create embodied communities. They are communities that operate in the cracks and fissures… not equipped to bring down the megacorporations, but to disrupt them. They show us that change is still possible’ PG191
Behind the Zines: Self-Publishing Culture by Adeline Mollard
Zines’ ‘approach of cutting out the middle-men, of peddling your wares directly to the reader and getting close to the recipient, reflects a vital concept prevalent in the self-publishing scene: the idea of 100 percent authorship’ PG1
‘In the spirit of an exclusive club, protected by the bouncers of aesthetics and awareness’ PG1
‘In order to make it all happen, to realise projects and bring them to the world, the small print scene nurtures a flexible, yet resilient network, loosely modeled on the decentralised nature of the World Wide Web’ PG2
‘It is a network built on enthusiasm, idealism, and pragmatism… based on an enticing web of Chinese whispers and a modern take on the barter economy, the entire system thrives on physical, financial, and constructive feedback as well as a certain amount of give and take’ PG2
‘Distribution remains the scene’s Achilles heel. After all, not everyone is willing to go it their own and rely on a purely web-based “people will find me” approach’ PG2
‘What we are witnessing is not necessarily the first generation of crude trailblazers, those dedicated to reclaiming the means of production and doing it on the cheap, but rather their more savvy acolytes and offspring, those who understand and exploit the power and potential of making your own decisions to further your creative end’ PG4
‘This second wave of self publishing tends to be more reflective and diverse’ PG4
Cultural theory and popular culture by John Storey
Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (F.R Leavis)
‘It is a commonplace today that culture is at a crisis’ PG13
‘There are effects that touch the life of the community more seriously. When we consider, for instance, the processes of mass-production and standardisation in the form represented by the Press, it becomes obviously of sinister significance that they should be accompanied by the process of levelling-down’ PG14
“High-brow” is an ominous addition to the English language. I have said earlier that culture has always been in minority keeping. But the minority now is made conscious, not merely of an uncongenial, but of a hostile environment’ PG17
‘The prospects of culture, then, are very dark. There is less room for hope in that a standardised civilization is rapidly enveloping the whole world’ PG17
Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels)
‘The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production’ PG68
‘As they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range’ ruling also ‘as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution’ of ideas PG68
‘This class one part appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists… while the others’ attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passive and receptive’ as they have ‘less time to make up illusions and ideas about themselves’ PG68
The Rediscovery of ‘Ideology’: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies (Stuart Hall)
‘The ‘mass society/ mass culture’ debate really goes as far back, at least, as the eighteenth century… interpreted at the time as posing a threat, because of its direct dependence on cultural production for a market, to traditional cultural values’ PG125
Some concerns ‘were defined as social: the break-up of community ties’ PG126
‘The model of power and influence being employed here was paradigmatically empiricist and pluralistic: its primary focus was the individual; it theorised power in terms of the direct influence of A on B’s behaviour’ PG127
‘The notion of selective perception was subsequently introduced, to take account of the fact that different individuals might bring their own structure of attention and selectivity to what the media offered’ PG129
‘To be outside the consensus was to be, not in an alternative value-system, but simply outside of norms as such: normless - therefore, anomic. In mass society theory, anomie was viewed as a condition peculiarly vulnerable to over-influence by the media’ PG130
Those outside the norm ‘have alternative foci of integration… defined as ‘sub-cultural’. The relation of sub-cultures to the dominant culture continued to be defined culturally’ PG130
‘Sub-cultural theorists set out about investigating the rich underlife of the deviant community… Deviants were positively identified and labelled: the labelling process served to mobilise moral censure and social sanction against them’ PG130
Durkheim theorised that labelling outsiders as deviants ‘served to enforce a greater conformity to society’s ‘rules’ by punishing and stigmatising those who departed from them’ PG130
‘The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggested that each culture had a different way of classifying the world. These schemes would be reflected, it argued, in the linguistic and semantic structures of different societies’ PG133
‘In the structuralist approach, the issue turned on the question of signification… meaning is a social production, a practice. The world has to be made to mean. Language and symbolisation is the means by which meaning is produced’ PG134
Meanings of language can be assimilated to the Marxist proposition that ‘people make history, but only in determinate conditions which are not of their making’ PG139
‘The way in which different social interests or forces might conduct an ideological struggle to disarticulate a signifier from one, preferred or dominant meaning-system, and rearticulate it within another, different chain of connotations’ For example, ‘The shift from pig = animal with dirty habits, to pig = brutal policeman in the language of the radical movement of the 1960’s to pig = male-chauvinist pig in the language of feminism, is a metonymic mechanism - sliding the negative meaning along a chain of connotative signifiers’ PG147
‘It had to become part of an organised practice of struggle requiring the building up of collective forms of resistance’ PG148
Dallas and the ideology of mass culture (Ien Ang)
‘Ideologies not only organise the ideas and images people make of reality, they also enable people to form an image of themselves and thus to occupy a position in the world’ PG191
‘In addition to an image of oneself, however, an ideology also offers an image of others. Not only does one’s own identity take on form in this way, but the ideology serves also to outline the identity of other people’ PG191
Mass culture’s ‘influence will be mainly restricted to people’s opinions and rational consciousness, to the discourses people use when talking about culture. These opinions and rationalisations need not, however, necessarily prescribe people’s cultural practices’ PG197
The populaist ideology aesthetic ‘is of an essentially pluralist and conditional nature because it is based on the premise that the significance of a cultural object can differ from person to person and from situation to situation. It is based on an affirmation of the continuity of cultural forms and daily life, and on a deep-rooted desire for participation, and on emotional involvement. In other words, what matters for the popular aesthetic is the recognition of pleasure, and that pleasure is a personal thing… Pleasure, however, is the category that is ignored in the ideology of mass culture’ PG197 (Bourdieu, The Aristocracy of culture)
Feminist appraoches to popular culture: giving patriarchy its due (Lana F. Rakow)
The Recovery and Reappraisal Approach - ‘While examining, cataloging and criticising images of women may have been the earliest of the contemporary feminist approaches to popular culture… Another approach came on its heels from the humanities - art, literature and social history…
Rather than suggesting that changing women’s portrayal within popular culture content will solve the problem, feminists in this approach are more likely to place a positive value on women’s culture as something distinct from men’s culture, something that should be recovered and encouraged. Rather than focusing on men’s images of women, they focus on women’s images of themselves and women’s stories about their own experiences’ PG205
‘Often these voices have been found outside the dominant culture; other times they have been found in popular culture reaching a female audience’ PG205-206
‘The Recovery and Reappraisal Approach most directly challenges traditional notions of high and low art, folk art, and popular culture. It calls not for adding women artists to a literary or artistic canon but for a re-evaluation of the criteria that establish canons and determine the artistic and social merit of creative expressions' PG207-208
‘Approaching popular culture from the standpoint of women’s experiences with cultural forms presents feminists with a central tension in feminism. That is, it presents feminists with the challenge of respecting other women’s understanding of their own lives, though that understanding may be different from a feminists reading of their situation… It also, however, presents feminists with a central objective of feminism, the opportunity for activism and change as feminists come to better understand how women function within patriarchy’ ’ PG209
According to Mary Daly (1978), ‘Women’s minds have been mutilated and muted… Patriarchy has stolen our cosmos and returned it in the form of Cosmopolitan magazine and cosmetics’. Feminists should instead continue their subversive acts of creating women’s own culture, ‘creating new forms of writing, singing, celebrating, searching’ (Mary Daly, Gyn/ Ecology: The metaethics of radical feminism) PG210
‘British Marxist feminists have been dealing with the question of, as phrased by Michele Barrett, ‘what is the relationship between women’s oppression and the general features of a mode of production?’ (Michele Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist analysis, 1980) PG211
Barrett identified ‘three elements in the process of the construction of an ideology of gender: production, consumption, and representation. About production she has pointed out that the conditions under which men and women produce literature are materially different’ PG211
Feminism & The Principles of Poststructuralism (Chris Weedon)
‘Femininist postcontructuralism’ is central to the works of Michel Foucault, questioning ‘how social power is exercised and how social relations of gender, class and race might be transformed’ PG354
Chris theorises a ‘form of poststructuralism which can meet femininist needs’ and ‘the relationship between poststructuralist theory and feminist practice’ PG355
‘Poststructuralism theorises subjectivity as a site of disunity and conflict, central to the process of political change and to preserving the status quo’ PG355
‘While there can be no essential qualities of femininity or masculinity, given for all times and reflected in language and the social relations which language structures, different forms of poststructuralism theorise the production of meaning in different ways’ PG356
‘In this theory the meaning of gender is both socially produced and variable between different forms of discourse’ PG356
Ferdinand Saussure ‘theorised language as an abstract system, consisting of chains of signs. Each sign is made up of a signifier (sound or written image) and a signified (meaning)... the meaning of signs is not intrinsic but relational; it is not anything intrinsic to the signifier ‘whore’, for example, that gives it its meaning, but rather the difference from other signifiers of womanhood such as ‘virgin’ and ‘mother” PG356
‘Saussure’s theory implies that the meaning of ‘woman’ or the qualities identified as womanly, are not fixed by a natural world and reflected in the term ‘woman’, but socially produced within language, plural and subject to change’ PG357
Furthermore, ‘For Derrida, there can be no fixed signifieds; the meaning of the signifier ‘woman’ varies from ideal to victim to object of sexual desire, according to its context’ PG358
Taking a glance at women's magazines, there is ‘a range of often competing subject positions offered to women readers, from career woman to romantic heroine, from successful wife and mother to irresistible sexual object’ PG358
‘How women understand the sexual division of labour, for example, whether in the home or in paid work, is crucial to its maintenance or transformation’ PG358
‘How we live our lives as conscious thinking subjects and how we give meaning to the material social relations under which we live… depends on the range and social power of existing discourses, our access to them and the political strengths of the interests that they represent’ PG358
‘Conversely, in radical-feminist biologism, the status quo is rejected as an unnatural, patriarchal distrotion of the truly female’ PG359
‘The terms subject and subjectivity are central to poststructuralist theory’, marking a ‘crucial break with humanist conceptions’ PG359
‘Subjectivity is used to refer to the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions of the individual, her sense of herself and her ways of understanding her relation to the world’ PG359
‘The essence of womanhood is at the heart of much radical-feminist discourse or the true human nature, alienated by capitalism, which is the focus of humanist Marxism’ PG359
‘The political significance of decentring the subject and abandoning the belief in essential subjectivity is that it opens up subjectivity to change’ PG359
‘For many women’, subjectivity ‘is the meaning of the practice of consciousness-raising developed by the Women’s Liberation Movement. The collective discussion of personal problems and conflicts… leads to a recognition that what have been experienced as personal failings are socially produced conflicts and contradictions shared by many women in similar social positions’ leading to a ‘rewriting of personal experience’ PG360
‘Poststructuralist femininist theory suggests that experience has no inherent essential meaning… it may be given in language’ PG360
Plural meanings of language can be seen ‘as repressive towards particular subordinated interest groups like women or black, and the discourses developed to represent these interests will seek among other things to redefine what constitutes crime by taking into account patriarchy and racism’ PG362
‘The meaning of the existing structure of social institutions… is a site of political struggle waged mainly, though not exclusively, in language’ PG362
‘Femininist poststructuralism, then, is a mode of knowledge production which uses poststructuralist theories of language, subjectivity and social processes and institutions to understand existing power relations and to identify areas and strategies for change’ PG364
‘Feminist poststructuralism is able… to explain the working of power on behalf of specific interests and to analyse the opportunities for resistance to it’ it decentres the rational, self-prestent subject of humanism, seeing subjectivity and consciousness, as socially produced in language, as a site of struggle and potential change’ PG364
From Here to Modernity: Feminism and Postmodernism (Barbara Creed)
Craig Owens argues there is ‘an apparent crossing of the femininst critique of patriarchy and the postmodernist critique of representation’ PG397
‘Both feminism and postmodernism endorse Lyotard’s argument that there is a crisis in the legitimising function of the narrative; both present a critique of representation, that ‘system of power that authorises certain representations while blocking, prohibiting or invalidating others” PG397
‘Owens argues that here feminism and postmodernism share common ground - both present a critique of forms of narrative and representation which place man as subject’ PG399
‘Whereas feminism would attempt to explain that crisis in terms of the workings of patriarchal ideology and the oppression of women and other minority groups, postmodernism looks to other possible causes’ PG399
