RRRevolution! Girl Style! Now!
Moxie, an adaptation of the YA novel of the same name written by Jennifer Mathieu, makes its little screen debut on Netflix on March 3rd. The story follows Viv, a sixteen-year-old living in a small town where her school’s sexist dress codes and hallway harassment from the football team has left her feeling frustrated and unheard. Taking a page from her punk rock Riot Grrrl mom’s past Viv creates a feminist zine that she distributes anonymously to her classmates. And just as quickly as the copies of her zine fly off the Xerox she has started a revolution, girl style, at her high school.
Sounds pretty cool, huh? But maybe the description has you scratching your head with questions like… what’s a zine? And who are Riot Grrrls??
Zines (pronounced like maga-ZINE) are do-it-yourself, handmade booklets, usually photocopied and stapled, that come in all different sizes and formats. Zines are a unique form of personal self-expression and can cover just about any topic you can think of. Zines are not made for profit but rather for the love of the medium, building community, and sharing information.
Riot Grrrl was a new genre of punk in the 1990s—one that championed third-wave feminist thought and featured all women or women-fronted bands making raw and gritty music that pushed against the mainstream image of women as quiet and timid. A big part of the Riot Grrrl revolution was community building across the country through zine making and sharing. Zines were a cheap, easy way for young women to share their dissatisfaction with the status quo and safely share their stories and experiences with sexism and misogyny.
If all this has made you want to learn more about zines and about the Riot Grrrl movement then you’re in luck! The New York Public Library has its very own zine collection and plenty of books to keep you occupied after you finish reading Moxie.
Zines in the Collection:
To learn more about NYPL’s Zine Collection you can check out this excellent blog post, ‘Discovering Zines at the New York Public Library’, and visit the Zine Collections home page to see all the tiles in the collection. If you need more support in finding and researching zines in the collection you can check out our LibGuide Find Zines at NYPL.
Started in 1995 Bamboo Girl is one of the first zines of the Riot GRRRL era that tackled and confronted not only sexism but racism and homophobia from the "Filipina/API/Asian mutt feminist point of view." The creator, Sabrina Margarita Alcantara-Tan, began her zine as many do—because she wasn’t finding any publications that spoke to her or told of her experiences. She felt like the alternative punk scene, which was supposed to be inclusive of outsiders, was full of white straight men who fetishized her and complained about their "oppression" while also asking her "what are you?" Bamboo Girl ran for ten years collecting Sabrina’s personal stories, interviews with other Queer, Asian, and POC musicians and artists, book and zine reviews, recipes, essays on identity, Tagalong for Novices, and much more. It is a beautiful homage to a moment in time told from a perspective not usually found in traditional archives or anthologies. You can access “The Herstory of “Bamboo Girl” Zine" through JStor using your library card.
One of the longest continuing running zine series, Ayun Halliday began it in 1998 and itshows no sign of slowing down. As the cover of the The East Village Inky no.1 states, "in which the mother of a baby struggles to reclaim some semblance of her once creative life by hand-writing a highly digressive guide to New York City’s East Village during the baby’s naptimes" each issue tells of a new adventure of raising a child in NYC. Triumphs, tribulations, and also musings on the mundane,The East Village Inky is a love letter to the city which raises and shapes us all. Ayun is also an author of several children’s books including the hilarious Always Lots of Heinies at the Zoo which you can check out with your library card.
Tenacious: Art and Writings from Women in Prison
Tenacious began in 2003 after Vikki Law was asked to be an outside publisher and co-editor by a group of incarcerated women in Oregon after having their proposals ignored by mainstream media. Tenacious is full of articles, essays, poetry, and artwork created by formerly and currently incarcerated women. Their work covers tough topics like being HIV positive inside prison, trying to get an education, sexual harassment, motherhood behind bars, but is also full of stories of finding hope, expressive artwork, and life after incarceration. The zine circulates inside prison facilities as well as being sold to the general public with any profits being used to send more copies to incarcerated folks or to print the next issue. For more information on Tenacious, you can read this interview with Law from 2009 and check out a copy of her book Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women with your library card.
A letterpressed “life history” zine since 1996 Ker-bloom! is part zine and part work of art. Every page is lovingly letterpressed and each issue is a missive on the author’s daily life. Issue #110 deals with the grief of moving back after moving away, #134 is about middle school friendships, #43’s pretty pink flower cover has insides filled with thoughts on computer combat gaming and self-defense classes. Each issue has a very limited print run and when the issues are gone—they are gone. Dive into older issues of Ker-bloom! in the zine collection and check out newer work on their website.
Books in the Collection:
Need more Riot Grrrl reads? We've got you covered! Here are some of our favorite books on the zines and music. For more books on feminism for kids, teens, and adults check out NYPL’s Essential Reads on Feminism reading list.
Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu
Available as a print book, as an e-book, and en Espanol
Read it before you see it! In a small Texas town where high school football reigns supreme, Viv, sixteen, starts a feminist revolution using anonymously-written zines.
Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus
Available in print, as an e-book, and e-audiobook
Girls to the Front is the epic, definitive history of the Riot Grrrl movement: the radical feminist punk uprising that exploded into the public eye in the 1990s, altering America's gender landscape and soundscape forever. Author Sara Marcus, a cultural historian and critic who's written for Rolling Stone, the The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, and The Nation, interweaves research, interviews, and her own memories as a Riot Grrrl frontliner. Her passionate, sophisticated narrative brilliantly conveys the stories of punk bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Heavens to Betsy—whose successors include Sleater-Kinney, Partyline, and Kathleen Hanna's Le Tigre-as well as the legions of young feminists who listened up, became inspired, and made their own revolution.
Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminismby Alison Piepmeier
Available in print, e-book, and as an electronic resource
If you want to know more about the intersection of Riot Grrrl and zines then this is the book for you. Girl Zines is the first book-length exploration of this exciting movement. Alison Piepmeier argues that these quirky, personalized booklets are tangible examples of the ways that girls and women "do" feminism today. The idiosyncratic, surprising, and savvy arguments and issues showcased in the forty-six images reproduced in the book provide a complex window into feminism’s future, where zinesters persistently and stubbornly carve out new spaces for what it means to be a revolutionary and a girl. Girl Zines takes zines seriously, asking what they can tell us about the inner lives of girls and women over the last twenty years.
Shotgun Seamstress Zine
A collection of zines is available in print or select issues of the zine can be viewed online through Issuu
Shotgun Seamstress discusses the difficulties of being a black person within dominantly white punk and queer scenes. The author and contributors give anecdotes about their experiences at punk concerts. Osa interviews local punk artists of color and provides excerpts of her own writing about racism. The zine incorporates images and sparse typewritten sections for a dynamic effect on each of the pages. Multiple issues have been produced, each focusing on a different aspect of black punk culture (e.g. Toni Young, love, money) and how people of color interact with popular culture.
Summaries adapted from NYPL’s catalog, which draws from multiple sources. Click through to each book’s title for more.