Material Culture

The first book-length exploration of the quirky feminist booklets With names like The East Village Inky, Mend My Dress, Dear Stepdad, and I'm So Fucking Beautiful, zines created by girls and women over the past two decades make feminism's third wave visible. These messy, photocopied do-it-yourself documents cover every imaginable subject matter and are loaded with handwriting, collage art, stickers, and glitter. Though they all reflect the personal style of the creators, they are also sites for constructing narratives, identities, and communities. 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.

Object Studies: Introductions to Material Culture is a textbook that introduces students to an interdisciplinary approach to material cultural study. This text helps reveal how everyday objects from pens and coffee cups to our most cherished keepsakes help define our collective histories and personal narratives. Object Studies is organized around accessible and engaging chapters on objects with "model  essays" that present original projects designed to engage students with a series of concepts and research activities. Each will demonstrate a key methodology tied to specific learning outcomes, but all chapters will be intertwined in their attention to the project of developing the core skills of "object studies": careful viewing, writing detailed descriptions, setting out and testing research hypotheses, and telling stories through material artifacts. Aimed towards undergraduate students taking courses in material culture as well as postgraduate students embarking on independent research projects these chapter "studies" are practically oriented and demonstrate research projects that can be undertaken either in a course or even through personal study. Chapters in Object Studies conclude with research questions, suggestions on methodology, and a discursive bibliography designed to help students pursue their own projects based on these examples.

Everyone has something to say about their dreams, thoughts, and weirdest obsessions. Whether you're a pen-wielding Riot Girl in an urban landscape, a prairie cowgirl with the soul of a beat poet, or someone who just wants to kick back and take in the self-expression revolution, this book is for you.

Zines are the maverick inhabitants of publishing's Wild West, where the obsessional, the idiosyncratic and the wilfully obscure roam free across pages unbounded by the constraints of mainstream agendas. This book offers a highly-visual analysis of this phenomenon, assembled with expert fanaticism by the team of Pop theorists who created Highflyers and Scrawl. It showcases a huge, international range of current zines, put into context by historical examples from the hoardings of die-hard collectors.

Riot grrrls, punk feminists best known for their girl power activism and message, used punk ideologies and the literacy practice of zine-ing to create radical feminist sites of resistance. In what ways did zines document feminism and activism of the 1990s? How did riot grrrls use punk ideologies to participate in DIY sites? In Writing a Riot: Riot Grrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics, Buchanan argues that zines are a form of literacy participation used to document personal, social, and political values within punk. She examines zine studies as an academic field, how riot grrrls used zines to promote punk feminism, and the ways riot grrrl zines dealt with social justice issues of rape and race. Writing a Riot is the first full-length book that examines riot grrrl zines and their role in documenting feminist history.

A GIRL'S GUIDE TO TAKING OVER THE WORLD Writings from the Girl Zine Revolution

Punk was born on the East Coast in the late 1960s, later crossing the Atlantic and exploding in London and Paris. This dynamic countermovement churned out heaps of professional magazines and photocopied, hand-stapled fanzines, all expressing ideas on music, art, and current events. By creating its own press, the punk movement secured its place in the history of 20th-century culture. Featuring collages, cutouts, and handcrafted typography, Punk Press compiles the stunning graphics created by these publications, spanning from the East Village to East London to the Left Bank. With unforgettable images of punk's greatest bands--the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Dead Kennedys, Iggy Pop, and more--this is a captivating look at some of music's most fascinating personalities and greatest talents.