Between vulnerability and categorisation: Locating zines in institutions and as forms of alternative media identity

Abstract

Emerging from conversations at two symposiums, ‘Zines Revisited’ (2022) and ‘Selfing and Shelving’ (2024), held at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, this special issue reflects on the tension between zines’ alternative media identities and their increasing institutionalisation, represented by the growing number of institutions, including public and university libraries, building their zine archives. In the introduction, the editors propose the concepts of ‘selfing’ and ‘shelving’, which capture these seemingly opposing processes and underpin the special issue. While ‘selfing’ hints at how the individual or collective self is constructed or ‘manufactured’ through writing and publishing zines, ‘shelving’ represents the practical and theoretical challenges of zine archiving, both to document cultural practice and to preserve these vulnerable or resistant voices into the future. The contributions in this special issue trace how zines enable modes of selfing in relation to disability or antiwar zinetivism, and present practical reflections on the challenges of running a zine archive within the university and more. The special issue contributes to a continuing dialogue among scholars, archivists, and practitioners.

This special issue is the result of papers and conversations that took place at two conferences held at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. In July 2022, as pandemic travel restrictions began to relax, the hybrid event ‘Zines Revisited’ brought together an international group of researchers, among them Sabina Fazli, Miloš Hroch, Christian Schmidt, and Matthew Worley. The conversation about zines and zine scholarship continued into the evening. With few opportunities to present research on zines in all their breadth, the idea was born to organise a follow-up symposium and send out a call for papers that would bring together scholars and practitioners to discuss zines across a range of practices, genres, and periods.

Sharing ideas for possible titles, Sabina's and Christian's suggestion of pairing ‘selfing’ and ‘shelving’ – representing the tension between the growing number of institutions collecting zines and their ongoing importance in communal and individual identity projects – eventually held sway. The symposium, ‘Selfing and Shelving: Zines, Zine Media, and Zinetivism’, took place 2 years later in May 2024, organised by Fazli and Hroch. This event comprised both zine scholars and practitioners, representing a wider range of media, themes and approaches subsumed under the term ‘zine’.

Although Christian had been involved in the conception of the event, he wasn’t able to attend. Together with the organisers and Worley, however, he agreed to co-edit a special issue based on papers delivered at the symposium. Just when we entered the planning phase of the special issue, we learned that Christian had passed away. To acknowledge his impact on the realisation of the symposium and inspiration for this special issue, as well as to put his zine scholarship in the spotlight, we include here a translated piece by him, which was previously published as part of his pioneering work on German-language zines at the Archiv der Jugendkulturen in Berlin. Christian will be missed very much; he was a cherished friend, scholar and colleague who contributed greatly to the preservation, analysis and acknowledgement of zine culture.

The rationale for this special issue stems from our observation that zines diversify across media, becoming ever more ‘chimeric’ (Chaker and Thieme, 2018), while also forming part of public and academic collecting efforts in libraries and archives that aim to capture and pinpoint them as objects in catalogued holdings. We see zines, and other alternative media, as dynamic formats and concepts. Zines are extremely versatile and shapeshift across historical and cultural contexts. The term covers a wide range of objects with different aesthetic and material qualities, as well as varied modes of production and reception: zines accommodate the collective concerns of fans and activists (zinetivism) and the personal voice of the diarist and letter writer. Since the rise of digital media, zines and their aesthetics have again changed (and continue to change): digitised and digital zines exist alongside blogs, social media, podcasts, and substacks, which seem to exhibit zine-y tendencies, while digital infrastructures have transformed the ways that paper zines are produced, distributed, read, and archived.

As this suggests, the special issue is underpinned by the concepts of selfing, which hints at how the individual or collective self is constructed or ‘manufactured’ via writing and publishing zines, and shelving, which encapsulates the boom of zine archives within institutions. It presents the practical and theoretical challenges and tensions between alternative media identities and institutional practices. James F. Hamilton (2000) argued that operating beyond institutional structures is one of the defining characteristics of alternative media such as zines. His definition of alternative media is based on their opposition to mass media and institutionalisation. He speaks also of decapitalisation and deprofessionalisation as hallmarks of media niches on the margins. Atton (2006: 25) untangles these three features: ‘In short, they [alternative media] must be available to ordinary people without the necessity of professional training, without excessive capital outlay, and they must take place in settings other than media institutions or similar systems’. This special issue, then, is an attempt both to spotlight zine media as important and complex objects, and to offer perspectives on the institutionalisation process of zines, making them a valid subject for academic research and archival curation.

At the same time as the preservation of zines is being recognised, paper-based media – including zines – has seen a revival and post-digital reinvention (Cramer, 2014; Ludovico, 2012). Attention has shifted towards the materials of which zines are made, returning craft to their production and thereby distinguishing them from publications that are over-dependent on digital devices. As alternative media, zines are now frequently conceived as an alternative to screens and platforms; alternative forms for alternative points of view. Simultaneously, there has been a growing scholarship on the materiality of zines, much of which attempts to go beyond traditional subcultural theories and absorb the thinking of new materialist philosophers (Hroch and Carpentier, 2021). Even in mainstream popular culture, the revival of zines has become visible, as in the novel Moxie (2017) and its film adaptation, released in 2021, which tells of a teenager's rebellion against sexism at her high school via a return to zine-making inspired by her mother's past as a riot grrrl zinester. Together with the growing number of anthologised zines (since the 1990s, and especially 2010s, Cometbus, Doris, Ring of Fire, Shotgun Seamstress, etc.), published by independent presses, this signals a renewed interest in zines as historically and aesthetically important texts, worth (re)reading and preserving.

In this new constellation, we propose to consider such questions as: where does the zine begin and end, and how have its meanings changed for readers, collectors and makers? How can contemporary developments of zine creation (like the wave of ‘quaranzines’, see Luther, 2022) change our understanding of its meaning, genealogy and archive? And what, and where, are zines now? One of the goals of this special issue is to offer a palette of theories and approaches – however incomplete – for zine researchers at the current moment.

The developments sketched above point in two directions. First, zine media constantly evolve and thereby become more and more difficult to grasp. They exist as messy texts and objects on the one hand, but, on the other hand, they are increasingly ‘fixed’ in metadata and catalogued at institutions. Second, zines remain subjectively meaningful objects that feed into private collections in shoe boxes and folders. They also continue to circulate as important sites for the construction of individual and communal selves, holding fragmentary and intimate records of biographical trajectories through subcultures and scenes. As Lucy Robinson has shown in a seminal chapter on zines working as history as well as in history (Robinson, 2018), they enable and record alternative readings of the past and the present. But is there a disconnect between the zine as personal means of communication, made collectively or individually to circumnavigate prevailing media structures, and the institutional collation of zines as filed, organised, and preserved objects?

To help frame this, we take up a line of discussion in zine studies which evokes zines as sites of selfing or volitional doing, modelling zines as the tools and materials through which their makers and readers become agents in shaping social and interior selves. In this vein, Duncombe (2008: 22) wrote about how zinesters ‘manufactur[e] themselves’, often beginning with the adoption of marginalised stances of ‘Freaks, geeks, nerds, and losers’, rather than defaulting to prefabricated mainstream identities (2008: 42).

Duncombe's seminal stock-taking of zine genres and zine cultures paved the way for more specialised studies. Bailey and Michel (2004), for example, see the preoccupation with selves as the hallmark of a specific genre and period. Their analysis of the boom of perzines conceptualises the genre as responding to the vagaries of a postmodern ‘identity crisis’, which makes the self the central topic of zine-making at the turn of the millennium. We hold that selfing is a perennial preoccupation of zines, both in those produced around communities, like fans or activists, and the subjective, sometimes hermetic, publications following the model of the perzine.

As a critical term, selfing has the greatest currency in psychology and sociology, and is inspired by the conceptualisation of identity construction by Erving Goffman, who borrows vocabulary from theatre and dramaturgy. Psychology views the self and selfing as the site of dialogic interplay between internal and external positions. The self is understood as ‘an introvert and private narration towards an illusory cohesion’ or ‘flow’ (Gülerce, 2014: 245; emphasis in the original), in which ‘an inventory of voiced positions’ (Surgan and Abbey, 2012: 153) interacts. Selfing contains this internal polyphony within a bounded and coherent space that relies on othering as its complementary opposite. The flow of self-narration may read like the ‘Intro’ to issue 8 of Butch nor Femme, in which the zinester gives the reader an immediate glimpse of the writing process: ‘I noticed last night while writing my journal that my pen wasn’t making consistent, direct contact with the paper, my handwriting looking more like a scrawl. […] not wanting to write but feeling like I should. […] But I’m writing now. Well, I’m technically typing now’ (Monsoon, 2013: 1). Fanzines and perzines may be read as mediating this form of self-narration as an ongoing monologue.

In Erving Goffman's (1959) influential formulation of the performative dynamics of everyday interactions, the self is the external presentation of a situationally adequate fiction, one that permits onlookers and interlocutors to posit a self as the origin of performance (1959: 252). In Goffman's use of theatre as the extended metaphor running through his book, this front-stage performance is propped up by back-stage work, a separation which demarcates spaces in which the quality and intensities of performance are adjusted to different contexts. In E. T. Russian's zine The Rings of Fire, a comic titled ‘Behind the scenes of my not-so-glamorous life’ (Russian, 2014: 54) explicitly casts the zine as a window on back-stage work. In this constructivist approach, the self which results from successful ‘impression management’ emerges in conjunction with the scene of performance and is anchored not only in the performer's body and expressions but also co-constituted by the context and environment, which includes props as ‘means for producing and maintaining selves’ (Goffman, 1959: 253). Later, Goffman explicitly mentions ‘selfing’ in his Frame Analysis (1974: 521), coining a term that captures the processual and relational quality of the self. They allow experimentation and open-endedness. For example, the introduction to issue 1 of queer zine Just Say No Thank You programmatically states that ‘my thoughts on these subjects continually change and evolve. But I’ve decided that this zine is inherently unfinished, and that's why it's a zine, not a book’ (edgystar, 2006: 1).

This sense of situational and alterable performance has been taken to distinguish selfing from identity, but a performed self can be seen as capturing forms of identity that range from situational and fleeting to bureaucratic categories. Given Goffman's perspective on selves as continually produced in performance and the currency of the term in psychology to denote an internal flow of articulation and experience, the concept provides a vantage point to consider acts that – or attempts to – relate subjectivities to categories, which nevertheless fall short of full-blown ‘identity’ (Hirschauer, 2023: 367). As often as zines are concerned with identity, they also take as their subject matter the seemingly inconsequential, mundane and fleeting moments of self-understanding that make up the flow of selfing.

Without wanting to be dragged into a theoretical debate about conceptual difficulties and discrepancies, Goffman's self as unstable – and (discursively) constructed in social interactions – is close to Stuart Hall's conceptualisation of identity (Hall mentions how ‘[individuals] fashion, stylize, produce and “perform”’ positions, see Hall, 1996: 14), even though the latter focused more on the macrolevel of political, cultural, class, historical, or institutional forces. According to Hall (1990: 222), we should think of identity ‘as a “production,” which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation’.

‘Selfing’ as a term resonates with these conceptualisations and offers a particularly apt starting point for explorations of zines as tentative, ephemeral, and experimental in both their materiality and articulation of precarious identities and belonging. Selfing may then refer to zines’ performance of immediacy and mode of communication that resembles stage whispering, allowing readers glimpses of back-stage scenes (Goffman, 1959). Today, we can trace the thread of selfing also in the research on the liminality of zines, as Peter Bryant (2025) writes that ‘variability and uncertainty of zine-making can expose the messy and ambiguous liminal states in which zine-makers both practice and define their craft’. Liminality can represent this back-stage setting where ‘selfing’ occurs.

The shelving of zines need not negate nor undermine any of the above. Though concerns surrounding the institutionalisation of zines recur, especially among oppositional groupings or ideologies that see themselves as outside or resistant to the state/capitalism/patriarchy/hierarchy, and so on, such anarchist and Adorno-esque echoes represent one perspective among many. For a start, shelving exists in many contexts.

To be sure, zines have indeed become objects of interest for a range of learned institutions, both scholarly and nominally public. In the UK, the British Library in London and numerous universities (e.g. Liverpool John Moores and London College of Communication) have begun to cultivate zine archives, enabling zines to form part of the historical – and contemporary – record. Equivalents can be found across the world. This is important, certainly from the perspective of the historian. Zines offer subaltern and alternative perspectives, distinct from the history ‘of record’ (newspapers, state papers, etc.). They enable histories ‘from below’, giving voice – as Thompson (1963) demanded – to those too often written out of, or ignored by, prevailing narratives of the past. Of course, questions might remain as to what is preserved and what is not, or how zines are categorised, labelled and accessed. But the alternative – excluding zines, ignoring zines, allowing trace of human voices and ingenuity to disappear – seems more problematic.

Besides, zines have been shelved elsewhere too. That they always really did – and still do – constitute more than ‘bits of paper’ (Bull and Penguin, 2015) can be determined by the fact that individuals collected/preserved them and that countless ‘insider’ accounts of zine-making now exist. From this, independent archives such as the Archiv der Jugendkulturen have developed to locate zines as an integral component of modern and contemporary culture. Go to many a coffee shop or independent book shop in many a city, and zines will be on sale. More often than not there will be zine-making groups nearby that themselves collate and collect what is made and produced. Given that zines have increasingly become part of activist practice (Matich et al., 2024), activist and political groups maintain their own archives and collections. Zines – if defined beyond the ‘fanzine’ moniker – feed into a far wider history of self-publishing that constitutes and effectively rides roughshod over any attempt to neatly delineate the parameters of ‘alternative media’, even of ‘zine’ itself. Embrace the mess; it is the practice and the dissemination of ideas that matter … and the shelving of zines captures, inspires, and enables that. For instance, Alessandro Ludovico (2023: 196) writes about the transformation of libraries as institutions under the influence of various types of DIY libraries and sees the future potential – at a crossroads of the alternative with the institutional – to foster ‘a mutual influence between the codified institutional environments and the free-floating alternative environments, reshaping their forms to better reflect contemporaneity’.

Scholars and archivists have long made such a case (e.g. Baker, 2015). For Sarah Baker and Alison Huber (2014), the preservation of materials such as zines is essential given how historical perspectives change over time. What is ‘popular’ or ‘known’ in a particular period is not necessarily representative of culture more generally; the recovery of voices, peoples, ideas, and experiences relies on those who collect and shelve artefacts and documents that are made and circulated outside of dominant media, narratives, and discourses. What once was ‘rubbish’ may later be priceless (Baker and Huber, 2014). As importantly, the practice of shelving might also be seen as an integral part of the practice and process of zine-making, another step towards curating a community archive (Baker and Cantillon, 2022).

Certainly, as Kirsty Fife makes clear (Fife, 2019), there is an ethics to this. Being sympathetic to those who made what becomes a cultural artefact is essential, meaning archivists should reflect critically on what they are doing and endeavour to incorporate ‘the originating politics of zine culture into protocols for cataloguing, access, interpretation and use of these materials’ (Fife, 2019). For example, consideration needs to be given to access, organisation, and location. The nature of zines also means that materials may be sensitive. Small circulation allows for sharing and expressing thoughts on personal subjects not designed for wider viewing. Zines are often made by young people formulating and developing ideas. Would you want your teenage musings revealed to others once you became an adult? Like diaries, zines can be private. They can be a place to test and experiment. They are a site of praxis, meaning they capture a process: ideas and identities becoming, and so not designed to be read or seen as fixed and definitive. Archivists and scholars need always keep this mind.

Ultimately, the shelving of zines serves both to document cultural practice and to preserve voices into the future. From a historian's point of view, they provide an invaluable source; a veritable portal to a range of experiences, communities, practices, priorities, concerns, desires, and possibilities not always intended for a wide readership but invaluable for gleaning insight into the past.

The contents of this special issue reflect the themes outlined above. First, Ash Watson provides an overview of recent zine scholarship, expanding on themes of politics and subjectivity; expression and materiality; archiving and finally, research and teaching. Watson also reflects on the content of zines: the substance that fills the form. By looking especially at zines concentrated on music, sport, fiction, celebrities, places, stuff and things, Watson suggests ways by which zines have influenced both research and the wider culture.

Lilith Cooper's article is concerned with how zines enable, mediate, and present modes of subjectivity or in other words, modes of selfing. In particular, she has mined the Wellcome Institute's collection of zines relating to disability. Borrowing from Stacey Park Milbern's notion of ‘Crip Doulas’, Cooper considers how zines support transitions into disability, presenting zines as ‘liminal affective technologies’. A more overtly activist focus is applied by Inna Perheentupa, Galina Miazhevich, and Saara Ratilainen, whose article presents the antiwar zine Zhenskaia Pravda as a form of modern-day samizdat production. Founded by the Feminist Anti-War Resistance in Russia, the zine is seen to construct a range of interconnecting ‘selves’ that enable and facilitate opposition to Putin's forces. This process of selfing through zinetivism is necessarily complex, at once seeking to unify and speak across a diverse Russian audience.

Putting the ‘fan’ back into fanzines, Abi Hockday looks back to female fandom around British science fiction. Though sci-fi fandom was predominantly male in the mid-twentieth century, zines – such as Femizine (1954–60) – helped make space for women to contribute to and help shape the ‘golden age’ of British sci-fi in the 1950s. Utilising the concept of the ‘affective circuit’, which suggests how affect, fans, and fandom function, Hockday looks at how women ‘rewired’ understandings of sci-fi to create a distinctly female site of fandom. Peter Willis, meanwhile, takes a different historical turn to begin development towards a material history of zine. To do this, Willis proposes a ‘sociotechnical’ understanding of zines that reveals at how their production, purpose and dissemination was informed by technological changes over time.

Finally, alongside Christian Schmidt's study of zines as a bricolaged media, detailing the zine's mutability and versatility, Aggie Toppins and Shreyas Ravikrishnan provide us with a view from inside the archive. The TL: DR Archive is located at Washington University, St Louis, from where the relationship between zine production and zine archivism plays out day to day. This practice-based contribution discusses how the archive works with practitioners to forge a constructive intellectual community, as well as tensions between institutions and alternative cultures. Overall, the special issue presents as a contribution to an ongoing dialogue that connects scholars, archivists, and practitioners. Only by connecting, speaking and working together will inherent tensions between selfing and shelving be navigated and conciliated.