• DOI:10.1632/pmla.2011.126.1.140
• Corpus ID: 56081796

Zines, Half-Lives, and Afterlives: On the Temporalities of Social and Political Change

@article{Radway2011ZinesHA,
  title={Zines, Half-Lives, and Afterlives: On the Temporalities of Social and Political Change},
  author={Janice A. Radway},
  journal={PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America},
  year={2011},
  volume={126},
  pages={140 - 150}
}

• J. Radway
• Published 1 January 2011
• Art
• PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

The term zine is a recent variant of fanzine, a neologism coined in the 1930s to refer to magazines self-published by Aficionados of science fiction. Until zines emerged as digital forms, they were generally defined as handmade, noncommercial, irregularly issued, small-run, paper publications circulated by individuals participating in alternative, special-interest communities. Zines exploded in popularity during the 1980s when punk music fans adopted the form as part of their do-it-yourself aesthetic and as an outsider way to communicate among themselves about punk's defiant response to the commercialism of mainstream society. In 1990, only a few years after the first punk zines appeared, Mike Gunderloy made a case for the genre's significance in an article published in the Whole Earth Review, one of the few surviving organs of the 1960s alternative press in the United States. He celebrated zines' wide range of interests and the oppositional politics that generated their underground approach to publication.