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.

More girls are producing media today than at any other point in U.S. history, and they are creating media texts in virtually every format currently possible--magazines, films, musical recordings, and websites. Girls Make Media explores how young female media producers have reclaimed and reconfigured girlhood as a site for radical social, cultural, and political agency. Central to the book is an analysis of Riot Grrrl--a 1990s feminist youth movement from a fusion of punk rock and gender theory-and the girl power movement it inspired. The author also looks at the rise of girls-only media education programs, and the creation of girls' studies. This book will be essential reading for anyone seeking to understand contemporary female youth in today's media culture.

Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer brings together a collection of text-based and visual essays, commissioned artworks and graphics. This richly illustrated book responds to the concept, aesthetics and function of the political pamphlet. It is diverse in content, interpreting the 'pamphlet' in the broadest terms, and encompassing a number of case studies that offer historical or specific examples of contemporary pamphleteering practice that can be seen to perform 'a clear political implication' or protest. Besides exploring the radical history and diverse cultures of the pamphlet, it also celebrates the rich visual rhetoric, typography and contemporary relevance of the format for both artists and activists. Contributions include an historical overview and essays by: Andy Abbott, Angeliki Avgitidu, Aziz Choudry and Désirée Rochat, David Murrieta Flores, Michelle Kempson, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Rachel Schreiber, Jane Tormey, Gillian Whiteley; visual contributions by Gary Anderson and Steven Shakespeare, Ruth Beale, Ami Clarke, Common Culture, Jeremy Deller, Freee, Patrick Goddard, Gavin Grindon, Ferenc Grof, Marc Herbst, Joanne Lee, Josh MacPhee, Manual Labours, Mark McGowan, Minute Works, Chris Morton, radicalreThink, Hester Reeve, Oliver Ressler, Greg Sholette & Christopher Darling, Laura Wild, Andrew Wilson. As the book was conceived as predominantly visual from the outset, the book concept has been a collaboration with The Little Riot Press (Phil Eastwood and Chris Dunne). Overall, an aesthetic of protest and propaganda was considered integral to the design to reiterate the generally handmade, analogue techniques found in political pamphlets. The Little Riot Press have thus approached the illustration and overall visual cohesion from the perspective of the radical artist pamphleteer. www.thelittleriotpress.com

Perspectives from educators, archivists, and students involved in efforts to deconstruct and transform the institutional authority of archives

Zines in Third Space develops third-space theory with a practical engagement in the subcultural space of zines as alternative media produced specifically by feminists and queers of color. Adela C. Licona explores how borderlands rhetorics function in feminist and queer of-color zines to challenge dominant knowledges as well as normativitizing mis/representations. Licona characterizes these zines as third-space sites of borderlands rhetorics revealing dissident performances, disruptive rhetorical acts, and coalitions that effect new cultural, political, economic, and sexual configurations.

This essay collection explores the cultural functions the printed book performs in the digital age. It examines how the use of and attitude toward the book form have changed in light of the digital transformation of American media culture. Situated at the crossroads of American studies, literary studies, book studies, and media studies, these essays show that a sustained focus on the medial and material formats of literary communication significantly expands our accustomed ways of doing cultural studies. Addressing the changing roles of authors, publishers, and readers while covering multiple bookish formats such as artists’ books, bestselling novels, experimental fiction, and zines, this interdisciplinary volume introduces readers to current transatlantic conversations on the history and future of the printed book.

The contributors, including such leading scholars as Vicki L. Ruiz, Jennifer Scanlon, and Miriam Formanek-Brunell, examine myriad ways in which a variety of discourses and activities from popular girls' magazines and advertisements to babysitting and the Girl Scouts help form girls' experiences of what it means to be a girl, and later a woman, in our society. The essays address such topics as board games and the socialization of adolescent girls, dolls and political ideologies, Nancy Drew and the Filipina American experience, the queering of girls' detective fiction, and female juvenile delinquency to demonstrate how cultural discourses shape both the young and teenage girl in America. Although girls' culture has until now received comparatively little attention from scholars, this work confirms that understanding the culture of girls is essential to understanding how gender works in our society. Making a significant contribution to a long-neglected area of social and cultural inquiry, Delinquents and Debutantes will be of central interest to those in women's studies, American studies, history, literature, and cultural studies.

Given the rapidly growing presence of girls online, serious academic inquiry into the relationship between girls and the Internet is imperative. Girl Wide Web is an innovative collection of cutting-edge research exploring a wide sweep of issues related to the ways adolescent girls interact with the Internet. Employing a range of methodologies and theoretical perspectives primarily within cultural studies, the authors examine a variety of topics - from instant messaging and web-diaries to online fan communities and Internet advertising that targets young girls. Taken together, these essays provide a rich portrait of the complex relationship among girls, the Internet, and the negotiation of identity.

Today’s youth live in the interface of the local and the global. Research is documenting how a world youth culture is developing, how global migration is impacting youth, how global capitalism is changing their economic and vocational futures, and how computer-mediated communication with the world is changing the literacy needs and identities of students. This book explores the dynamic range of literacy practices that are reconstructing gender identities in both empowering and disempowering ways and the implications for local literacy classrooms. As gendered identities become less essentialist, are more often created in virtual settings, and are increasingly globalized, literacy educators need to understand these changes in order to effectively educate their students. The volume is organized around three themes: gender influences and identities in literacy and literature; gender influences and identities in new literacies practices; and gender and literacy issues and policies. The contributing authors, from North America, Europe, and Australia offer an international perspective on literacy issues and practices. This volume is an important contribution to understanding the impact of the local and the global on how today’s youth are represented and positioned in literacy practices and polices within the context of 21st century global/cosmopolitan life.

Bringing together exciting new interdisciplinary work from emerging and established scholars in the UK and beyond, Litpop addresses the question: how has writing past and present been influenced by popular music, and vice versa? Contributions explore how various forms of writing have had a crucial role to play in making popular music what it is, and how popular music informs ’literary’ writing in diverse ways. The collection features musicologists, literary critics, experts in cultural studies, and creative writers, organised in three themed sections. ’Making Litpop’ explores how hybrids of writing and popular music have been created by musicians and authors. ’Thinking Litpop’ considers what critical or intellectual frameworks help us to understand these hybrid cultural forms. Finally, ’Consuming Litpop’ examines how writers deal with music’s influence, how musicians engage with literary texts, and how audiences of music and writing understand their own role in making ’Litpop’ happen. Discussing a range of genres and periods of writing and popular music, this unique collection identifies, theorizes, and problematises connections between different forms of expression, making a vital contribution to popular musicology, and literary and cultural studies.