“Zine Politics and the Intuitions of Zine Culture” - Izabeau Legendre
Channel: Bibliographical Society of Canada
Date: 2021-06-25

Izabeau Legendre, Queen's University

My current research project engages with the politics of zine culture. Building on my previous M.A. thesis on Montreal’s zine scene, it proposes a comparative analysis of important scenes of the global zine culture, notably in the Anglosphere (focusing on the US, the UK and English Canada), Quebec, and France. One of the rare attempts for a general and systematic study of zine culture since the seminal publication of Notes From Underground in 1997 (Duncombe, 2017), it aims at laying a general theoretical and methodological framework for further study in the growing academic field of zine studies. 

Zines – self-published, self-distributed little printed publications circulating in alternative scenes, and framed within a broader Do It Yourself, politicized “analog” culture (Valelly, 2020) – have acquired a special status within contemporary print culture. Increasingly included in libraries, and archival collections they have drawn the attention of scholars and actors of book culture alike (Alix, 2007; Bartel, 2004; Mouquet, 2014).

Previous studies have insisted on the prevalence of politics in zine culture, and chiefly on the political dimension of zine making and publishing (Jeppesen, 2012, Piepmeier 2009). Zine artists, or zinesters, are generally considered the main actors of zine politics. As a part of this PhD research project on zine studies, I want to emphasize the political role of institutional actors, and the importance of institutions structuring zine scenes as sites of political activity.

Although mostly ignored by contemporary scholars, the political role of scene-scale institutions was already acknowledged by the early actors of American zine culture (Moskowitz, 1956). This role has been brought back into the in the last 15 years. From the perspective of zine politics, institutions become both crucial sites of internal contention, and strategic apparatuses for the outward radical social criticism that has made the mark of zines and the politics of alternative culture since the punk and post-punk movements of the 1970s and 1980s (Hesmondhalgh, 1999). Institutions play an undeniable role in zine culture’s central political issues: negotiation with cultural fields, including the field of comics (Boltanski, 1975; Brown, 2017) or the publishing field more generally (Bourdieu, 1999; Habrand, 2016; Thompson, 2013); negotiation with the “mainstream” or the dominant culture (Atton, 2002), or with the political ideas and debates of the time (Pagé, 2014). Providing zine culture with an alternative structure of its own – its own networks of production, distribution, promotion, and conservation – the zine scenes’ institutions disseminated across the world are key elements to understand the depth of zine politics.