Revolution Grrrl Style: Zines and the Future of Feminism
Faculty Mentor Alison Piepmeier and Student Taylor Livingston
During summer 2007, Alison Piepmeier and Taylor Livingston (Anthropology major, WGS minor) worked together on Alison’s book in progress, tentatively titled Revolution Grrrl Style. The central questions they addressed were, how do girls and women construct their public and private identities, and how do they use the (often limited and flawed) verbal, visual, and physical materials of their cultural moment in this task? Alison's book documents and examines zines—quirky, individualized booklets filled with rants, ironic reworkings of pop culture iconography, and all variety of personal and political narratives. Taylor and Alison read hundreds of zines over the course of the summer, collaboratively interviewed a zine creator, and spent a week at the Special Collections Library at Duke University exploring their extensive zine archive.