Discourses of social change in international grrrls zines

Throughout history, women have created their own media to demand the right to vote, study, and to resist social pressures. Self-publishing, thus, has played a crucial role in the women`s liberation movement. In this tradition, contemporary grrrl zines - independent, small-circulation magazines made by and for young women - continue to address gender inequalities and hierarchies of power. Grrrl zines provide a forum for women to freely express their critical thoughts, playfulness, and anger, voices that tend to be marginalized in our society and scholarly writing. Zines offer a rich archive for social, cultural and political analysis but have rarely been preserved in libraries and studied in academia. Therefore, this qualitative media analysis will address these abscences by archiving and analyzing grrrl zines as primary documents. An ethnographic content analysis of three cross-cultural case studies and interviews with zine editors will unfold the contemporary discourses of social change in respect to alternative views of motherhood, violence against women, and queer and transgender issues, topics that have been increasingly articulated in international grrrl zines. My hypothesis is that as part of the global women`s liberation movement grrrl zine editors form a proactive community of resistance that seeks social change, and express new codes under which society might be re-thought and transformed. As members of society and researchers we have to listen to these complex and diverse voices that point us to issues at the forefront of society and provide a model of participatory cultural production. Because only when today`s young women`s thoughts and experiences are known, cultural and social limitations can be changed and policies developed.