'zine

Zines contributed to an evolving critical language that would ultimately take two paths: into the gut or to the academy. The most compelling zines fused the two.

The feminist zine community is not located in place but it geographically dispersed, constituting a connected flow of communicative practices, spaces, texts, technologies, bodies, and utterances.

I conducted a content analysis of the zines I collected by using techniques of thematic analysis (Patton, 1990). I read and reread each of the zines’ contents. I annotated the prose, cartoons, poetry, and narratives in the zines by noting key words that signaled topics and assigning codes and subcodes that were later collapsed to form categories.

“Do you think Cal Bodian's over there? Do you think he'll sign my zine?” “♪♪ Bum, bada-dum. ♪♪ My P.I. Undercover fanzine. I've done everything myself. I just took a guess about the chest hair.”

While this may sound like a scene from the 1980s or 1990s – when zines were popular as a countercultural form of expression – this was a workshop in modern-day Los Angeles, where immigration raids and federal threats have left residents restless and scared.