Riot Grrrl Zines Between Olympia and Chicago: Feminist Punk, Queer Identity, and DIY Zine Networks, 1990s

Riot Grrrl Zines

Pamphlet

Riot Grrrl feminist and queer punk writing in six zines from the Olympia and Chicago networks of the 1990s, preserving the movement’s use of inexpensive photocopying, mail order distribution, collage, and first person writing to address subjects that remained contested within both mainstream culture and punk itself: sexism, sexual abuse, queer desire, fat oppression, body image, class, depression, friendship between women, and women’s authority within underground music. The group includes Channel Seven, made by Erika Reinstein with Corin Tucker of Heavens to Betsy and later Sleater Kinney, as well as Nomy Lamm’s I’m So Fucking Beautiful #3, an Olympia zine that made fatness, disability, sexuality, and the politics of beauty subjects of direct feminist analysis. Riot Grrrl Press, founded in 1992 by Reinstein and May Summer, operated as a distribution network for zines primarily written by women and moved with its organizers from Washington, D.C. to Olympia and Chicago, making the geographical movement visible in the addresses and personal narratives reproduced across this group.

Six zines, each approximately 5" x 8.5", reproducing issues originally self published and circulated during the 1990s, photocopied in black and white with white, fluorescent green, yellow, purple, orange, and pink covers. The present group corresponds to a later reproduction set made from surviving copies of zines originally written or distributed through Riot Grrrl Press; the distributor describes these editions as “copies of the copies,” accounting for occasional text cropped at the margins.

[1] Reinstein, Erika, and Corin Tucker. Channel Seven. Olympia, WA, 1990s. A collaborative feminist punk zine by Reinstein and Tucker, then singer and guitarist of Heavens to Betsy, combining typewritten personal writing with drawings, handwritten additions, television imagery, and discussion of music, gender, relationships, and the treatment of women within punk. The photographed interior opens “welcome to channel seven...” and describes itself as “an idea i have and a fanzine i am doing for this purpose,” before moving through accounts of harassment, relationships, punk scenes, and the authors’ attempts to create their own cultural space.
[2] Growing Pains #1. 1990s. A personal zine concerned with movement between cities, queer identity, work, friendship, music, and the difficulties of establishing community. Its pages describe living in Chicago, plans to move to Portland, work on Riot Grrrl Press, and the author’s identification as a “white, middle-class, college educated, queer skinny woman,” placing individual uncertainty within the geography and social networks of feminist punk.
[3] The Nerdy Grrrl Revolution #2. 1990s. A confrontational feminist punk zine whose photographed pages announce “nerdy girrrl revolution!!!” and attack sexism, exclusion, and the behavior of men within underground music. Personal accounts of shows, relationships, work, and sexual politics are mixed with handwritten interventions, collage, addresses, and calls for correspondence, retaining the direct relationship between political argument and everyday communication characteristic of zine culture.
[4] Lamm, Nomy. I’m So Fucking Beautiful #3. Olympia, WA, 1995. Sixty four page zine centered on fat liberation, body image, disability, sexuality, and the politics of health and beauty. Lamm distinguishes systemic fat oppression from individual dissatisfaction with appearance and writes about internalized shame, accessibility, nutrition, sex work, and the equation of thinness with health within punk culture; contemporary descriptions of the issue likewise record contributions concerning disability, stretch marks, fat male identity, consumer society, and the relationship between fat oppression and medical authority.
[5] Wrecking Ball. 1990s. Personal and political writing organized through typewritten text, handwritten commentary, photocopied imagery, and deliberately fragmented page design, addressing relationships between women, sexuality, anger, class, and the pressures surrounding femininity. The issue’s pages move repeatedly between autobiography and structural critique, using the writer’s experiences in punk and feminist communities as material for examining gendered expectations.
[6] Wrecking Ball #2. 1990s. Continues the same autobiographical method through writing on class, women’s friendships, abusive behavior, sexuality, and feminist community. One photographed passage describes the difficulty of discussing class in the United States and criticizes the assumption that oppression can be separated into competing hierarchies, while handwritten marginal responses and additions preserve the zine’s mixture of essay, correspondence, annotation, and visual argument.

These zines come from a period when Riot Grrrl developed simultaneously as a musical scene, feminist political vocabulary, and decentralized print network connecting writers through shows, postal addresses, trades, distros, and photocopied publications. Heavens to Betsy, the Olympia duo of Corin Tucker and Tracy Sawyer, formed within that early scene, while Tucker’s participation in Channel Seven records the movement between performing music and producing feminist print rather than treating the two as separate activities. Nomy Lamm pushed another part of this print culture toward fat liberation: I’m So Fucking Beautiful #3 is independently recorded as a 1995 Olympia publication, and Lamm’s zine circulated arguments about fat oppression, disability, health, beauty, and sexuality through precisely the mail based networks represented here. Riot Grrrl Press supplied infrastructure for that circulation, reproducing material from flats submitted by writers and distributing catalogs as its organizers moved between Washington, Olympia, Chicago, and later locations. Later reproductions from surviving copies, with occasional cropped text inherent in the copying process; covers bright, interiors clean and legible, with no substantial wear visible. Overall near fine condition. Six zines preserving the textual network through which 1990s feminist and queer punk writers converted experiences of sexism, fat oppression, sexuality, class, abuse, music, friendship, and geographic displacement into material intended to be copied, mailed, traded, and answered.

Item #23776

Price: $450.00