ENG 340 Week 8: Notes from Underground

 Notes from the Underground Blog 8

    Notes from Underground: Zines & the Politics of Alternative Culture by Stephen Duncombe was an interesting peak inside the 'underground' communities and cultures that have been associated with zine-making. As a medium for the Language Arts, this novel particularly interested the future educator in me. I was also drawn to social discussions of power explored through this as it supports my learning in another course I am currently enrolled in, ENG/FILM 395 - Feminist Media Criticism & Theory. 

    While I examined Chapter 5: Consumption the most closely, throughout the text I noticed an emphasis on the living beings and cultures that led to the creation of zine communities, rather than a simple analysis of the form. This book could have easily approached zines from a singular perspective, starting with How-to's or a Zine101 lesson. Instead, the reader is drawn into the individuals who create and disperse this material through frequently referenced, often strange and niche, examples of zines. Sometimes, this approach led certain chapters to read like an annotated bibliography-- extremely useful for finding sources and exploring new perspectives in zine culture (especially older archival work), but it seems less applicable to the day-to-day exploration and beginner approach to zines that I would love to explore with highschoolers one day. I'm sure there are plenty of resources I will work with to create zines with younger generations, and these sources may work as helpful examples.

    In the Film Studies course that I'm taking as my final English credit, Feminist Media Criticism & Theory, we have been focusing on studies about the social position of the audience within the consumer/creator relationship. I've been particularly interested in the aspect of this class that discusses fan culture, which is discussed at length by Dumcombe, as he claims that any zine could be argued to be a fanzine. In Chapter 5, I was engrossed by the section that discussed how within this stratified consumer/producer relationship, "fans are continually betrayed in their quest to make the culture theirs, and the process of connection must be continually reinvented, ad infinitum," (122). I found that this particularly related to the fan 'slash' communities that we had discussed in our class, from Buffy to The 100, fans become continually dissatisfied by these strained relationships and take power from recreating them in their own format, whether through zines, fanfiction, or online community-building.