Janice Radway, the Walter Dill Scott Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University, will give the annual Carl W. Ubbelohde lecture, titled “Girls, ‘Zines, and Divergent Networks of Dissent: Some Thoughts on Subjectivity and Social Movement in the 1990s.”
The lecture will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 4, in the Allen Memorial Medical Library Building’s Ford Auditorium.
Dissident and non‐conforming girls and young women developed an interest in what are now called “girl zines” through a number of different routes, with a range of different interests in mind, and at different moments over the course of the last 20 years. Some were directly inspired by Riot Grrrl bands in the early 1990s. Others happened across zines at alternative bookstores and info‐shops or learned of them through popular magazines, college courses, public and private libraries, or varied friendship networks. This social, material and temporal variability raises interesting and important questions about whether “girl zines” should be thought of as a unitary phenomenon and, correlatively, whether the girl zine explosion should be thought of as an event, a social movement, a conversation, a political intervention, or something else. Drawing on oral history interviews with former girl zine producers as well as with zine librarians, archivists and commentators, this presentation will raise questions about how to think the recent history of feminism and its relationship to subject formation and other “new social movements” at a time of significant economic, political and technological change in the 1980s, 90s and into the 21st century.
The Ubbelohde Lecture is an endowed lecture series sponsored by History Associates in memory of Carl Ubbelohde, an admired professor and former chair of the Case Western Reserve University Department of History.
For more information about this event, contact Emily Sparks at 216.368.2625 or emily.sparks@case.edu.