Life Lessons: Experiences of Gender Studies in Zines in the 1990s and 2000s

Abstract

ABSTRACT The early years of gender studies in the US academy can be traced through their impact on zinesters, who parsed their interactions with these studies in their self-made and distributed publications. In this paper, I argue that the way that these young people used the space of the zine to make sense of feminist theory in their lives and to understand their experience of thinking through gender and sexuality within the college setting can serve as a reminder of the necessity for feminist theory to be transformative to students’ lived experiences, and of the critical importance for feminist studies in the academy to primarily enable students to, in Sara Ahmed’s words, ‘live a feminist life’. The zines discussed here show both the excitement and promise that arose for student zinesters in their work with feminist theory at college, but also the inequalities perpetuated by the gender studies classrooms of the 1990s and 2000s. As we reach a critical moment in reimagining and rebuilding institutions of higher education, zines discussing early gender studies courses offer a rare insight into the lived experience of historical efforts to address educational inequality, and can serve to refocus conversations on the role of studying liberation in the academy today.