Written in the Mud

Abstract

From the early months of the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp protests, women wishing to offer different perspectives from those found in the corporate press, created their own newsletters and booklets. These print publications incorporated a wide and vibrant array of anecdotes, analyses and images of life at the camp. They served to mobilize new participants, circulate information about events, document women's actions and create forums for cultivating ideas, demands, tactics and analyses. In this paper, I look at how Greenham publications functioned simultaneously as instrumental tools and affective sites of knowledge production. I situate these women's publications in regard to the histories and political trajectories of zine-making, arguing that the ethics and values that shaped Greenham women's publications share a great deal of similarities with zine-making cultures and cultural productions. In doing so I offer an alternative approach to the historicization of DIY publishing and feminist grassroots media that focuses on the dynamics of autonomous media practices pre and post-internet.