zine

plural zines · alternative 'zine

1. A low-circulation, noncommercial publication of original or appropriated texts and images, especially one of minority interest.

   Zines contributed to an evolving critical language that would ultimately take two paths: into the gut or to the academy. The most compelling zines fused the two.

   2005, Kim Cooper, “Mimeos and Cut-Out Bins”, in David Smay, editor, Lost in the Grooves: Scram’s Capricious Guide to the Music You Missed, Routledge, →ISBN

   4 more examples

   The feminist zine community is not located in place but it geographically dispersed, constituting a connected flow of communicative practices, spaces, texts, technologies, bodies, and utterances.

   2008, Samantha Holland, Remote Relationships in a Small World, Peter Lang, →ISBN, page 21

   I conducted a content analysis of the zines I collected by using techniques of thematic analysis (Patton, 1990). I read and reread each of the zines’ contents. I annotated the prose, cartoons, poetry, and narratives in the zines by noting key words that signaled topics and assigning codes and subcodes that were later collapsed to form categories.

   2013, Barbara J. Guzzetti, Thomas W. Bean, Adolescent Literacies and the Gendered Self: (Re)Constructing Identities through Multimodal Literacy Practices, Routledge, →ISBN, page 58

   “Do you think Cal Bodian's over there? Do you think he'll sign my zine?” “♪♪ Bum, bada-dum. ♪♪ My P.I. Undercover fanzine. I've done everything myself. I just took a guess about the chest hair.”

   2024 November 25, Max Brockman, “P.I. Undercover: New York” (5:35 from the start), in What We Do in the Shadows, season 6, episode 8, spoken by Guillermo de la Cruz (Harvey Guillén)

   While this may sound like a scene from the 1980s or 1990s – when zines were popular as a countercultural form of expression – this was a workshop in modern-day Los Angeles, where immigration raids and federal threats have left residents restless and scared.

   2025 December 10, Mallory Carra, “Gen Zine: DIY publications find new life as a form of resistance against Trump”, in The Guardian, →ISSN