Duplicate, copy, print: Towards a material history of the zine

This article draws on my PhD thesis ‘Duplicate, Copy, Print: Towards a Material History of the Zine’, in order to explore the ways in which specific technologies, such as the stencil and spirit duplicator, photocopier, risograph and digital inkjet, have impacted zine production and zine culture. I propose a sociotechnical understanding of zines and how they are created, drawing on emerging theoretical turns within book theory and wider media theory, which seeks to ground the emerging field of Zine Studies within a materialist media theoretical framework.

While the academic study of zines has significantly increased over the last decade, a dedicated field of Zine Studies is still emerging. While most research into zines to date has had a sociological underpinning, related to specific subcultures or the role of zines within wider movements, little attention has been given to their material form and the influence of certain technologies of production on their materiality, and how this materiality impacts the zines function within subcultural identity and community formation, often treating the zines materiality as an extraneous element, subordinate to the textual or visual content, rather than a co-constitutive part of it.

This article draws on archival research to outline some specific examples of zines relationship to their technologies of production over the last century, starting from the coining of the term ‘fanzine’ in 1940, up to the postdigital zines of today, in order to outline the ways in which contemporary zine production maintains and diverges from the ways zines have historically enacted their iconic properties of DIY, anti-mainstream, intimacy and intensity. This article argues that zines are instructional, dialogic, and communally produced, and that these factors, integral to zine culture, are informed through the technologies used in their production and performed through the materiality of the zine object.