College of Arts and Sciences

Janice Radway, Spring 2015 Magliocco Lecture

Riot Grrrl History, Underground Itineraries and Girl Zine Networks: Unruly Subjects in the 1990s
April 9th, 2015 6:30-8:00 pm, Sandburg Theater

The Department of English and Journalism Presents the 10th Annual Magliocco Lecture.

Radway is the Walter Dill Scott Professor of Communication Studies and a professor of American studies and gender studies within the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University. She is also the director of the Rhetoric and Public Culture Program within the communication studies department. Radway is widely known for her scholarship on readers, reading, books, and the history of middlebrow culture.

Drawing on recently established zine archives and oral history interviews with former girl zine producers as well as with zine librarians, archivists, and commentators, this presentation will explore the significance of the fact that 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, and at different moments over the course of the last twenty years.

Some were directly inspired by Riot Grrrl bands in the early 1990s. Others happened across zines at alternative bookstores and info-shops and at punk performances both in the ‘90s and later. Still others learned of them through popular magazines, college courses, public and private libraries, or through quite varied friendship networks.

Rebekah Buchanan, rj-buchanan@wiu.edu

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