Margins in Motion
Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships Program Doctoral Fellowships 2020–2023 and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program, OGS 2019–2020
Margins in Motion. Towards a Political History of Zine Culture is my Ph.D. thesis, completed as part of the Cultural Studies PhD program at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, under the supervision of Julien Lefort-Favreau. It proposes a political history of zine culture in the United States and France from the 1930s to the present. My approach draws from the Italian school of microhistory (Ginzburg, Levi), political theory (Mouffe, Freeden, Arendt), French sociology (Bourdieu, Boltanski), and art history (Baxandall).
The scope of this work is considerable, covering some of the most influential corpuses in zine history, from science fiction fanzines of the 1930s and 1940s to autobiographical perzines since the 2000s, through punk zines of the 1970s–1990s and French graphzines since 1980. This ambitious research project’s main goal is to lay new foundations for Zine Studies as a field of study, nearly 30 years after the publication of Stephen Duncombe’s seminal work Notes From Underground. This is done in three ways. First, by bringing together zine corpuses from different time periods, genres, and cultural areas in a comparative perspective. Second, by presenting a general periodization of zine history to help frame future work in the field. Third, by providing a robust theoretical framework for rethinking the role politics plays in zine culture, a major theme of existing scholarship on the subject.
Work for publication of the thesis is underway.