This past summer, during my SURE project, I began working on queer zines from the Milwaukee and Chicago area (using the QZAP) because I wanted to find out how the canonical gay and lesbian newspaper culture differed from the zine culture. I wanted to understand better how queer and feminist movements progressed/advanced into the 90s. This research was then finalized during my senior thesis semester, where I worked more intimately with Dykes To Watch Out For as a series and the zine culture itself in Chicago and Milwaukee, outside of these gay and lesbian newspapers.

First, I needed an introduction to zines and zine culture. I understood how zines came to be, everything they are, and what they represent in our society. From the topics zines cover to who gets access to them, how diverse they are, how they are distributed, and the general aesthetic qualities that give them their zine identity. I took a deep dive into the historical background of the zine community and its grassroots connection to queer and feminist movements.

After that, I spent a lot of time in the Chicago Public Library Special Collections archive researching the Chicago Outlines and Windy City Times, two gay and lesbian newspapers from Chicago that included and/or were published alongside Dykes To Watch Out For. Seeing how much was there in the archive, my summertime was devoted to absorbing as much information as possible about the newspapers in that archive. I learned how each newspaper had a lesbian subsection, and through conversations with Professor Brennan, I applied queer and political theory to the texts. I ended up focusing on the theory of pleasure activism and the influences of Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic in the newspapers. I was able to conclude that engaging with the newspapers themselves opened access to people to have a relationship with the erotic and was a form of pleasure activism.

In the second section, I dove specifically into zines from Milwaukee and Chicago. I gave a literary analysis and archival description of the zines in the archive- and then, what is probably the most critical part of my research, explained how there is a considerable body of literature on zines in New York and San Francisco but not many or any on zines in Chicago or Milwaukee and how we need more studies on zine culture in the midwest. I decided to analyze the archive itself and the importance of what voice was the biggest in each city. What message was being conveyed, and how? I had to read through each of the zines and understand why they were made. I sadly concluded that zines, because of their personal-journalistic nature, are the artists carving out a space for themselves to belong. They either don’t see a space set for themselves daily or must hide or fight more than others to get the representation they crave. They don’t have a community outside of the zine community, which is mainly queer and accepting, so they build a bigger space to accommodate that loss. It is also a way for the average person to get creative and speak their mind without having to be published in a paper or journal. Hence, these conversations of access are also highly relevant to the zine community.

In the third portion, I dive into the cartoon series Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel. First, I spotlighted who she is and her work and how it has affected feminist, film, and new media movements during the 90s up through the current day. I zoomed in on the aspects of Politics, Gender, and Representation that make her comic strip the notable canonical work it is. It’s evolution, focusing mainly on the comics from the 80s before a main cast was created. The comic's responsive, reflective, and activist nature encouraged a fluid relationship between it and those who were reading it as it was being produced. Against the newspapers and zines, I argue that Bechdel’s main focus was to carve out a space for the lesbian experience in mainstream media, purposefully or not- once art is created, it is sometimes no longer yours. Bechdel influenced Lesbian and Women’s movements in the 80s and through the 00s. Finding this, I encourage scholars to research the formative years of the comic next to Bechdel’s more significant successes in literary theory, like the Fun Home graphic memoir trilogy she published after working on this project.

To combine all these mediums, I had to focus on setting the ground for different social issues when published and then place them in their contexts—contrasting the local mainstream news against the newspapers, comics, and zines. They also contrasted them with popular culture references from the time to how they presented themselves in the literary mediums. This geared me towards inspecting the influence of the AIDS epidemic, the Cold War, Gay and Lesbian Rights Movements, Bowers v. Hardwick, the Supreme Court case from 1986, and the catalytic formation of the ACT UP Movement in 1987. These events and movements are referenced in the newspapers and comics, and the effects can be seen later in the zines, primarily published during the 90s.

In my last section, I broke down my methodology and how I found the archive I am working with. Getting into why I chose to work with these zines specifically and how getting a local read enhanced my understanding of previous research I had done with the gay and lesbian newspapers from Chicago. My research then turned from text-based formatting into a visual representation, including charts I created about the zines in the archive. I started with charts on demographics within the archive: who, where, what, how many volumes, language, etc. Then, another chart with topics and keywords covered in each zine, how many pop culture or news references it makes, and where they were published.

Once I completed all of this research, I found myself thinking that this was the beginning of an academic book and how I could branch into films and poetry, as well as plays and music during this time, to get a feel of the culture outside its paper context. I plan to present the mid-point of this anthropological work I manifested in my sophomore year. I plan to continue in Graduate school- either in a Library Science & Archival Work program or a more Anthropological Research program.