Chapter 3 Zines summary

Chapter three of Notes from the Underground explains the community surrounding and developing from zines as a virtual society most often for isolated people.  It seems as if zinesters have plenty of trouble socializing, either because they do not have the time, they are socially awkward, or because they feel they don’t have much in common with other people surrounding them physically. Our author says,“loneliness promotes zine communication” (45) Anyone making zines, trading, receiving, and remaining active can start to build a community and develop a sense of fulfillment.  Zines are an individualistic venture, as we learned in the identity chapter, but the primary property of a zine is communication, which requires another person receiving information. A person can connect with others as much as that person expresses him/herself.  In short, communication is bound to bring people with similar interests together, and that is what zines hope to do. 

            A community always needs a clubhouse, but zinesters don’t always live in the same area, or even the same city, so their community is more a virtual one. The zine itself is the “clubhouse” that people of similar interests can attend. People often write letters to zines, and contributing is quite common. The written word appearing in the zine is the discussion material of the club meeting. The ideal zine network is comprised of people from all walks of life sharing their zines with other people- accepting, sharing, coexisting; “this model is the very essence of a libertarian community; individuals free to be who they want and cultivate their own interests, while simultaneously sharing each other’s differences”. (52). This ideal place, is supposedly Bohemia.

            The scene that the zinesters make up are all those avenues that make up Bohemia.  Bohemia traditionally has been in low income neighbourhoods, independent coffee shops, record stores, and other independent places in cities like New York and San Francisco, but with gentrification every 20 or so years and no rent control, many artists have scattered and moved to different places.  Supposedly, physical location is not an issue anymore, and zinesters cannot rely on a central locale in any case because they are scattered all over the place.. Duncombe suggests, as a result of this dispersion, “there is simply not an abundance of material structures…and those that do exist are in constant danger of ‘being discovered’ by non-bohemians; of being gobbled up and ruined by an insatiable consumer culture industry” (58) The bohemians as a whole wish, according to Duncombe’s definition to place value on things that the “straight world” sees as worthless.  Perhaps they do this so that the straight world will never stumble upon it? Some cultural studies people, assuming that bohemians are from impoverished backgrounds, see that “this semantic rearrangement of components of the objective world gives people who are materially impoverished material with which to fashion their own cultures” (60).  Zinesters overlay the straight world with their own world, and that value is not necessarily material. In this case of a bohemia, zines themselves hold together this dispersed scene, and some zines are even dedicated to mapping the underground all over the country, literally pointing out all the underground hotspots in various cities that don’t seem to have been gobbled up yet…

             Of course, any scene must have its rules and debates.  A long standing debate mentioned is the ‘what constitutes a punk rocker?” where the main contenders are appearance, which subscribes to an image already planned out, or individuality, which is a tenet of anarchy, a philosophy of Punk Rock. Is punk rock an individual endeavor if it can turn into a shade of conformity?  This is a debate that seems to have never been resolved, and it also seems as if only men have participated in it.  While they were thinking about what punk rock really is, girls were becoming restless and disenchanted with the fact that no women were featured in punk rock zines. They felt they had no voice in the scene, so riot grrl was born.  Their mission was to “put the punk back into feminism and the feminism back into punk” (66) They were a network of women linked through zines spread over all the united states that didn’t subscribe to one philosophy; it was just supposed to be a “medium for grrrls to say what is on their minds”, for, “we feel that over-organization would cost us the individuality we spend too much of the time fighting the rest of the world for” (66,68).  Riot grrrl was a place for any girl to rant, rave and say whatever they pleased because girls were (and are) being expected to look, behave, and breathe a certain way.  After a while, however, this absolute subjectivity settled comfortably into a formulaic magazine where girls were sending in the same things- stories of someone harassing them, drawings of girls, etc.  It seems as though the readers and contributors were molding themselves into a singular voice which progressively became more stagnant when the intention of the magazine was to serve as a catalyst for new thoughts and pure individual expression.  In this, we learn that the zine community ideally wants to be “based not in common understanding but in shared dialogue” (70)  This exchange of thought shapes the community and keeps it in motion.

            Duncombe’s last section thinks through a contradiction that also arises in the zine community. In America, so many organizations are founded that allow people to “come together in personal unions” that encourage citizens to find a common interest with somebody despite the staunch individuality that America advocates. (71)  But one problem with the little communities is that some people within these groups start getting into the business of the group, the politics, instead of focusing on the cause that formed the group in the first place. Zines are intended to encourage people to share despite differences, but if one is against everything except one’s own or elitism about a subject starts to develop, then it will be impossible to meet people that are potentially wonderful connections. He suggests that some zinesters are living in a “virtual ghetto” if they don’t extend a hand from out of their own subject bubble.