Girls and Adolescence - Youth Culture

ARTICLE
10.1177/0044118X03254566
YOUTH & SOCIETY / SEPTEMBER 2003
Schilt / ZINE MAKING AS A FORM OF RESISTANCE
“I’LL RESIST WITH EVERY INCH AND

EVERY BREATH”
Girls and Zine Making
as a Form of Resistance
KRISTEN SCHILT
University of California, Los Angeles
Scholars who argue that girls lose their confidence during adolescence neglect to ex-
amine girls who do not lose their voice as teenagers. Based on written interviews and
textual analysis of zines produced by girls involved in the feminist subculture of Riot
Grrrl, this article maintains that zine making is one way girls form support networks
and create a safe space to examine and resist the cultural devaluation of women.
Keywords: girls and adolescence; youth culture; cultural resistance
If popular culture can be read as reflecting popular attitudes and

opinions, girls appear to be living in a society that is beginning to vali-
date their experience and encourages them to develop into strong, pro-
ductive women. Teen apparel catalogues (such as Delia’s and Brat) of-
fer a myriad of girl-positive clothing. Girls can choose to wear “girls
kick ass,” “happy to be a girl,” or “I will not lose to boys” on T-shirts as
their personal empowerment slogan. Television shows such as Xena
and Buffy the Vampire Slayer offer girls new images of strong, female
heroines who use wits and martial arts to defeat male attackers. In ad-
dition, girls are also now viewed as a viable target market for items be-
yond apparel and makeup. Companies ranging from software produc-
ers to snowboard makers are now marketing their products—with a
feminine spin—to girls. Lionel trains and Legos, as in the 1950s, now
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I would like to thank Christine Williams and Laura Miller for
all of their help with this article.
YOUTH & SOCIETY, Vol. 35 No. 1, September 2003 71-97
DOI: 10.1177/0044118X03254566
© 2003 Sage Publications
71
72 YOUTH & SOCIETY / SEPTEMBER 2003
come in bold colors for boys and pastel colors for female consumers.
Even Nintendo, a notorious marketer to boys, made their new
GameBoy in hot pink in an attempt to attract female players. With this
new marketing trend of providing girls with empowering consumer
choices, American culture appears to be encouraging girls to grow
into strong women who can negotiate work, home, and romance,
while still retaining their femininity.
This new focus on girl power products stems from the growth of so-
ciological and psychological research on the need for empowering ad-
olescent girls that emerged in the mid-1990s. Although psychologists
like Carol Gilligan (1982) have long advocated that adolescence is a
difficult time for girls, the publication of the American Association of
University Women’s (AAUW) report, Shortchanging Girls, Short-
changing America, brought attention to what has come to be known as
“the confidence gap” (Orenstein, 1994). The AAUW found that al-
though both sexes experience a drop in self-esteem in adolescence,
girls suffer more from lack of belief in their intelligence and self-
worth. Following the AAUW report came a plethora of research that
focused on the adolescent female experience as one of immense tur-
moil (Lees, 1995; Orenstein, 1994; Pipher, 1994; Sadker & Sadker,
1994). In addition to supporting the AAUW’s (1991) finding that girls
lose their belief in themselves as creative and talented beings as they
approach adolescence, these works tended to paint a bleak picture of
adolescent girls as “saplings in a hurricane” (Pipher, 1994, p. 22) who
were “in danger of drowning in the Bermuda Triangle of adolescence”
(Pipher, 1994, p. 73).
Is the situation really this desperate for adolescent girls, however?
Certainly adolescence is a time fraught with trauma for girls, and pro-
viding information about the problems girls experience is an impor-
tant research goal. For example, information from psychological clin-
ical studies and sociological ethnographic work with girls allows
parents and teachers to identify problems girls are experiencing and
helps to outline plans to overcome these obstacles to girls’ success.
However, although these techniques elicit important data, they place
the researchers in the position of talking to girls who either are placed
in psychological care, volunteer to be in research projects, or seek out
researchers in schools. I argue that these research methods may miss
girls who do not seek out researchers but still may be offering resis-
Schilt / ZINE MAKING AS A FORM OF RESISTANCE 73
tance to the crisis of adolescence. Thus, to gain a wider perspective on

girls’ experiences in adolescence, I argue that it is necessary to focus
attention on how girls describe their own lives outside of the gaze of
the researcher. To this end, I juxtapose academic research on adoles-
cent girls with writing by girls gathered from zines.1 Analyzing girls’
writing in zines illustrates how some girls are able to resist losing their
voice in adolescence by receiving validation for their experiences and
being encouraged to speak up from their zine support networks. I ar-
gue that examining these zine support networks reveals not only how
beneficial peer support networks can be in adolescence in terms of
giving girls a safe space to articulate their thoughts and feelings but
also the difference between girl-based and consumer-market-driven
strategies of girl empowerment.
METHODOLOGY
This research was conducted through a combination of written in-

terviews with female zine makers and textual analysis of girl-produced
zines. I chose to do my primary analysis on girl-made zines for several
reasons. First, “girl-zines” (which Green and Taormino [1997] de-
fined as “do-it-yourself publications made primarily by and for girls
and women” [p. xi]) deal with many of the same topics as academic re-
search on girls. Therefore, I found them to be an excellent resource for
analyzing the differences between how adults construct the problems
of adolescence and how girls actually experience their lives. Second,
most research that attempts to access girls’thoughts and feelings relies
on participant observation, focus groups, or interviews. Using zines as
a research tool provides a unique opportunity to hear girls speaking
about their experiences outside of a clinical or research setting, be-
cause zines are examples of girls writing about their lives without an
adult audience in mind. Thus, examining girls’ writings in zines is an
unobtrusive method that captures how girls choose to represent their
lives in writing rather than how they describe their lives to researchers.
To begin my analysis, I did a content analysis of girl-zines in my
own personal collection. Having been a zine maker for several years, I
had amassed an archive of over 100 girl-produced zines that I used in
my analysis. Most of the zines I traded for with my zine or ordered
from Factsheet Five (a now-defunct resource guide that contained

contract addresses and ordering information for zines). As I was inter-
ested in girl-zines, I eliminated zines that dealt mainly with music, fic-
tion, or poetry. In addition, as I was focusing on teenagers, I elimi-
nated zines that were produced by girls older than the age of 18. After
this selection process, I had 33 issues of zines that I viewed as repre-
sentative of the girl-zine genre as they contained articles about a range
of topics about the female experience, such as feminism, rape and sex-
ual abuse, and sexual relationships. I devised codes for a variety of
subjects, ranging from sexual abuse to discussions of feminism. For a
final analysis, I narrowed my focus down to five topics: sexuality, sex-
ual abuse, sexual harassment, self-destructive behaviors (such as self-
mutilation), and puberty (especially menarche). I selected these topics
because they occurred frequently in the zines and were areas that re-
searchers who focus on adolescent girls frequently discuss (Martin,
1996; Orenstein, 1994; Pipher, 1994). As I was juxtaposing girls’ per-
sonal writing with the academic literature about them, I wanted to ex-
amine comparable subject matter. Twenty-seven of the zines con-
tained writings on these topics (see the appendix for a list of zines used
in the final analysis).
After conducting the content analysis, I focused on what the zines
said about these topics, performing a textual analysis of the articles.
When I had finished this analysis, I conducted written interviews with
a sample of girl-zine editors whose zines I had analyzed to examine
what function zine making served in their lives and to see what they
were doing currently. Zine makers leave very little contact informa-
tion, as they are often anonymous, have an address that is no longer
correct, or simply lack contact information at all. For these reasons, I
had only mail contacts for 20 of the girl-zine makers. I was able to
reach 18 by mail, and all agreed to participate. I opted to do the inter-
views via mail for two reasons. First, the respondents were geographi-
cally widespread, so face-to-face interviews would have been finan-
cially prohibitive. Second, because I was interviewing zine editors, I
surmised they would be most comfortable in a situation in which
they were able to write their responses. Many of them mentioned in
their zines that they felt uncomfortable talking to others in person or
on the phone. Thus, written interviews seem to be the best option for
making the respondents comfortable. I mailed 18 interviews, and I re-
ceived 17 back. On the form, I provided blank space for racial and eth-
nic identity and age. The respondents ranged between the ages of 14
and 20. Fifteen labeled themselves as Caucasian or White, whereas
two identified their ethnic backgrounds as Italian American and Pol-
ish American.
Obviously, the written interviews were not a random or representa-
tive sample, as I was using zine editors whose zines I had in my collec-
tion. However, as zines are not formally published and there is no cen-
tral location (such as a zine library) to access all zines produced,
collecting a random sample of girl-zines would have been impossible.
The zines in my collection did come from diverse regional locations,
and the demographics of the zine makers I interviewed did reflect the
demographics of most girl-zine makers (Carlip, 1995; Leonard,
1997). Zine making is mainly a middle-class phenomenon, as it re-
quires access to time and resources. Most of the printing costs are ab-
sorbed by the editor, as are the costs of paper, layout, and distribution.
Zines are also largely produced by White people, as they emerged
from the predominantly White punk subculture. In addition, it is
mainly an adolescent format, as teenagers, in general, have more lei-
sure time than adults. For these reasons, girl-zine editors are usually
reported to be White, young, and middle-class (Kearney, 1998; Leon-
ard, 1997). As my sample reflected these same demographics, I argue
that this research contains fairly representative examples of zines
made by adolescent girl-zine makers in the United States in the mid-
1990s.
On a final note, although zines are public and available as research
tools, it is important to remember that girls did not expect them to be
used in research. For this reason, I exclude the real names of my re-
spondents, opting to identify them through their zine identity. I did this
to help maintain the anonymity that many zine makers desire, espe-
cially around extremely personal subjects.
PROBLEMATIZING ADOLESCENCE FOR GIRLS
As adolescence marks the difficult transition between childhood

and adulthood, boys and girls have been found to experience a myriad
of problems as they chart the unfamiliar territory of puberty and in-
creasing responsibility. However, psychological studies that examine

adolescent development have found that girls consistently suffer a
wider variety of negative consequences as they begin to mature
(Freud, 1905; Gilligan, 1982; Horney, 1926; Peterson, 1988). The
1991 AAUW report found that compared to boys, girls emerged from
adolescence with lower self-esteem, a higher vulnerability to depres-
sion and eating disorders, and less belief in their intellectual abilities,
especially in the areas of math and science.2 The report found that
boys’ confidence, on the other hand, did not drop as severely as girls.3
This differential between boys and girls’ self-esteem, labeled the
“confidence gap” (Orenstein, 1994), became the focus for a body of
research on adolescent girls in the 1990s. In this section, I provide a
brief overview of research on the confidence gap specifically for
White, middle-class girls, as this is the demographic of my research.
The adolescent stage of development is viewed as a time for boys
and girls to begin developing independence and autonomy from the
adults in their lives. Yet, early studies on boys and girls’ developmen-
tal differences suggested that this development of autonomy was par-
ticularly difficult for adolescent girls. Examining the experiences of
White, middle-class girls in the 1980s, for example, Carol Gilligan
(1982) argued that girls have a different relational style than boys.
This female style privileges sharing, communicating, and cooperat-
ing. As girls enter adolescence, however, Gilligan argued that they be-
gin to realize that this relational style is not valued in society, a realiza-
tion that causes them to go underground with their thoughts and
feelings. For Gilligan, this emotional closing off results in girls be-
coming silent and passive, in effect losing their voice.
Since the publication of In A Different Voice (Gilligan, 1982), a
steady stream of work on girls, adolescence, and self-esteem has
emerged. These studies suggest that White, middle-class, adolescent
girls have difficulty maintaining confidence in their appearance, their
intellectual abilities, and their own emotions and feelings (Gilligan &
Brown, 1992; Lees, 1995; Martin, 1996; Orenstein, 1994; Pipher,
1994). One salient theme that emerges from this body of work is girls’
lack of authentic relationships. Gilligan and Brown (1992) and Pipher
(1994) located girls’drop in self-esteem within the context of the soci-
etal negation of girls’relational style, a negation that forces girls to be-
gin to form false friendships with little true emotional context. In addi-
tion to sacrificing authentic relationships, adolescent girls are

socialized to believe that “good girls” are quiet, passive, and willing to
sacrifice their needs for the needs of others. With anger and depression
outlined as unacceptable emotions for girls who want to be feminine,
girls often feel scared or trapped by their “bad” emotions. As a result,
girls’ depression and anger is often internalized and surfaces in self-
destructive behaviors, which may explain the higher rates of eating
disorders and depression found in adolescent girls (Pipher, 1994).
Moving beyond girls’ psychological development, research has
also focused on the role of the education system in socializing girls’
into gender-appropriate behavior (Lees, 1995; Orenstein, 1994;
Sadker & Sadker, 1994). In ethnographic studies of classroom behav-
ior, researchers have documented the myriad of ways in which girls
are rewarded for silence and passivity (Orenstein, 1994; Sadker &
Sadker, 1994) whereas boys receive positive reinforcement for ag-
gressive behavior and are given more freedom to express negative
emotions such as anger.4 This treatment in the education system serves
to reinforce societal messages about gender appropriate behavior and
encourages girls to place a higher value on being nice than on being
smart, which often leads girls to lower their career expectations from
“mean,” competitive professions (such as lawyers and doctors) to
more caring (and lower-paying) professions (such as nursing and
teaching) (Orenstein, 1994).
Research that examines the loss of voice also looks at the confi-
dence gap in relation to sexuality and sexual agency. Puberty—the
most visible marker of the transition from childhood to adulthood—
raises complex issues for girls. Although menarche is considered to be
a rite of passage into womanhood, it is frequently denigrated in soci-
ety and has come to have a negative, dirty image (Lees, 1995). In addi-
tion, girls’bodily development, such as breast growth (which is occur-
ring at increasingly early ages), attracts male sexual attention that
often is confusing or unwanted. With little sexual or emotional educa-
tion in schools, girls begin to think of themselves as the sum of their
physical attributes, which leaves them vulnerable to male sexual ad-
vances. These negative images of female puberty result in many girls
leaving adolescence with no voice with which to articulate their
thoughts and beliefs, especially in regard to sexual desire (Martin,
1996; Tolman & Debold, 1994).
In summation, although a definitive answer to the question of

what causes girls’ adolescent loss of voice remains to be found, the
majority of the research on girls suggests that, whether it is psycho-
logical or structural, girls largely are unable to retain their pre-
adolescent strength, determination, and voice in their teenage years.
Yet a great deal of the most publicized research on girls comes from
clinical studies (Gilligan, 1982; Gilligan et al., 1995; Pipher, 1994),
focus groups (Lees, 1995; Martin, 1996), or participant observation in
schools (Orenstein, 1994). I argue that these research methods may
leave out girls who do not seek out researchers but still may be offering
resistance to the crisis of adolescence. My analysis of girl-produced
zines reveals that the form of resistance that girls present may often
fail to register with those seeking examples of outright rebellion or
concise verbal descriptions of how girls are resisting. In the next sec-
tion, I outline how and why zines are an important research tool for ex-
amining girls’ apparent loss of voice from their own perspective.
USING ZINES TO EXAMINE GIRLS’ EXPERIENCES
In her essay, “Telling a Girl’s Life,” Lyn Mikel Brown (1991) posed
the question, “What would it mean for a girl at the edge of adolescence
to tell the truth about her life, to speak honestly and openly about her
experience?” (p. 71). Although her comment is an attempt to solve the
problem of girls’ losing their voice in adolescence, it has a resonance
for examining research on adolescent girls. As I argued earlier, be-
cause clinical studies place girls as the research participant, responses
to questions about girls’ experiences are always filtered through the
research process. With ethnographic research questions of how much
adult authority the researcher should exercise frequently arise. As
most researchers do not want to be too intrusive, they often opt to re-
main outside of girls’ real or nonschool lives, which excludes them
from an important sector of activity (Kenny, 2000). Those who do par-
ticipate in leisure activities with girls, however, acknowledge that the
research they gather is always mediated through their position as
adults in an adolescent world and, therefore, cannot be seen as a true
reflection of what girls do when not under the adult gaze (Griffiths,
1995). Obviously, I am not advocating for the removal of the re-
searcher from the research process; however, I am arguing that using

girls’personal writing—whether it is notes to adolescent friends (Hey,
1996) or zines—as a research tool offers a new way to look at adoles-
cent girls’ lived experiences because these writings are composed for
peer groups and personal use, not for adult audiences.
Not being written for an adult audience is the main lure of zine writ-
ing, which has the ability to be simultaneously public and private. As
Green and Taormino (1997) noted, many girls do zines to share their
experiences with their readers. For girls, the experience of having a
space to talk about their lives can be very important, as there are few
chances for girls to express their thoughts and feelings without fear of
ridicule or censure. As one zine maker said, “Sometimes paper is the
only thing that will listen to you” (Green & Taormino, 1997, p. xi).
Yet, although girls can be open about their lives, they also are able to
control the audience of their zines and how much personal identifica-
tion they provide for the reader. Girls often use only first names, em-
ploy pseudonyms, or give no names at all. Zine makers leave zines
anonymously at book and record stores, or trade them with people
who express interest in reviews they have read. Controlling the audi-
ence allows girls to feel they are still anonymous while revealing their
inner-most thoughts on paper.
Zines are also unique in that they exemplify a girl-driven strategy
for empowerment. Although a girl-power movement has sprung up in
response to widely read works on adolescent girls, such as Reviving
Ophelia (Pipher, 1994), much of these empowerment strategies have
been consumer based. Thus, girls are supposed to be empowered
through buying girl-power products, such as T-shirts with girl-positive
slogans. Although these consumer slogans may be empowering for
some, they do not encourage girls’ own creativity or input into em-
powerment strategies. Zines, on the other hand, are a do-it-yourself
project that teaches girls how to be cultural producers (Kearney,
1998), rather than consumers of empty girl-power products. By mak-
ing a zine, girls learn that if they do not like the cultural products of-
fered to them, they can produce their own. Learning this do-it-yourself
ethos can encourage girls to be more critical consumers of cultural
products and lead them to feel more empowered to express their own
ideas and opinions. In addition, as argued earlier, trading zines can
lead to the creation of a supportive, zine network with whom to share
new ideas and opinions. Thus, zines allow girls to take part in and ac-
tively direct girl-based empowerment strategies for negotiating their
specific problems in adolescence, rather than market-driven strategies
created by adults that often fall short of offering girls the tools to effect
change in their own lives.
Finally, girls can use zines to form friendships that provide them
with emotional validation. Although zine makers do not use Gilligan
et al.’s (1995) term “false” friendships, they often do express a sense of
suffering from a lack of real friendships in their everyday life. For ex-
ample, the author of Pussycat #2 wrote:
It seems that I have friends but . . . we talk about T.V., movies, or some
dumb thing that’s funny. No one wants my real [sic]. “Oh, you are so
funny!” So I make you laugh, then I laugh. But I really want to cry.
However, girl-zine makers are often able to bypass this isolation by

forming zine peer support groups that allow for the formation of close,
emotional candid relationships with other girl-zine makers. In my
written interviews, all of the girls discussed the importance of their
zine friends and provided me with examples of personal support they
received from these relationships. One girl remarked about her zine
friends, “There are people who understand completely. That’s amaz-
ing. It makes you feel like you can do anything when you connect.”
Another girl notes the importance of zine making to her:
It is my therapy and the way I reach out to others. Recently a lot of peo-
ple have told me reading me stuff helps them—and “I’m not the only
one who feels this way” sort of reaction. I HAVE to zine to pour out the
pain from my self and knowing it helps others is further impetus.
Finally, one girl wrote, “I don’t have a social life, I have a zine,” illus-
trating the centrality of zine making to her life. Zines offer girls a way
of making connections with other girls who share and sympathize
with their experiences and become a unique communication tool that
allows them to express their thoughts and feelings in a safe community
of other zine-makers. Moreover, as Gilligan et al. (1995) have argued,
“Girls’ active attempts to maintain connection with others and with
their own thoughts and feelings, are acts of resistance and courage”
(p. 27). Using this definition, zines can be seen as a form of resistance,
a concept I expand in the next section.
REFRAMING RESISTANCE
In terms of defining resistance, I find it useful to employ a psycho-

logical definition as my research takes on the predominantly psycho-
logical debate about girls losing their voice in adolescence. Carol
Gilligan et al. (1995) discussed two different types of what they term
“political resistance” (p. 26). The first type is covert resistance, a situ-
ation in which girls go underground with their feelings and knowl-
edge. In this situation, they realize that they are in a culture that does
not value their experience and retreat from it. The downside to covert
resistance is these girls lack a confiding relationship and may ulti-
mately end up feeling alienated. A second strategy is overt resistance,
in which girls manage to speak out and reject stereotypes about the
proper roles for women and femininity.
Although researchers who focus on girls would welcome overt re-
sistance if they could find it, it rarely occurs as many overt resisters are
censured. Girls know what consequences await those who speak out,
as parents and teachers are the absolute authority in most disputes with
teenage girls (Brown, 1998; Orenstein, 1994). Even if teachers are dis-
playing openly sexist behavior, they still have the ability to punish
girls who challenge them. In addition, girls have little ability to ex-
press their anger and frustration because, as Pipher (1994) pointed out,
our language does not allow girls to fully articulate their experiences.
If they protest sexist or racist treatment, they may be labeled delin-
quents or troublemakers (Gilligan et al., 1995; Orenstein, 1994).
Many girls, therefore, reject overt forms of resistance because there is
too much punishment involved. Not employing overt resistance, how-
ever, is not necessarily bad, as LeBlanc (1999) argued, “No form of re-
sistance can be pure, untainted by strains of accommodation” (p. 133).
To resist, girls need to find a balance between secret and open resis-
tance. Therefore, in my work on zines, I looked for a combination of
the two, a sort of c/overt resistance that allows girls to overtly express
their anger, confusion, and frustration publicly to like-minded peers
but still remain covert and anonymous to authority figures.
An example of how this c/overt resistance operates is through using

zines to write about humiliating or unfair experiences that girls may
not have discussed with other people. For example, one zine editor
wrote in Good Faerie #12 about the sexist treatment she received at the
hands of her math teacher. He called her a “reverse sexist” in front of
the class for wearing a feminist T-shirt. She wrote:
I’m not going to defend myself of anything. It doesn’t work usually. It

wouldn’t have helped me either really. Perhaps the point is this: the
“downlook” that was cast on me for wearing a shirt with a feminist
statement, which I would say that I support by means of my feminist
ideals. Which, yes, are really not often “voiced.” It did rather throw me
off guard, and I didn’t really know what I’d say about it. I thought he
twisted the words and meanings a bit. I saw it more optimistically and
toward high achievement as opposed to supremacy. I resent that this
made me doubt and left me unprepared. I still don’t know the proper re-
sponse.
The example in this zine is interesting, as from the teachers’ perspec-

tive, it would appear that the author was not defending herself. More-
over, had this interaction been observed by a researcher, it could be
read as exemplifying adolescent girls’loss of voice.5 Reading this pas-
sage, however, reveals that girls are not passive in these situations as
much as they are unable or unwilling to speak freely and risk being rid-
iculed or censured. This discussion exemplifies c/overt resistance, as
the zine author worked out her feelings in the safety of her zine where
she can speak about her experience yet still remain anonymous.
Although the c/overt resistance of zines could be easily dismissed
as little more than ideological resistance, it can lead to more overt po-
litical action for some girls. As cultural producers, girls are able to
make cultural products that encourage participation in girl-driven em-
powerment. As one zine maker wrote about zine making and politics
in Out of the Vortex #6:
Zines are many people’s first contact with the idea of the do-it-yourself
ethic. I know this was true for me. It’s quite staggering, the first time
you truly digest the revolutionary concept that you don’t have to de-
pend on other people to do the things you want to do. You can have full
power over that. For me, this zine was my first time being the final critic
of my work before it was seen by the public. Always in my life I had
handed in my writing to teachers, parents, older writer friends, to give me
their opinions about what I’d done. Suddenly, all this seemed unneces-
sary. The confidence people gain from this tremendous self-sufficiency
can carry over into all aspects of their lives. This is particularly impor-
tant to kids, girls, minorities, anyone who is discouraged from taking
charge in their lives.
In addition to passing on the sense of the importance of the do-it-

yourself kind of empowerment, girl-zines also pass on a great deal of
information about how to become involved in feminist, political, and
antiracist action. Speaking to the importance of this spread of infor-
mation, many of the zine makers I interviewed noted that they learned
about feminism from zines, which led many of them to become in-
volved in feminist groups, such as NOW or Riot Grrrl, and to study
women’s studies or feminist theory in college. This reveals how zine
making can move beyond the c/overt resistance of giving girls a safe
space to practice articulating their thoughts and feelings about femi-
nism to the more overt space of feminist activism. In addition, it illus-
trates that c/overt resistance should not be discounted as it is a much
more feasible form of resistance for adolescent girls—particularly
younger girls—who are more regulated by structures of authority.
In summation, zines can operate as a safe format for girls to explore
their thoughts and feelings without fear of censure. As evidenced
through my written interviews, having this safe space for c/overt resis-
tance can lead girls to adopt more overt forms of resistance as they ma-
ture. For researchers, zines can also be a useful tool for examining how
girls speak about their lives outside of the gaze of researchers. In the
next section, I compare academic writing on adolescent girls with
girls’own writing, focusing on five topics: sex, self-mutilation, sexual
abuse, menstruation, and sexual harassment. Through this analysis, I
explore how girls’ discussions can be read as c/overt resistance to the
loss of voice, and, finally, how girls’ perspectives on these issues may
differ from academic assessments.
“SEX. IT’S SO FUCKED.” SEXUAL AGENCY AND ZINES
Karen Martin (1996) argued that one reason for the drop in girls’
self-esteem in adolescence is lack of sexual agency. In her analysis,
she pointed out that the female body and femininity are degraded in
American culture. Thus, girls enter adolescence with a fear of the
changes that are occurring in their bodies and the sexual treatment
they receive. Girls feel removed from their sexuality—which they
view negatively. She noted that girls often describe their first sexual
encounters with bewilderment, describing them as “just happening.”
These comments reveal a feeling that sexual encounters are beyond
girls’control. Moreover, girls are unable to discuss sex with their part-
ners and have trouble resisting unwanted sexual intimacy (Martin,
1996; Orenstein, 1994). Tolman and Debold (1994) pointed out that
there is very little language for girls to voice their sexual desire, which
often leads them to disconnect from their bodily feelings. Gilligan
et al. (1995) argued that “this disconnection . . . puts girls in serious
danger, as they can be mistreated and abused without acknowledging
to themselves the extent of their hurt and loss” (p. 101).
Although these same feelings of disconnection from sexuality of-
ten appear in zines, the zine format is often used as a location for dis-
cussing this sense of alienation from sexuality, as well as sexual rela-
tionships, sexual desire, and general information about sex, such as
birth control options. Fourteen of the zines I analyzed discussed sex in
one of these formats. The most common was discussions of sexual re-
lationships and birth control issues. For example, in Out of the Vortex
#6, one of the zine makers recounts her sexual history, going into great
detail about whether the man or the woman should be responsible for
introducing the subject of condoms. Another zine discussed the au-
thor’s AIDS test and how frightening waiting for the results was for
her. These articles work to normalize the sexual experience of girls
and take away the idea that sexually active females are “sluts.” Other
zines encouraged sexual desire. Riotemptresses #1gives a description
of how female masturbation works and encourages readers to try it
themselves. These zines provide examples of girls who take control of
their sexual lives and have a safe space to talk about their own desire.
Other zines become a format to discuss sexual problems and

agency. For example, in Yawp #12, the editor wrote about having sex
with her boyfriend:
Sex. It’s so fucked. I know that Peter would not do anything against my
wishes. So why did I have such a hard time telling him when I don’t
want to do some/anything? Good girl. Always the good girl, always got
to please. I was 17 and he was 22 and I didn’t want him to think I was a
kid because I didn’t want to take any chances of him losing interest.
And I knew that he would understand if I said no. Later on he said quite
sincerely, “I hope I didn’t make you do anything you didn’t want to do.”
I said no. Liar that I am.
Although she is expressing her lack of agency in her inability to be

honest about her sexual desires, she is using her zine to work through
the thought process of why she feels unable to be candid. She adds that
she wrote this article after receiving a letter from a zine friend dealing
with similar topics, revealing that she was able to think more about her
lack of sexual agency because of support she was receiving from her
zine network. In our written interview, she remarked that her boy-
friend did eventually break up with her but added, “After getting my
zine [which discussed the break up], my friend Caroline ransacked her
house looking for my phone number, couldn’t find it, and instead
wrote me a long e-mail assuring me that I didn’t need my ex-boyfriend,
she understood what I was going through, I was beautiful and she
loved me.” This type of support can enable girls to reject the feeling
that they need to comply with a boy’s sexual desire. It also allows them
to feel supported in the decision not to have sex, either for the first time
or when they simply do not want to. Although they are not overtly re-
sisting unwanted sexual advances, they are using c/overt resistance to
develop more autonomy in their sexual relationships. Developing this
sense of autonomy is an important step in recognizing one’s sexual
agency and feeling secure in expressing it, which Martin (1996) main-
tained will aid girls in developing a more positive sense of self. Thus,
through zine discussions, some girls do appear able to begin the pro-
cess of developing a positive sense of sexual agency in adolescence
and manage to gain some voice for expressing their sexuality.
“NO ONE BUT THE RAZOR”: TALKING ABOUT

SELF-MUTILATION AND SEXUAL ABUSE
In addition to discussing sexual experiences, zines are also arenas

for writing about painful experiences that are not normally discussed,
such as sexual abuse and self-mutilation. Pipher (1994) and Orenstein
(1994) found examples of girls who reported cutting themselves with
razors and knives as an attempt to “feel better.” Pipher (1994) noted
that self-mutilation illustrates how anger that cannot be expressed in
an overt way can act as a destructive force for girls who often think they
are the only ones engaging in such hurtful behavior. Four of the girl-
zines I analyzed contained reports of cutting in an attempt to deal with
feelings of depression, anger, and hopelessness. Scratch N Sniff and
Look Behind the Scenes wrote about telling a close friend about the
mutilation and being rejected for their “abnormal” behavior. The other
two zines discussed the why of self-mutilation. The editor of Yawp
#12 wrote about her response to feeling depressed over a breakup: “I
cut myself last week, which I haven’t done in a long time. But I was
alone and abysmally depressed so out came the scissors slash slash on
my rib cage.” Another wrote in Good Faerie #10 about her frustration
with her life, adding that sometimes there is “no one but the razor.” In
these examples, girls have developed survival strategies (Gilligan
et al., 1995) that allow them to deal with bottled-up emotions. Al-
though these strategies aid girls in resisting giving up their anger, they
are ultimately negative, as they are causing the girls to put themselves
in bodily harm.
In our written interview, the editors of Yawp and Good Faerie re-
ported that they received many letters of support from other girl-zine
makers who had similar stories of self-mutilation. The editor of Good
Faerie recounts her happiness at receiving these letters because “ev-
erybody is afraid to talk about their own fucked-up-ness and they are
not building connections like they should.” Receiving this support
helped her to stop using cutting as a form of anger release. Thus, much
like feminist consciousness-raising sessions in the 1960s, talking
about cutting among female zine-makers takes it out of a hidden space,
which is an important precursor to political action. As Alice Echols
(1989) noted, talking about personal experiences in consciousness-
raising groups allows women to recognize what they had previously
thought of as personal problems are actually social problems shared

by other women. Zines provide girls with a similar experience, as
hearing from girls who have the same self-destructive behavior can
lead girls to question why their valid anger is being turned on them-
selves. This questioning can, in turn, lead girls to see their problems as
part of a larger political situation and not unique to themselves. Zines,
therefore, give girls the power to realize they are not alone in their
struggles to navigate the contradictions of adolescence and allow
them to turn negative resistance like cutting into the c/overt resistance
of sharing experiences in zines.
Zines also provide a realm in which to share experience for sexual
abuse survivors. Lees (1995), Kaplan (1997), and Pipher (1994) all
encountered examples of girls discussing sexual abuse and incest.
However, these topics receive little attention in most academic work,
as they are difficult to broach with teenage respondents because re-
searchers are not encouraged to ask directly about sexual activity
without parental consent. In the case of incest, asking for parental per-
mission is impossible, as the girls fear retaliation for speaking out.
Again, zines provide a safe space to talk about abuse with others.
Twelve of the zines I analyzed talked about sexual abuse and rape. The
discussions came in many different forms. Several were written as sto-
ries or in a poem format. For example, the editor of Pussycat #2 wrote,
“Father your hands are holding my life/ Sometimes when you don’t
look/ I go to the kitchen and get a knife/ Someone needs to remind you/
I’m not your fucking wife.” Riotempresses #1 contains several poems
and essays about rape and sexual abuse. Finally, Sewer is almost one
long continuous sentence about incest. With this story format, it is dif-
ficult to decide whether girls are reporting their own experience or
dramatizing an issue that is particularly resonant for them. However,
that this topic is mentioned reveals that it is something girls are think-
ing about and, as Hilary Carlip (1995) argued, many girls actually are
experiencing this abuse. Therefore, I included the stories about incest
and sexual abuse in my analysis because they still reflected girls’ per-
ceptions of sexuality and the dangers of adolescence.
Other zines provide the reader with detailed accounts of personal
abuse, particularly incest. Fantastic Fanzine #3.5 describes the sexual
abuse the editor suffered at the hands of her father and outlines how
she is beginning her healing process. I found this same focus on the
healing process in other zines that dealt with sexual abuse. For exam-
ple, the editor of Unite Grrrls Love Yourselves wrote:
You have to talk to someone. You really do have to tell . . . someone.

Anyone. Once I began to accept it and deal with it, once I told one per-
son, I just kept telling people. Once you tell one person, it is not
enough. I feel I’ve got to tell the whole world cause I kept such a secret
locked up inside of me for so long that I start to feel free telling more
and more people. And see, right now there is an 11-year-old girl (on the
Sally Jesse Raphael show) she is telling her story. She too was sexually
molested. She is crying. I am crying too. I just want to hold her and tell
her I am proud of her. And that she is brave. And I wanna tell her that
maybe everything isn’t alright right now, but we can make it alright. I
wish for every one of us to come out, that could change things. We can
come out, come on strong. Yell and kick until the world finally listens
and takes action. (Carlip, 1995, p. 25)
She urges girls to make a connection, to share their story, noting that
she has been empowered to talk about her experience by being able to
discuss it in her zine. This illustrates how girls can deal with their pain-
ful experiences and start a healing process instead of turning their an-
ger and hurt inwards. Zines provide girls with a safe space in which to
share experiences and to begin to recognize them as part of a bigger
political problem. Also, using zines provides researchers a way to ex-
amine what girls are writing about a topic that is especially hard to dis-
cuss in research settings but may have a great deal more salience to
White, middle-class girls than previously addressed by academic re-
search.
“I KNEW ALL ABOUT PERIODS,

TECHNICALLY”: PUBERTY
In Puberty, Sexuality, and the Self, Karin Martin (1996) argued that
the biggest flaw in research about the loss of self-esteem in adolescent
girls is that researchers do not look at puberty and the effects it has on
girls. Sue Lees (1995) found that boys frequently denigrate puberty
for girls (especially menstruation). In his study of working-class boys,
for example, Paul Willis (1977) found that boys called each other “jam
rags,” referring to used sanitary napkins as an insult. There is no com-

parable language for girls to ridicule boys’ puberty changes. Ridi-
culing menstruation can also be a tactic used to belittle or trivialize
girls’ valid anger. Mary Pipher (1994) noted that if girls show unac-
ceptable emotions, such as anger or depression, it is frequently written
off as PMS or “being on the rag.” Moreover, Lees (1995) noted, “A girl
is constantly warned that her body may let her down, by emitting
odors or by leaking” (p. 107). Such a negative view of puberty, espe-
cially menarche, makes it hard for girls to feel comfortable about their
changing bodies, which Martin (1996) argued adds to decreased sex-
ual agency.
In zine writing, puberty is a frequently discussed topic, particularly
feelings about menarche and menstruation. Of the seven zines I found
that discussed menstruation, the majority focused on menarche. Fre-
quently, there are articles in which the zine maker gets several of her
friends to write about their first periods. Many of the stories mention
not knowing what was going on or being scared at the arrival of their
first period. One girl wrote in Pink Noise of puberty: “When I found
out what being a girl actually meant, I was scared! I found out from a
neighbor who said I’d grow tits that hurt when they bounced and I’m
gonna [sic] get a cut that won’t stop bleeding.” Although most girls
wrote that they knew what menstruation was due to watching films
about it in classes, they seemed unprepared for it to happen to them. In
Pussycat #2, the editor wrote that when she got her first period, she
cried and felt dirty. She added, “My father tried to make me stop cry-
ing by telling me in some countries they celebrate menstruation. I
wished we did in the U.S.” Her example shows how negatively many
girls perceive puberty, especially menarche. A guest author wrote in
Pussycat of carrying around a pack of Kotex for a year after seeing the
menstruation film in the 5th grade. She was worried that she might be
unprepared when it started and then ridiculed. Menarche discussions
in zines are another example of sharing negative experiences. Al-
though girls are not openly contesting society’s denigration of men-
struation, they have a safe space to c/overtly discuss their experiences
and get support from other girls who feel the same way. Writing about
periods—and the shame and confusion attached to them—helps girls
to realize they are not alone in their experience; other girls have simi-
lar feelings of being dirty or ashamed.
Not all stories about menstruation and menarche are negative, how-
ever. Another guest editor of Pussycat wrote:
I was a freshman and while having a conversation with my best friend,

the subject of Midol came up. She asked if I had my period yet, I said
no. About two weeks later, I started. I immediately called my best
friend. The next day at school she brought me 2 dozen red cupcakes
with pink and red frosting. When girls asked me what they were for, I
gave them this look. Only two of them figured it out.
In this example, menstruation is a positive experience for the girl be-

cause her best friend supports her. Other zines move to a more chal-
lenging stance in regard to the denigration of menstruation in Ameri-
can culture. In Scratch N Sniff, the editor wrote:
Ya [sic] see the other day my mom and I went to the grocery store. I
needed to buy some tampons. I looked by the make-up, by the sham-
poo, and such, even by the Depends—still no sign of my trusty Tampax
biodegradable tampons. By this time I was getting very irritated aim-
lessly strolling by the fruit, spices, and various canned goods. Even-
tually I came to the baby isle [sic] and right there between the Gerber
strained peas and the pull up Pampers were the tampons and pads.
What is the fucking symbolism in that? To think that some dumb ass
male grocery store organizer decided that tampons and baby shit go
hand and hand really annoyed me. Just because I bleed once a month
does not mean I need a pacifier.
She challenged what she saw as a patriarchal culture (in the form of a
male grocery store executive) denigrating what to her is a natural ex-
perience. In discussing why menstruation is considered “dirty,” girls
can begin to investigate where those feelings of shame come from and
begin to eradicate them. For many girls, menstruation is the first step
toward the realization that they were now sexual beings. Sharing sto-
ries about menarche, menstruation, and the stigma attached to it can
help girls start to gain more sexual agency as they realize that other
girls share their feelings of confusion about puberty and its changes.
Feeling positively about menstruation is part of achieving sexual sub-
jectivity and agency.
“IT’S NOT FAIR THAT YOU, ME,

OR ANY WOMAN SHOULD HAVE TO PUT UP
WITH THAT SHIT”: SEXUAL HARASSMENT
Sexual harassment of adolescent girls in schools is a heated topic of

debate. One side argues that sexual harassment is often boys simply
expressing their natural sexual curiosity (Gurian, 1998; Pollack,
1999). The other side views any form of harassment of girls as wrong
and in need of regulation. In Reviving Ophelia, Mary Pipher (1994)
discussed the AAUW report, “Hostile Hallways” (AAUW, 1993), that
examining sexual harassment in schools in the early 1990s. The report
states that 70% of girls experience harassment, and 50% experience
unwanted sexual touching at their schools. Peggy Orenstein (1994)
also focused on sexual harassment in schools, following a case in the
middle-class junior high she studied. Ultimately, she found that—
despite the new rules against harassment—the principal is unable to
punish the boys who did the harassing because of fear of lawsuits from
parents. Sue Lees (1995) examined how boys’violent sexual behavior
is actually condoned by teachers. After interviewing boys and girls,
she concluded her book by arguing that sexual harassment will con-
tinue until boys are made to be accountable for their behavior.
Of the eight zines that discussed sexual harassment, most focused
on the question of why sexual harassment occurs. For example, in
Boredom Sucks #8 the editor questioned why men felt the need to yell
at women on the streets and argued that it was not fair that women
were forced to put up with such negative treatment. Other zines such
as Pussycat #2, Riotempresses #1, and Slambook #2 dissect the as-
sumption that women bring on sexual harassment themselves through
what they are wearing. In addition, zines are used as a way to encour-
age sharing harassment stories and supporting girls who have been ha-
rassed. The author of Pussycat #2 wrote:
I know most people know but it is hard to get anything done about sex-
ual harassment. Even though I fancy myself a strong feminist, it hap-
pened to me and I found there was no one to back me up. All the other
girls the same asshole did the same thing to thought nothing of it or
didn’t want to speak up. I know what it’s like to stand up for myself and
have everyone laugh and then have no one behind you. So if you have
been harassed, even if I don’t know you, I’ll be behind you.
Knowing that someone is there to support you if you have been ha-
rassed can be important for creating an environment in which girls feel
safe to speak out. Zines are limited by the fact that zine friends are of-
ten geographically separated and thus not able to give local support.
However, as my research on zine makers revealed, when you do not
have anyone around you who is supportive, zine friends can make an
important difference. The most useful function of zines in regard to
sexual harassment is sharing experiences that are not usually voiced. It
appears to be the support that matters, whether it is physical or written.
As one of the editors of Out of the Vortex #7 wrote about sharing expe-
riences with zine friends: “Every time I talk with girls about sexual ha-
rassment and assault, my own memories get a little less painful.”
Knowing that a safe space for this kind of discourse exists can encour-
age girls to be more vocal about their experiences and, hopefully, be-
come more comfortable speaking out against them.
CONCLUSION
Academic research on teenage girls has been an integral force in

awakening society to the problems girls experience in adolescence,
such as sexual harassment and gender-bias teaching (Lees, 1995;
Orenstein, 1994; Sadker & Sadker, 1994). It is the conclusion of this
article, however, that in addition to focusing on these problem areas,
greater academic attention needs to be paid to how girls also develop
their own strategies to navigate adolescence. Zine making is one ex-
ample of a strategy that provides girls with a safe space to talk about
their lives to the audience of their choice. Zines offer girls a way to
practice their voices and opinions and work as a sounding board for
speaking about experiences and emotions. Because zines remain out-
side of the adult world and often are written anonymously, they offer
girls a c/overt forum for discussing topics that are normally not spoken
about openly, such as sexual abuse and self-mutilation. This safe
space for writing about their lives is important, for, as Mary Pipher
(1994) pointed out, “Our daughters need time and protected places in
which to grow and develop socially, emotionally, intellectually, and
physically. They need safe spaces where they can go to learn about
themselves and others” (p. 230). As girls are able to trade zines with
other girls, this safe space can translate into a support network that op-
erates as a girl-produced strategy for staying connected with others
and navigating the “Bermuda Triangle” (Pipher, 1994, p. 73) of ado-
lescence.
Although zine making is a c/overt form of resistance, the impor-
tance of it as a safe space and support network system for teenage girls
should not be underestimated. As James C. Scott (1990) pointed out,
overt resistance is rare, as it takes time and support to build up to politi-
cal action. This is especially true in the case of teenage girls who are
constrained by teachers, parents, and student peer cultures. Ex-
pressing opinions in zines in a c/overt manner allows girls to begin to
build confidence in their thoughts and feelings. Much like the feminist
consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s, sharing experiences
through zines can lead girls to begin to realize that much of what they
had previously thought of as personal problems are actually social
problems shared by many other girls. Having this supportive commu-
nity, even if they are not local friendships, can allow girls to feel more
comfortable speaking out against sexist treatment or sexual abuse.
Moreover, the confidence gained from having this safe, supportive
space to express c/overt resistance can lead to further, more overt in-
volvement in political movements, such as feminism. This is why zine
making is so important as a form of c/overt resistance, as it gives girls a
safe space to practice articulating their thoughts and feelings and aids
in the creation of political action.
In addition, analyzing zines provides researchers with a method for
examining girls’ lives on their own terms. Although psychological
studies and school ethnographies offer important insights into girls’
adolescent problems and the structural and cultural constraints on
their lives, zines are an example of girls writing without an adult audi-
ence in mind. Reading and analyzing zines aids in understanding how
girls grapple with the negative messages they receive in society and re-
veals how they often resist or alter these messages. Zine articles also
give insight into what issues girls see as critical to their lives, rather
than what issues adult researchers view as central. For example, from
the analysis of girl-zines—in my work and in other work such as
Carlip (1995)—sexual abuse and the negativity focused around men-
arche appear to deserve much more focus than they have been given in
academic research. Thus, zines and other girl-produced writing offers
an important addition to research on adolescent girls as this body of

work reveals girls’ active role in creating strategies to make their way
through the difficult period of adolescence.
Finally, as argued by Kearney (1998), zine making allows girls to
move away from being passive consumers and encourages them to be
cultural producers who make cultural products relevant to their own
lives. This aspect of cultural production has particular salience in
light of the girl-power market that has emerged with the popularity
of books such as Reviving Ophelia (Pipher, 1994). Although these
more consumer-based strategies indeed may be empowering to some
adolescent girls, they offer little practical guidance for girls interested
in challenging their treatment in society. Having the power to produce
a cultural artifact that speaks about your own life and over which you
exercise complete creative control gives a new dimension to the em-
powerment of adolescent girls as it teaches them the tools for seeking
their own strategies for navigating adolescence. Even though these
strategies may not always be successful or positive and are con-
strained by girls’ race and class positions, it is important to look at
girls’active involvement in creating new strategies, rather than casting
them as passive Ophelias. In conclusion, I argue that if educators,
mentors, and researchers want to create strategies to empower girls,
there needs to be more academic work that focuses on how girls repre-
sent, create, and produce their own lives within the social and cultural
constraints of adolescence.
APPENDIX
List of Zines Included in Analysis
All zines in this list were produced between 1992-1996.

Billy’s Mitten, Vol. 5.
Boredom Sucks, Vol. 3.
Dux Femina Facti, Vol 3.
Fantastic Fanzine, Vol. 3.5.
Good Faerie, Vol. 10.
Good Faerie, Vol. 12.
Kusp, Vol. 1.
Look Behind the Scenes.
Out of the Vortex, Vol. 6.
Out of the Vortex, Vol. 7.

Patti Smith, Vol. 3.
Pink Noise.
Pussycat, Vol. 2.
Pussycat, Vol. 3.
Riotempresses, Vol. 1.
Scratch N Sniff.
Sewer.
Slambook, Vol. 2.
Smart Like Eve, Vol. 3.
Smile for Me, Vol. 2.
Soeur, Vol. 1.
Sometimes I’m a Pretty Girl, Vol. 2.
Sourpuss, Vol. 3.
Sourpuss, Vol. 8.
Teenagewhorebook, Vol. 11.
Unite Girls and Love Yourselves.
Yawp!, Vol. 12.
NOTES
1. Zines, short for “fanzines,” are small, independently published magazines. The authors,
called editors, write the content or solicit articles from others. They are usually made on comput-
ers or handwritten and then photocopied and stapled. They tend to have limited distributions,
ranging from 20 to 100 and are usually handed out for free, traded for other zines, or sold for a
small fee.
2. In the AAUW report, self-esteem was estimated by asking participants to self-report how
content they were with their bodies, intellectual abilities, and personalities. Boys reported liking
themselves more, had more confidence in their intelligence, listed a wider range of talents, and
were more content with their bodies than girls.
3. The concept of the confidence gap between boys and girls has come under fire recently.
Researchers who work with adolescent male populations now argue that boys have lower confi-
dence, lower test scores, and higher rates of depression than girls. As I only address the literature
on adolescent girls for this article, I am not engaging these debates. For an overview of this posi-
tion, however, see Gurian, 1998; Kindlon & Thompson, 1999; Pollack, 1999; and Sommers,
2000.
4. These gender differences are complicated also by class and race. For example, compared
with girls from other race/ethnic backgrounds, African American girls exhibit the highest confi-
dence in their nonacademic abilities and the most satisfaction with their bodies. However, al-
though African American girls in some studies were able to speak up in classroom settings, they
were labeled as troublemakers by teachers (Orenstein, 1994). For more discussion on racial and
class differences, see Ferguson, 2000; Gilligan, Sullivan, and Taylor, 1995; and Orenstein, 1994.
5. Arguably, some researchers may read this silence as resistance (see for instance, Lewis
1993). However, I am arguing that this example is not simply silence but more c/overt resistance,
as the author rehashes the incident openly in her zine.
REFERENCES
American Association of University Women. (1991). Shortchanging girls, shortchanging

America [videocassette] (available from the AAUW). Washington, DC: The Foundation.
American Association of University Women. (1993). Hostile hallways: The AAUW survey on
sexual harassment in America’s schools. Commissioned by the American Association of
University Women Educational Foundation. Researched by Harris/Scholastic Research.
Washington DC: The Foundation.
Brown, L. M. (1991). Telling a girl’s life. In C. Gilligan, A. Rogers, & D. Tollman (Eds.),
Women, girls, and psychotherapy: Reframing resistance (pp. 71-86). New York: Haworth.
Brown, L. M. (1998). Raising their voices: The politics of girls’anger. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Carlip, H. (1995). Girlpower: Young women speak out. New York: Warner Books.
Echols, A. (1989). Daring to be bad: Radical feminism in America 1967-1975. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Ferguson, A. (2000). Bad boys: Public schools in the making of Black masculinity. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Freud, S. (1905). The standard education of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud
(Vol. XXII). London: Hogarth Press.
Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press.
Gilligan, C., & Brown, L. M. (1992). Meeting at the crossroads. New York: Ballantine.
Gilligan, C., Sullivan, A., & Taylor, J. (1995). Beyond voice and silence: Women and girls, race
and relationships. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Green, K., & Taormino, T. (1997). A girl’s guide to taking over the world: Writings from the girl
’zine revolution. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.
Griffiths, V. (1995). Adolescent girls and their friends: A feminist ethnography. London:
Aldershot.
Gurian, M. (1998). A fine young man: What parents, mentors, and educators can do to shape ad-
olescent boys into exceptional men. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam.
Hey, V. (1996). The company she keeps: An ethnography of girls’friendships. Buckingham, UK:
Open University Press.
Horney, K. (1926). The flight from womanhood. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 7,
324-339.
Kaplan, E. B. (1997). Not our kind of girl: Unraveling the myths of Black teenage motherhood.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kearney, M. (1998). Producing girls: Rethinking the study of female youth culture. In S. Inness
(Ed.), Delinquents and debutants: Twentieth century American girls’cultures (pp. 285-310).
New York: New York University Press.
Kenny, L. D. (2000). Daughters of suburbia: Growing up White, middle class and female. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Kindlon, D., & Thompson, M. (1999). Raising Cain: Protecting the emotional life of boys. New
York: Ballantine.
LeBlanc, L. (1999). Pretty in punk: Girls’ gender resistance in a boy’s subculture. New Bruns-
wick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Lees, S. (1995). Sugar and spice: Sexuality and adolescent girls. London: Penguin Books.
Lewis, M. (1993). Without a word: Teaching beyond women’s silence. New York: Routledge.
Leonard, M. (1997). Rebel girl you are the queen of my world: Feminism, subculture and grrrl
power. In S. Whiteley (Ed.), Sexing the groove: Popular music and gender (pp. 230-256).
New York: Routledge.
Martin, K. (1996). Puberty, sexuality, and the self: Girls and boys at adolescence. New York:
Routledge.
Orenstein, P. (1994). Schoolgirls: Young women, self-esteem and the confidence gap. New York:
Anchor.
Peterson, A. (1988). Adolescent development. Annual Review of Psychology, 39, 583-607.
Pipher, M. (1994). Reviving Ophelia: Saving the selves of adolescent girls. New York:
Ballantine.
Pollack, W. (1999). Real boys: Rescuing our sons from the myths of boyhood. New York: Henry
Holt.
Sadker, D., & Sadker, M. (1994). Failing at fairness: How America’s schools cheat girls. New
York: Scribner.
Scott, J. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Sommers, C. H. (2000). The war against boys: How misguided feminism is harming our young
men. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Tolman, D., & Debold, E. (1994). Conflicts of body image: Female adolescents, desire, and the
no-body body. In M. Katzman, P. Fallon, & S. Wolley (Eds.), Feminist perspectives on eating
disorders. (pp. 301-317). New York: Guilford.
Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labor: How working class kids get working class jobs. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Kristen Schilt is a graduate student in sociology at the University of California, Los An-
geles. Her research interests include youth culture, sexuality, and gender in the work-
place. She has an article on feminism and music in Popular Music and Society, as well as
an article about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender media advocacy forthcoming in the
Gay and Lesbian Journal of Social Services. She is currently working on her dissertation,
which explores the experiences of transsexuals in the workplace.

Girls and Adolescence - Youth Culture

Enviado por

Dados do documento

Título original

Direitos autorais

Formatos disponíveis

Compartilhar este documento

Compartilhar ou incorporar documento

Opções de compartilhamento

Você considera este documento útil?

Este conteúdo é inapropriado?

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

Girls and Adolescence - Youth Culture

Enviado por

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

ARTICLE

“I’LL RESIST WITH EVERY INCH AND

Keywords: girls and adolescence; youth culture; cultural resistance

If popular culture can be read as reflecting popular attitudes and

tance to the crisis of adolescence. Thus, to gain a wider perspective on

This research was conducted through a combination of written in-

from Factsheet Five (a now-defunct resource guide that contained

PROBLEMATIZING ADOLESCENCE FOR GIRLS

As adolescence marks the difficult transition between childhood

creasing responsibility. However, psychological studies that examine

tion to sacrificing authentic relationships, adolescent girls are

In summation, although a definitive answer to the question of

USING ZINES TO EXAMINE GIRLS’ EXPERIENCES

searcher from the research process; however, I am arguing that using

However, girl-zine makers are often able to bypass this isolation by

In terms of defining resistance, I find it useful to employ a psycho-

An example of how this c/overt resistance operates is through using

I’m not going to defend myself of anything. It doesn’t work usually. It

The example in this zine is interesting, as from the teachers’ perspec-

In addition to passing on the sense of the importance of the do-it-

“SEX. IT’S SO FUCKED.” SEXUAL AGENCY AND ZINES

Other zines become a format to discuss sexual problems and

Although she is expressing her lack of agency in her inability to be

“NO ONE BUT THE RAZOR”: TALKING ABOUT

In addition to discussing sexual experiences, zines are also arenas

thought of as personal problems are actually social problems shared

You have to talk to someone. You really do have to tell . . . someone.

“I KNEW ALL ABOUT PERIODS,

rags,” referring to used sanitary napkins as an insult. There is no com-

I was a freshman and while having a conversation with my best friend,

In this example, menstruation is a positive experience for the girl be-

“IT’S NOT FAIR THAT YOU, ME,

Sexual harassment of adolescent girls in schools is a heated topic of

Academic research on teenage girls has been an integral force in

an important addition to research on adolescent girls as this body of

All zines in this list were produced between 1992-1996.

Out of the Vortex, Vol. 7.

American Association of University Women. (1991). Shortchanging girls, shortchanging

Você também pode gostar