The Enculturation of Liminality in Zine-Making: Acts of Associative Commonality That Enable Participation in a Media-Making Communitas

Abstract

Participation in zine-making is enacted through a series of inter-linked making practices and intentions, constructed within both personal and interpersonal frames, and shared with others in different ways. Zines are catalysts for network formation within a cultural or sub-cultural community, with zine-makers sharing experiences, resources, and creativity to inform and associate with the community. Drawing on the constructivist grounded theory analysis of thirty-four semi-structured email interviews with zine-makers, this study sought to theorize a transdisciplinary understanding of the potential role zine-making communities play in the decision by an individual to participate in zine-making and how that participation was defined, enacted, and enculturated through zine-making. Using a constructivist grounded analysis, a model of participation was developed that defined and explored the bounded boundaryless of the zine-making communitas. In these spaces, members of the communitas deliberately transitioned into or through liminality and found affiliation and communion through engaging in and sharing the processes involved in zine-making (such as construction, distribution, and writing). Within this semi-fragile zine-making community, smaller sub-spaces were formed through engagement or affiliation with different interpretations and enactions of these processes, manifest in the production of different zine typologies and the creation and engagement with readership or circulation networks.

Keywords

zines DIY making arts participation liminality communitas cultural participation alternative media

Introduction

The making of print zines is a uniquely contradictory, lo-fi, do-it-yourself (DIY) media-making practice, rich in parallel traditions and cultural engagement across a range of vocal, creative, and active communities and sub-cultures (Duncombe, 1997). Zine-making is an accessible form of media-making enabling expression, access, and networking for many marginalized, under-represented, and disenfranchized individuals and cultures (Kempson, 2015). In recent years, zines have chronicled an increasing number of emerging communities (for example, refugees and recent migrants (Oliveira, 2019) and the diasporas of gender, youth, and identity (Wright et al., 2022), whilst continuing to represent and promulgate established sub-cultures where the role of zines has been deeply explored in the literature (for example, punk, riot grrrl and third-wave feminism (Baker & Cantillon, 2022; Dillon, 2021)).

Writers such as Bourdieu and Habermas have prosecuted the case for what they believe are the instigators of cultural participation within an informed society. Bourdieu (1993) argues that cultural participation is a function of social class and education, and this influences participation in avant-garde cultural activities. Habermas (1991) argues that within the public sphere, access to cultural participation performs the role of bringing people together through the mass media (including ‘laypersons’). Friedland (2001) asserts that it is impossible to disentangle social structures from the practices of participating in communication, enabling communicative communities to both connect social groups and find avenues toward social change within those communities. Some writers argue that zine-making operates counter to the theories of community communication in the public sphere, noting that despite its wider position as a voice or instrument of inter-community communications or within social movements (Holtzman et al., 2007; Snyder, 2006), remains effectively the pursuit of an individual or a small collective, engaging in personal media production and the construction of self-identity (O'Neil, 2004).

Zines remain catalysts for network formation within a community, with zine-makers sharing experiences, resources, and creativity to inform but also recruit members (Debies-Carl, 2014). Zines form embodied connections within and between sub-cultural communities, supporting how members transition from passive to active forms of cultural participation, sharing their lived experiences, their production skills, and the aspirational potential of being part of the community (Kearney, 2006). Zine-making can be both the gateway for people to join a community, opening channels of communication and facilitating the connections that trigger association and communion for new entrants (Mageary, 2020) and act as an instrument of sociality, education, sharing, or engagement within the community (Richardson, 1996). Zines also act as the thread that links disparate, diverse, and unique individuals residing loosely within a sub-culture, which as Radway (2016) notes, excludes the practices of many of those aligned with the sub-culture:

What concerns me is that as these histories organize a messy, distinctly wild, range of social practices into the thing-ness of a “movement,” they thereby miss the disparate routes young women travelled as they intersected in different ways with the loose constellation of activities and technologies known to constitute the punk and post-punk scenes and the cultural underground more generally. (p. 4)

The handmade, trashy, or amateur appearance of many zines demonstrates some of the tropes of DIY making, such as the use of accessible tools for making and reproduction, the editorial control granted to the maker, and the creation of user-generated content. The critical importance placed by some zine-makers on their zine being handmade and seen as personal to the reader is demonstrable through the addition of aesthetic decisions and intimate touches such as personalized, hand-written messages, stitching, and unique ephemera like lipstick kisses, glitter or personally selected cut and paste images (Bestley & Binns, 2018; Radway, 2001). These come together to give zines a look and personalized feel that is unique to the individual zine-maker who shares their sometimes rebellious, sometimes revolutionary, and sometimes personally insightful or challenging messages, with a limited audience (Nijsten, 2016; Zobl et al., 2014).

Defining the social and mechanical practices involved in zine-making is complex and contested in both the academic literature and among zine-makers themselves. While there are common themes about the physical form zines take, the control exerted by the maker over the production process, and the non-commerciality of the final product (Piepmeier, 2009; Poletti, 2008), there are equally passionate disagreements on the influences of technology and social media on zine-making, the typologies of zines and the participatory intentions and motivations of zine-makers (Desyllas & Sinclair, 2014). Over the course of the last decade, zine-making practices have been reconfigured and disrupted by social media, dissolving and coalescing into other media forms, redefining zines, the role of zines within cultural and sub-cultural communities, and what it means to be a zine-maker (Hall, 2021). The boundaries between physical and digital making practices continue to blur as zine-makers build portfolios of DIY-making in their virtual shopfronts or at zine fairs that include badges, stickers, books, posters, t-shirts, and other ephemera as well as physical print zines (Guerra & Quintela, 2020; Watson & Bennett, 2020), use digital platforms such as Etsy to distribute their zines and communicate with readers, their communities and other makers through social media (Clark-Parsons, 2017) and redefining (and reinforcing) the Habermasian notions of the public sphere and its inclusivity for readers, participants and audiences alike.

Making a zine is a combination of physical and emotional acts initiated by a decision to participate in some form of cultural production. Cultural production through making spans contexts greater than the act of making an object, affording larger, more aspirational possibilities such as participation in digital citizenship, social change, collective action, sub-cultures, and identity and meaning-making for the individual maker (Schilt & Giffort, 2020). Making media as a form of cultural production creates contested societal and community spaces, where practices such as digital citizenship and civic engagement are shaped by how participation facilitates inclusivity, altruism, clicktivism, and digital literacy and access (English & Irving, 2015; Knobel & Lankshear, 2014; Lacharite, 2017). Participation in making can enable transformative capacities amongst makers and readers for engaging in democratic acts and empowering disenfranchized socio-demographic communities in political and social acts of change through communications (Friedland, 2001; Heikka, 2015; Neuman et al., 2011). Jenkins (1992) argues that zine-makers are part of a community of makers that build, through their own stories, words, and creative content, a different and alternative community of social interactions, with zine-making used as a ‘…means of building and maintaining solidarity within the fan community’ (Jenkins, 1992, pp. 213–214).

Research Question and Methodology

Zine-making is a highly personal representation of the emotions, thoughts, opinions, and creativity of the maker, enabled by the modalities and attitudes of the DIY ethic. The aspirational assertions inherent in the phrase ‘do-it-yourself’ imply the lack of reliance on others to make a zine. Alternately, Tanenbaum et al. (2013) make the case that the processes of DIY media-making are both personal and interpersonal with individual acts of making satisfying the intrinsic and collaborative motivations of the maker, noting that:

…identity production, skill, reputation, participation, norms of sharing, learning through teaching, and communities and collectives of practice are components of DIY making, privileging pleasure, expressiveness, and communicative practices over the utility of making the end product. (Tanenbaum et al., 2013, p. 2604)

In the context of the complex spectrum of emotional, physical, political, and intellectual states informing the making of zines and the diversity of personalities, perspectives, and behaviors of those participating in zine-making, the role of zines within cultural and sub-cultural communities has been deeply explored in the literature (see e.g., Duncombe, 1997; Piepmeier, 2009; Reynolds, 2020). Many critical studies explore the individual motivations for engaging in zine-making spanning a range of zine forms, content, readerships, and aesthetics (see e.g., Nijsten, 2016; Zobl et al., 2014). Zine-making participation had been primarily explored and understood within key periods of historical growth. There was no existing theory with the zine-making or cultural participation literature that explained motivations for participation or described the collective or community constructs that may influence participation in zine-making outside of defined historical or cultural contexts.

This constructivist grounded theory study was designed to transgress the disciplinary boundaries and definitional limitations of the existing literature and develop a transdisciplinary understanding of the potential roles (if any) that membership, access, and connection to zine-making communities have on how and why people chose to participate in zine-making. Are there common traits within zine-making communities that influence the initial or ongoing decision to participate in making zines? Can these motivations be understood separately from the individual, sub-cultural, or societal reasons for engaging in zine-making? The non-linear nature of zine-making was a significant factor in choosing constructivist grounded theory as a methodological approach and discounting others. Constructivist grounded theory is an approach used to construct theory inductively from the stories of the community or group under study and additionally seeks to maintain the presence and the voice of the participants in a meaningful way (Charmaz, 2006).

Stories were collated from thirty-four semi-structured email interviews with self-selected and self-identified zine-makers who responded to various calls through mailing lists and web groups. These respondents came from six different minority or majority English-speaking countries (Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Canada, and the United States). Each interview was conducted through an exchange of emails with the zine-maker. This allowed an asynchronous conversation to form within the interview (Ison, 2009) and recognized the critical importance of the positionality of the researcher and the influence of a posteriori knowledge about the research question being explored. While email interviews sacrificed some immediacy, they created narrative discourses and conversations with the respondents that explored their participation in zine-making and their engagement with the community over time (James, 2015).

The use of theoretical sampling is a critical aspect of a constructivist grounded theory approach, in that it allows the researcher to adjust the sample to explore and refine the theory until the point of data saturation (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). To start the process of theoretical sampling and begin the generation and definition of categories, the initial call for respondents outlined some broad sampling criteria to ensure that the participants were able to discuss and describe their own experiences of zine-making and legitimately be able to provide insight into the question under study (Morse, 2010). Respondents needed to have made at least one zine, which ensured that the zine-maker had something they could identify as zine-making practice to describe. The purpose of theoretical sampling is to direct the research where the researcher needs it to go, as opposed to allowing the sample to progress by the same rules that you started with (Birks & Mills, 2015). Theoretical sampling also works as a self-correcting process, whereby the process of constant comparison within the data analysis identifies gaps in the data and directs the next iteration of sampling (Charmaz, 2014).

After the completion of an initial tranche of fifteen interviews and subsequent open coding, I applied the theoretical sampling approach to direct the data collection and analysis toward exhausting the categories emerging from the data (Charmaz, 2006). Sequences of interviews were progressively added to the data set and analyzed using open coding methods to identify initial patterns, followed by a summative content analysis, a two-stage process of counting the occurrence of specific words and searching for latent meanings in the use of those words within the texts and then aligned with themes emerging from the literature (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005). The data analysis identified meanings and concepts agreed by the actors, without starting with a pre-formed model or hypothesis (Suddaby, 2006). This approach supported the emergence of theory from personal testimonies to describe and understand the personal decisions the respondents made to make zines, the role that their practice played in enabling their participation in a zine-making community (or not), and the conditions they experienced within that community.

The Liminal States of Zine-Making

Data saturation is a concept that is debated extensively in grounded theory literature, often uncritically (Charmaz, 2006; Glaser, 1992), with constructivist methodologists noting that it occurs when the conceptualization of categories yields no new insights. After the final series of email interviews and the subsequent open coding of that new data, no new insights emerged from the interviews; they simply reinforced the existing categories and the emerging theoretical model. The zine-makers in the study described complex, inter-connected, and personal reasons for participating in zine-making, sharing deeply personal, affecting, and reflexive narratological journeys that evolved through the course of the interview. For many of the respondents, the interview became an iterative process of cognitive interpretation that drew sometimes disparate observations, memories, and past actions together to try and describe how they came to and continued to make zines. The decision to participate in zine-making was rarely linear and evolved from the uncertain confluence of their lived (or living) experiences, rejection, or rebellion against established social structures or behaviors and the discovery of zines as a medium, either as a maker or reader, as described by R.13:

I guess it started out as being lonely in high school and wanting someone else to be able to understand the things I was seeing and having trouble dealing with. That motivation has changed as I've grown up, and maybe now my focus is more loose as I just want to be able to talk about my life and have a creative outlet to express myself in. I'm also really motivated by the prospect of community and meeting new people and sharing my experiences with them. (R.13)

The practices used by the respondents to make zines or to have a frame that allowed them to recognize those practices as zine-making were rarely homogenous nor did they conform to any logical or ritualistic sequence or structure. Zine-making was not described in technical terms, but as an organic, fluid, and human expression of creativity, which was sometimes loud and brash and other times deeply fragile and uncertain. Whilst some respondents made explicit references to the specific processes they undertook to make their zine, their stories also told of the ambiguities in the ways they made zines, manifest as both a holistic understanding of zine-making (the zine was not ‘made’ until all/some of the processes had been completed) and as the necessity to complete these processes to satisfy more tacit outcomes (the zine was ‘made’ to help them construct and share meaning, or feel part of the community). The story of R.34 described their identity in the wider context of cultural production, demonstrating resistance as the rebellious individual advocating change through the lens of their zines:

We chose zines to get our thoughts and views across - not in any rash political or extreme social manner but to create an output and release of our what we believe in. I feel the act of writing the articles are not as important as knowing that our ideas will either resonate or strike a wrong chord with someone on the other end. (R.34)

The lived experiences of some of the respondents were intrinsically connected to what they made and what they wrote. In these instances, the decision to make zines and subsequently interact with others in the community emerged from very personal places and from the tensions and traumas they experienced within their normative social structures. Rebellion against expectations, stereotypes, and the resistance of control by invisible, imagined, or societal forces were especially prevalent manifestations of this rite of passage away from their established social community, as was expressed passionately by R.26:

I also think it [zine-making] is a radical and highly political act for women, any woman or oppressed person to tell their story and express themselves because our society is so much about silencing people and white-washing and sanitizing everything into tidy shiny fake piles of crap. Life is not like a movie or a margarine commercial it is raw and gritty and hard and painful and authentic which doesn't sell mouthwash or pre-mixed drinks does it? (R.26)

For most respondents, zine-making was enacted between different states of creative and social structure (such as the differences between mainstream and alternative media or the dissonant expectations of their gender, their sexuality, their age, or their behaviors). Participation in zine-making signified a transition between these structures, with the zine-maker finding themselves residing in messy, interstitial, and ambiguous liminal states, situated outside of their normative roles, structures, or expected behaviors and values and finding solidarity with others through the expression and sharing of countercultural hopes and dreams (Turner, 1974a). The liminal states described by the respondents were not uniformly experienced or described. The structures they were transitioning away from and the experiences that triggered a rite of passage were uniquely constructed and interpreted, although collectively shared. R.18 described their transition between social structures:

The discovery of zines coincided with my leaving my hometown and venturing out into the big, wide world as well. It was that combination, the discoveries I made at that stage that contributed to my creating not just zines but a new identity for myself as well. It seemed to all be integrated and combined. I guess that experience was life-changing! (R.18)

Turner (1969) notes that the rite of passage initiated by the transition by an individual away from their established social structures and into a liminal state is often temporaneous. He argues that all liminality eventually dissolves in part due to the intensity of the experiences occurring within the rite of passage, with individuals seeking a return to their original social structures or establish new structures, leaving the liminal state. What became clear as the analysis of the interviews progressed was that the liminal states being experienced and lived by many zine-makers in the study were not temporary even though the experiences within their liminal states were frequently intense, traumatic, cathartic, or emotional. Making zines was a destination for their journey, often described in terms of finding a ‘home’. In making zines and experiencing liminality they discovered others of similar minds and practices residing in the same spaces and states they were in, found through reading zines or having theirs read by others. More than simply being there with others, many respondents wanted to actively recruit people to join them in these collectively experienced liminal states, as R.28 noted:

By age 16 I started writing stories and collecting them from others. I’d put them together, copy them, staple them, hand them out. I had no idea that there was a ‘zine culture’, or what zines were. I just wanted to share my stories and be creative. As much as that, I also wanted to encourage others to be creative. (R.28)

The story of R.26 demonstrated the capacity of respondents to describe zine-making as a way of safely sharing their search for meaning and identity with others in similar liminal states, guiding them through their own rites of passage. Their response started as descriptive but as it progressed began to explore their relationships, their gender and sexual identity, their relationship with their identified community, and how they could encourage others into the community through their zine-making:

After a breakthrough of my own, I decided I could make such a zine! In particular, I read an auto-biographical comic by a woman about incest from her uncle and I admired her courage in sharing that painful and traumatic story in such a creative way that reached out to others, and I hoped I could do something similar. (R.26)

Sharing their experiences and telling the stories ‘…about my diagnoses of mental health issues, medication, treatment by doctors and psychiatrists and the like’ was not an easy process for R.26. It was described as a cathartic and traumatic process, with their resistance and rebellion emerging in the form of their struggle to share experiences that they were ‘scared’ to share. Zine-making provided the respondent with both a bricolage-informed passage to a safe liminal state and a beacon for others feeling equally scared in their social structures. R.26 described the fear that comes from expressing and sharing something that they had been unable to share with anyone before; ‘…and then I started to type my story, which I was so scared of doing because I had never told people before about my childhood and upbringing which was characterized by a lot of physical violence, threats, psychological abuse, and emotional trauma’. Whatever had caused R.26 to not share their story with anyone before was broken down through the practice of making the zine. They recognized that the experiences conveyed through their zine were going to be shared with others and once published, would become part of the public sphere. The thought of putting something out there, even into a semi-private space, nearly made R.26 change their mind about choosing to make zines, but they persisted and made their zine available for the community; ‘…I started and stopped it a few times, just freaking out about the process of breaking this silence, you know? I had never told anyone this stuff before, big family secrets, shame, and all that.’ These were not ad hoc decisions on behalf of R.26, they were deeply reflexive, analytical, and deliberate, with the risks and rewards arising from arriving at their destination clearly understood and welcomed:

SO my zine isn't just “my story” it is part of a rebellious fabric of society that is a movement for change. It believes change is possible and it starts now! (R.26)

From a Zine-Making Community to a Communitas of Zine-Makers

The engagement in the collective processes of zine-making afforded the respondents the opportunity to describe their reasons for participation as a conceptual whole that was greater than the sum of its parts. Far from being instrumental or utilitarian, the decision to participate was often explained by the respondents in personal, persuasive, aspirational, contradictory, and demanding terms. This did not mean the decision to participate in zine-making was described in selfish or conceited ways, but rather that collective and community responsibility and voice were functions of how the respondents understood or needed to construct and share meaning and identity. As each progressive tranche of data was collected and analyzed, understanding the liminal states of zine-makers provided the granularity necessary for theory generation about the potential role of communities in the decision to make zines. The demonstrable existence of these liminal spaces made the case that the personal and interpersonal acts involved in zine-making were interconnected.

In an anthropological sense, the collective experiencing of liminality can trigger the formation of a communitas. This is a temporal, voluntary, and transient state of collective being, that marks the journey from one state to another (Turner & Turner, 2011). A communitas is defined by the modality of its sociality, manifest through the violation of social norms and structures (anti-structures), the exhibition of behaviors that run counter to status, and the member's ability to commune as equals. For members, it can shatter perceptions of normal and generates potent experiences stripped of established and ritualized behaviors and relationships (Turner, 1974b). There is no single form of communitas, with the enacting of social structures (or anti-structures) defining both the stability of the communitas and its ambition to shape a utopian or countercultural society (Turner, 1969). A communitas can be transgressive, with members feeling uncomfortable at their diversion from established structures, whilst for others, this transgression offers freedom from the tensions of needing to act within social mores and norms. A communitas is defined not by a collective identity, but by how unity and solidarity liberate members to be more socially human, marked by a sense of spontaneity, openness, anti-structural behaviors, and an interest in how others enact them, which leads to a pronounced sense of belonging (Turner, 1982).

For most of the respondents, zine-making triggered the rite of passage they were seeking, away from the social structures that created the uncertainty they were experiencing. At the core of exploring and understanding this point of transition or transformation were the lived experiences of the zine-makers. How zine-makers made their zines afforded certain interdependencies that were framed by how the zine-maker lived their life, expressed their culture, and constructed their own meanings and identity within that context. The rites of passage and the normative social structures they were escaping or leaving were not universally experienced but resulted in the respondents transiting through or into liminality, nonetheless. The journey into a liminal state was often experienced alone, but the destination (the communitas) was populated by readers, other zines, and other zine-makers, a connected network of friends, comrades, and family, both known and unknown, finding commonality in the aspirational, political, and practical acts of making and sharing zines, as R.2 described:

Initially I was motivated by the idea of trying to become less of a private. I kept a lot to myself; I wrote diaries and stories, I was often quiet. And I was working on changing all this. I started to see that the things I thought and wrote needed to be brought into the world. Zines in particular are quite an immediate way of getting read, making your voice and your experiences accessible. So, there's quite a thrill from that, and from confessing secrets to strangers anonymously. But the motivation changed or grown a little. I started to realize that not only is it cathartic for myself to really unlock myself in this way, but it's also useful for a reader to delve straight into another country, culture, sexuality, background, set of experiences and assumptions. It's enlightening, it shows people they aren't alone in the problems they face, and its political (R.2)

The physicality, creativity, content, and construction of zine-making enabled the respondents to project their identity and use their media-making as an autobiographical act. These acts of making were generally recognized as zines by other respondents within the communitas, but the fragmented, diverse, and sometimes contrary practices of zine-making made defining and describing the conditions and roles within the liminal communitas complex. There were practical, tenuous, and sometimes deeply held differences between zine-makers, arguing form, function, audience, and subject as differentiators of the media they were participating in making. Despite these often assertively argued points of difference, the associative nature of the communitas of zine-making held true, with the disagreements rarely becoming exclusionary and often welcoming of the benefits of the diversity of the zine form:

One of my favorite things about zines and the creation of them is all the possibilities, and better yet, when someone presents a new one to you that you just couldn't have thought up… It's endless and inspiring. The community is very accepting, welcoming, and collaborative, even if only subtly, and the nature of making them and sharing them is the best I've ever encountered, and so far-reaching. (R.17)

It was the unique combination of associative acts and the degree to which the respondent privileged the importance of tacit outcomes such as creating, participating, expressing, controlling, and sharing (amongst others) that signified the recognition of theirs and other membership of the communitas. This belief was determined by how they interpreted and understood the aesthetic of zines and more specifically, their zine, and the assumption that others in the community would recognize those aesthetical materialities as the same, as R.19 observed:

I was probably a bit too young to understand it all, but the sudden appearance in my life of a vibrant and connected underground was at once thrilling and scary to me. I felt quite intimidated by how cool and hip it seemed, and I felt like a voyeur in this secret society. I should point out that this was before the internet took hold of the world: living as a teenager in a remote, provincial town in the north of England was a very isolating experience without the connectivity and culture that the web brings. I would say that a concern with ‘reaching out’ to like-minded people is still present in my zines now. (R.19).

Figure 1 models how the communitas of zines was defined and boundaried through the constructivist grounded theory analysis of the stories of the respondents. It codifies the states of associative commonality within the communitas defined by the aesthetic of zine-making and the states of difference outside its span of membership. The boundary of the communitas was homogeneous without. Zine-makers recognized an aesthetic that they believed or understood to be zine-making, even if it was not like theirs. They recognized the intentions of their fellow zine-makers, promoting and expecting a sense of comradeship enacted through the experiences of a shared rite of passage. The boundary of the communitas was not strictly defined nor was it policed.

Figure 1.

The communitas of zine-making.

Members of the liminal communitas might identify with the practices of other zine-makers but exhibit only a fleeting or weak connection with them. For example, some respondents questioned whether a zine made by another person in the communitas was a zine, but stopped short of declaring this, giving them the benefit of the doubt. The acts of making a zine were representable as cognitive schemata, with the processes of making zines and how those processes and acts coalesced to determine the aesthetics of zines for the maker. The cognitive schemata, which represented the acceptance of an object as a zine or as presenting a zine aesthetic, were not applied to exclude or remove zines and zine-makers from the communitas, but to interpret making experiences and recognize the rites of passages being enacted by others. The responses of R.22 and R.34 showed how they used cognitive schemata to define the boundary of the communitas:

I don't want to open up a big can of worms, but I'm never sure what people are talking about, and what they're including or excluding, when they say “zine”. I might have gotten “basically produced” publications through the mail before I ever heard of the word zine. (R.22)

A great zine should stir up uneasy conversation, not just controversy in order to raise awareness and thought on issues relating to their particular target audience. I think it'd be great for every time a reader disagrees with the views of the writer a new zine is born. (R.34)

Inside the communitas, the cognitive schemata shattered and combined within to create sub-communitas formed by different types of practice, different external communities and cultures, different gender and identities, and different types of zines. The respondents defined their own sub-communitas and their actual and desired connections through how they framed their own understanding of the zine aesthetic, drawing on detailed interpretations and applications of form and type, construction, content, distribution, readership, sub-cultures, and community. These sub-communitas were heterogeneous within, exhibiting clear evidence of porosity and flexibility, allowing an aesthetic different from their own to also be called zine-making. The boundaries between these sub-communitas might be strongly defended but are not essentially exclusionary to the point that the difference marks a zine-maker as not being a member of the communitas. This openness created sub-spaces where rituals and practices intersected and blended. It afforded zine-makers the capability to create multiple meanings and identities within the communitas and to find their own place within the liminal space. In the study, these multiple identities were not in conflict with each other (mostly). They were part of the gestalt of defining the (anti) social structures within the communitas:

I currently focus on my zine Cats Teeth which I would class as a perzine (because it's non-fiction and focuses on diary entries, reflections, and has a confessional tone). It's quarter-sized and it tends to be equally text and image heavy. I select images and artwork that tend to be quite dark, bordering on slightly erotic. I also include some of my own sketches. In terms of content, I talk about the issues and experiences that play on my mind at the time of writing, usually it flows like a journal with occasional film, book and music reviews or literary and philosophical quotes/excerpts. Reoccurring themes tend to be polyamory, myth and matriarchy, sex and sexuality, psychoanalysis, philosophy, wanderlust. (R.2)

The sub-communitas described by R.2, whilst centered on the self-description of their zines as perzines, intersected with their identity as defined through sexuality and eroticism. It also intersected with the diary-like confessional style of zine-making and tangentially with those of music or culture zines. The zine-maker also describes subjects for their zines that encompass alternative lifestyles and living. The complexity of defining the communitas and their own space within it was seen in many of the other interviews. The zine-makers sense of self was not a continuous and predictable destination, more that their understanding of the zine aesthetic was sometimes disconnected from their own practices and was sometimes rent with discontinuities and uncertainties. There was a liminal interplay between the acceptance, interpretation, assumption, and demonstration of their understanding of the aesthetics of zine-making.

Associative Commonality and the Boundaries of the Communitas of Zines

The acts of zine-making triggered cues for respondents that enabled them to join, reside or invite others into the communitas of zines. The analysis identified two aesthetical frames (physicality and materiality) that the respondents used to eschew their uncertainty and find their associative commonality within the communitas. These frames, whilst structured through different meanings, definitions, and cultural contexts, acted as lenses through which acts of making enabled membership of the communitas (or fragmented it within as sub-communitas) or as gateways to facilitate the liminal journey or provide a guiding light to find the communitas in the dark of the transitive state.

Located in the practices of making (including construction, reproduction, distribution and communications between zine-makers and zine readers), the physical acts of zine-making defined participation for many respondents. Physicality offered them a tangible way to demonstrate their membership of the communitas and to recognize others on similar rites of passage. This tangibility took many forms including, from the replication of making tropes (black and white reproduction or the use of manual typewriters for typesetting, for example) to more tacit forms (building relationships with zine readers through letter writing or email, for example). An equally significant number of respondents argued that how their zine was made was less important than the materiality inherent in its making. For these respondents, the making of the zine and the production of an aesthetic facilitated a higher-order form of participation. Making zines was a site in which to construct and share meaning and identity, both personally and socially. They recognized others through their shared experiences, their common trauma or their political or social views. These respondents recognized the emancipatory potential of pen and paper and how their participation supported the continued efficacy of DIY production as a method of community and personal empowerment (Radway, 2011).

The common thread between these experiences was the notion that zine-making was a manifestation of materiality, where the way something is made becomes the message, as opposed to signifying the message through the content. It is in effect an ontological interpretation of making, where the engagement in doing facilitates higher-order levels of understanding and knowing. These higher order knowledges emerged as ways in which the zine-maker expressed and demonstrated the need to construct and share meaning, to represent and form their identity, aligned to their ways of being, their sense of belonging, their attitudes to society and life, and their wider perspectives of their role in the communitas, as described by R.34:

Although at the end of the day I do believe zine writing and reading is a community act I feel there is an importance in writing for yourself. Even though all of our articles are written for others to read and either agree or disagree with we do write for ourselves and without the criteria or demand of others. In the future I'd love to interact with other zine creators who share similar beliefs and attitudes but although it is a healthy element to have, I do not feel it is necessary (R.34)

The final aspect of the model is the permanency or durability of the relationships (or sense of certainty) within the communitas. For most of the respondents, zine-making was a lasting practice and the communitas a desirable social structure within which they felt welcome and safe. Whilst some respondents reflected on the necessary and desirable transitory nature of their place in the communitas. For them, zine-making was a step on the journey either toward other social structures and identities or as a way of shaking off expected behavior through enacting anti-structural activity. The temporary state of the anti-structures of zine-making (like rebellion, resistance, and pushing back against the mainstream) was rationalized in part by allowing and supporting the different perspectives of others, even in terms of the bounded communitas. Again, it was the notion of aesthetics that afforded and fostered difference because choice, the assertion of independence, and the resistances against being told what you can do were more important to the respondents than the type of paper you used or whether your zine was photocopied or professionally printed (even though these defined the nature of the sub-communitas in some cases), as described by R.6:

I have to emphasize the importance of zines in the sense that they capture the true spirit of a community. They provide some of the most honest reflections of a society; documenting its ups and downs. I feel exhilarated when I read a good article in a zine or see a good piece of art. Zines often succeed in making me feel like a part of a community, like my opinions and views may be shared with someone else. (R.6)

Conclusion

Returning to the primary research question that this study attempted to theorize on the potential roles (if any) that membership, access, and connection to zine-making communities have on how and why people chose to participate in zine-making, the respondents described a communitas of zines that was encircled by the acts of associative commonality that enabled them to reside within the notions that what they were making (and reading) could be described and recognized as a zine. They felt part of the culture of the communitas, with an enculturation forged through the processes of discovering and making zines that shared common experiences, perspectives, practices, and concerns. Within the communitas, the ‘innumerable threads of crisscrossing lines of meaning, flows of meaning’ (Turner, 2012, p. 3) coalesced into sub-communitas where meaning was found through association and community within the aesthetic of zines. While the processes, motivations, and performative actions that defined membership of sub-communitas were sometimes porous and fragile, the communitas itself was not weak. Members were often fiercely loyal to the aesthetic of zines, defending the form and the freedoms they believed zines afforded makers and readers alike. Finding zines was often a surprise for the respondents, and when they did, they felt they had discovered a secret mode of expression that represented ‘a spring of pure possibility’, which mainstream media denied them, as noted by R.12:

I was picking up alternative menstrual zines … and I remember thinking that there were totally bad-ass women making rad shit out there and I wanted to surround myself with it. Not necessarily make zines myself - that would come much later. But it did help show me that it was possible and totally awesome, and that anybody could do it. (R.12)

Turner (2012) argues that communitas, whilst capable of de-structuring sociological and psychological practices and patterns that create senses of unease and uncertainty amongst members, can also elicit a sense of joy. The communitas of zines exhibits this sense of joy manifestly through the discovery of the communitas, the recognition that others were experiencing the same or similar rites of passage, and the certainty that comes from being welcomed (or welcoming others) to it. Members of the communitas had found their place in the world by making or reading zines. Even in the act of dealing with serious and life-changing experiences, being able to resist, rebel, share, rage against or any number of outward facing acts of expression, offered the zine-makers a sense of joy (or magic) from the agency they have been afforded over their own meaning and identity. The members of the communitas were aware that zine-making did not expose their creative work to large audiences and that they could control (in part) how many people read their zine. The making processes within the communitas were both hard limits and soft guidelines that could be stretched, pushed, added to, and played about within the sub-communitas, and exuded into the personally and socially constructed sub-spaces between them. Resisting and rebelling against orthodoxies, either inside or outside the communitas of zines, was neither rewarded nor discouraged.

The members of the communitas did not necessarily know who their readers might be (and in several cases, did not care). They did want to communicate with them, recognize their membership of the communitas, and in some cases, encourage them to become zine-makers themselves. This aligns with the broader community communication assertions of Friedland (2001)and the deep entanglement he argued between social structures and communication. The presence of both producers and consumers within the communitas, often undertaking the same journey away from established social structures but enacted in very different ways, was a unique feature of the communitas of zines. The act of reading a zine and sharing in the zine-maker's rite of passage was viewed by many of the respondents as being as important as the act of making. The invitation to join the communitas through reading, or through more active methods of skills sharing, storytelling and direct engagement and communications defined participation as essentially Bordieuan in that cultural production exists within the social conditions of production, circulation, and consumption. Bourdieu argued that aesthetics represent a critical lens to understand art as a ‘socially constituted’ form, created through display in public and private spaces, consumed by social actors (makers, readers, patrons) and not existing sans forms of sociality that engage producers in the search for meaning and value (Bourdieu, 1993, pp. 318–319). The critical importance that Bourdieu placed on social experiences defines the boundary of the communitas centered on a common appreciation, enthusiasm, and passion for zines.

The members of the communitas of zines did not lose sight of the political and social implications of zine-making nor the critical importance of readers and their cultural and sub-cultural communities to the meaning and identity that emerged from the enacting of those implications. Zine-making offered the respondents a path toward something different from the cultural and structural sociality they were residing within. The shared experiences of zines and the agreement that zines represented something different from the social structures they were escaping or seeking to change was the tensile strength of the communitas. Enculturation into the communitas was not always a comfortable journey, with some respondents finding it confronting and contradictory, and the acts of production and consumption sometimes painful, triggering, traumatic and emotional. Discovering and residing within the communitas brought stability, safety, and sociality, even if the associative commonalities of making and reading fractured their states of residence to varying degrees within the communitas. It was this fracturing and healing of sub-spatial lines that saw the communitas constantly challenged and evolving in form. Being enculturated into (or influencing the culture itself) allowed respondents to share their own constructed version of zines and zine-making with others in the communitas that worked to draw them in and commence their own journey into liminality, a journey that seeps into not just making but into how the zine-makers chose to live their lives,

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Peter Bryant

Author Biography

Peter Bryant is a professor of business education at the University of Sydney Business School (Australia). He is an experienced social science academic with thirty years teaching and research experience in both the UK and Australia, including the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of Greenwich, and Middlesex University.

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