Notes

During the early 1990s the Seattle/Olympia Washington area had a sophisticated do it yourself infrastructure.[10] Young women involved in underground music scenes took advantage of this to articulate their feminist thoughts and desires through creating punk-rock fanzines and forming garage bands. The political model of collage-based, photocopied handbills and booklets was already used by the punk movement as a way to activate underground music, leftist politics and alternative (to mainstream) sub-cultures. There was a discomfort among many women in the punk movement who felt that they had no space for organizing, because of the misogyny in the punk culture. Many women found that while they identified with a larger, music-oriented subculture, they often had little to no voice in their local scenes. Women at the punk-rock shows saw themselves as girlfriends of the boys, so they took it upon themselves to represent their own interests by making their own fanzines, music and art.[12]

"[Riot Grrrl is ...] BECAUSE we girls want to create mediums that speak to US. We are tired of boy band after boy band, boy zine after boy zine, boy punk after boy punk after boy... BECAUSE we need to talk to each other. Communication/inclusion is the key. We will never know if we don't break the code of silence... BECAUSE in every form of media we see us/myself slapped, decapitated, laughed at, objectified, raped, trivialized, pushed, ignored, stereotyped, kicked, scorned, molested, silenced, invalidated, knifed, shot, choked and killed. BECAUSE a safe space needs to be created for girls where we can open our eyes and reach out to each other without being threatened by this sexist society and our day to day bullshit."[25]

The movement also used zines (or small D.I.Y. magazines) as its primary method of communication. Thousands of young women began to produce personal and political zines with explicitly feminist themes, which allowed Riot Grrrl to spread its message without the use of mainstream media.

The riot grrrl movement allowed women their own space to create music and make political statements about the issues they were facing in the punk rock community and in society.

Riot grrrl's momentum was also hugely supported by an explosion of creativity in defiantly homemade cut-and-paste, xeroxed, collagey zines that covered a variety of feminist topics, frequently attempting to draw out the political implications of intensely personal experiences in a "privately public" space. Grrrl zine editors are collectively engaged in forms of writing and writing instruction that challenge both dominant notions of the author as an individualized, bodiless space and notions of feminism as primarily an adult political project.[41]

, "It's just essential to preserve the activist voices in their own unmediated work, especially because of the media blackout that they called for

"For instance, women of color wondered out loud for whom writing 'SLUT''
across their stomachs operated as reclamations of sexual agency against
feminine passivity, where racisms had already inscribed such terms onto some
bodies, and poor or criminal-class women argued that feminists 'slumming' in
the sex industry (through stripping, for the most part) as a confrontational act
implied that other women in this or other tiers of the industry were otherwise
conceding to patriarchy."

we organized a exhibition. put together and distributed zines for trans kids
http://camh.org/exhibitions/perspectives-189-margins#.V3W6MEI_9bw