Students find the middle-space of zines appealing. The informal, creative, and participatory character of zines shares some ground with blogs, but unlike blogs, zines are physical objects that can be held and passed from person to person by hand. Essays, poems, or confessional stories might also be handwritten-or typed with drawings framing the paragraphs. Images are hand-drawn or cut-and-pasted by hand. Unlike research papers, zine style is decidedly informal. Zines occupy a middle ground between traditional research papers or essays and Web-based media such as blogs. They are available in many public and university libraries and independent bookstores, as well as from online zine distributors and other websites specializing in handmade goods (see Appendix for a teaching resource list). Zines are "non-commercial, non-professional, small-circulation magazines which their creators produce, publish, and distribute by themselves" (Duncombe 6). In order to help students connect feminist theory to their own experiences, I suggest incorporatingzines into gender studies courses as both reading and writing assignments. To complicate matters further, Introduction to Women's Studies students come from various levels of experience-from students in their first to fourth years-and major in subjects ranging from engineering to psychology. Many students came to the class believing that women's studies was solely a history lesson, that the discipline had little to offer their own lives. What is left for us to talk about?" Her classmates nodded in agreement and looked at me blankly. When I began teaching Introduction to Women's Studies, one student said, "But the women's movement is over. One of the challenges that many gender studies instructors face is making complex topics-such as gender identities, political theory, and media criticism-current, interesting, and relevant to students' lives.
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