Fanning the Flames of Feminism: Activist Periodicals, Paracodical Objects, and the Politics of Participation

A magazine is often seen to be something perishable or ephemeral, superseded, for example, by the next issue: discardable, or at least much less likely to be kept than a book. In many instances, however, these seemingly transient objects often incorporate, or are accompanied by, their own supposed ephemera: leaflets, posters, badges, stickers, and so forth. And yet the presence and meaning of such items — the work that they perform — rarely features in histories of periodicals. Using the first issue of Feminist Arts News from 1980 as a case study, this contribution considers some of the questions that such ephemeral material poses for the field of the study of art and artists’ magazines in relation to issues of preservation, retrieval, capture, and transmission. Magazines are inscriptions of collective labour, including that of those who have written, edited, designed, printed, distributed, and read them. What, I want to ask, can a subscription leaflet teach us about the differing modes of participation engendered by grassroots periodicals such as FAN, both at the time and today?