Subcultures can provide a rich source of study for composition instructors who want to address rhetorical concepts such as audience, style, and ethos within a cultural studies paradigm. Issues such as power, community, identity formation, representation, and the consumption and production of discourse are all features of subcultures that can be integrated into a writing class that emphasizes the development of critical media literacy and research skills. Because of the ever-increasing access to the Internet both in and outside the classroom, a commitment to web literacy is a necessary requirement for any writing classroom. To deny students this opportunity is to unconsciously promulgate an unreflective attitude towards this persuasive medium (Sorapure, Inglesby, Yatchisin 1998). Thus, this assignment aims to introduce students to the rhetorical and cultural practices of electronic subcultures through the analysis of their discourse production, particularly in the form of electronic zines. 

As defined by Stephen Duncombe, author of Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture, zines are "noncommercial, nonprofessional, small-circulation magazines which their creators produce, publish, and distribute themselves" (6).  Zines, particularly those known as 'perzines,' most often reveal the experiences of their authors--their thoughts and feelings, passions and hates, personal and political observations. Therefore, more than simply self-published or "little" magazines, zines present us with the everydayness of individual lives that are intricately connected to others. Unlike most literary works or contemporary magazines, zines cannot function without other zines. Their interdependence engenders group affiliations loosely organized around common needs and interests, whether these be factors that include gender, race, sexuality, disability, and class, or a political or subcultural affiliation such as animal rights activists or queer punk rockers. 

Traditional print zines are individually produced, often traded or sold for a few dollars, and distributed through the mail or through Internet sites called 'zine distros'; a trademark of zines is their punk aesthetic that relies on cut and paste, however, their electronic versions are apt to be slightly more commercial in both look and in their use of advertisements that often fund sites' use of a server. Other complications that arise from zines' movement to electronic environments such as being vulnerable to multiple and sometimes hostile audiences particularly for women of color and those who identify as queer are noted in Mimi Nguyen's excellent article, "Tales of an Asiatic Geek Girl: Slant from Paper to Pixels." However, despite the disadvantages of bringing zine on-lines, the formation of numerous on-line subcultures provides opportunities for their study as cultural texts that often profess ideologies, beliefs, and points of view that do not get much space in corporate-regulated media. 

Thus, a pedagogical aspect of zines is their ability to produce resistant discourse that may often be in opposition to mainstream media or to dominant representations of women, people of color, disabled, and queer identities. In Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition, Henry Giroux delineates his plan for a unilateral "citizen education." The pedagogy he calls for proposes that students "learn not only how to weigh the existing society against its own claims, [but] they should also be taught to think and act in ways that speak to different societal possibilities and ways of living" (202). The study of zines and those who produce them can provide writing students the opportunity to explore alternative discourses, or what I call, subcultural rhetorics, which are unrecognized or subordinated discourses that are often overlooked, disregarded, or misread by the academy and/or mainstream public, yet they exist and emerge sometimes aggressively in unpredictable sites. Although their producers may not necessarily be members of historically marginalized social groups, the production of their discourse is unorthodox and delegitimated because it is often ephemeral, non-totalizing, and decentralizing. Compared to traditional Western notions of rhetoric, subcultural rhetorics appear powerless and consequently ineffective yet as sites of study, these underground rhetorics can illustrate how discourse constructs us, often in relation to a community, and conversely how we construct alternative positions and communities. This is particularly relevant for students who share similar subject positions with the electronic subculture they are analyzing. 

This cultural studies approach to studying zines is informed by ethnographic methods such as observation, analysis, and participation that can be used to investigate the complex negotiations that subject undergo in producing identities, communities, and resistant discourse. Thus, students who participate in this assignment can develop critical analytical skills by viewing the Web as an ethnographic space in which to explore how meaning is made among people participating in subcultural activities. Since most participants in subcultures are ‘poachers,’ using and refashioning discourse in ways not intended by those in power (record/publishing companies, the media, fashion industry), students can hopefully glimpse the way that power can be abducted and recycled through style, vernacular, consumption and production by those who rarely have possession of it.