Synopses & Reviews
Stroll through any public park in Brooklyn on a weekday afternoon and you will see black women with white children at every turn. Many of these women are of Caribbean descent, and they have long been a crucial component of New York's economy, providing childcare for white middle- and upper-middleclass families.
Raising Brooklyn offers an in-depth look at the daily lives of these childcare providers, examining the important roles they play in the families whose children they help to raise. Tamara Mose Brown spent three years immersed in these Brooklyn communities: in public parks, public libraries, and living as a fellow resident among their employers, and her intimate tour of the public spaces of gentrified Brooklyn deepens our understanding of how these women use their collective lives to combat the isolation felt during the workday as a domestic worker.
Though at first glance these childcare providers appear isolated and exploited—and this is the case for many—Mose Brown shows that their daily interactions in the social spaces they create allow their collective lives and cultural identities to flourish. Raising Brooklyn demonstrates how these daily interactions form a continuous expression of cultural preservation as a weapon against difficult working conditions, examining how this process unfolds through the use of cell phones, food sharing, and informal economic systems. Ultimately, Raising Brooklyn places the organization of domestic workers within the framework of a social justice movement, creating a dialogue between workers who don't believe their exploitative work conditions will change and an organization whose members believe change can come about through public displays of solidarity.
Review
“[An] engrossing look at the Caribbean community of child care workers in Brooklyn, NY”
“Mose Brown has entered the hidden realm of West Indian childcare workers and produced a remarkable picture of urban life. This is fine grained, careful ethnography that reveals the taken for granted intimacies and politics of everyday experience.”
“Vividly written…Mose Brown's own voice is especially poignant; her reflexivity about her relationships to others as a researcher, fellow New Yorker and mother is a model for contemporary ethnography.”
&8220;Outsiders can only wonder what West Indian caregivers say to each other as they sit on park benches watching their charges. Mose Brown gives us the answer, in an insightful and fascinating account of how these women create their own social worlds in public spaces. A revealing sociological portrait of women whose work and struggles command respect.”
“A sensitive and nuanced glimpse into the lives of the women who raise so many of Brooklyn’s—and America’s—children. Mose Brown has given us a deeply compelling and timely ethnography.”
Review
"[Piepmeier is] one of third-wave feminism's astute voices... As the wealth of examples she brings to her argument reveals, the author has done careful research on the significance of this medium and its use as a tool for making the voices of third-wave feminists heard. The study is important in that it affirms the continuity and relevance of feminism and does so in a way that delights as well as informs... Summing Up: Essential."-CHOICE,
Review
"In , author Alison Piepmeier defends the grrrl ethos with a scholarly take that points to the movement as a key part of feminist history; one that enabled women to gain more presence in a male-dominated world, albeit through flimsy, phantasmagorical photocopies passed around in the 1990s. Here Piepmeier brings forth a local study that, whether you agree with it or not, steadfastly lodges zine culture into the feminist archive."-Broken Pencil,
Review
"Piepmeier's work is an insightful and long-overdue engagement with the feminist work in zines, which played a pivotal role not only in Riot Grrrl but also in the development of the Third Wave in general."-Virginia Corvid,Feminist Collections
Review
"Feminist identities are the central concern of Piepmeier's Girl Zines, the first full-length academic study of young women's zine production to take third-wave politics as a serious subject of inquiry."-Red Chidgey,Signs
Review
“Before you could Tweet your every thought to the world, young women cut, pasted, Xeroxed, and traded their own handmade magazines through the mail. In fact, the gorgeously glossy mag youre holding in your hands right now started off as a zine. Girl Zines analyzes the beginning of the movement and its revolution grrrl style roots, as well as the way zinesters used the medium to explore race, sexuality, and identity.”
-Bust Magazine,
Synopsis
With names like
The East Village Inky,
Mend My Dress,
Dear Stepdad, and
I'm So Fucking Beautiful, zines created by girls and women over the past two decades make feminisms third wave visible. These messy, photocopied do-it-yourself documents cover every imaginable subject matter and are loaded with handwriting, collage art, stickers, and glitter. Though they all reflect the personal style of the creators, they are also sites for constructing narratives, identities, and communities.
Girl Zines is the first book-length exploration of this exciting movement. Alison Piepmeier argues that these quirky, personalized booklets are tangible examples of the ways that girls and women ‘do feminism today. The idiosyncratic, surprising, and savvy arguments and issues showcased in the forty-six images reproduced in the book provide a complex window into feminisms future, where zinesters persistently and stubbornly carve out new spaces for what it means to be a revolutionary and a girl. Girl Zines takes zines seriously, asking what they can tell us about the inner lives of girls and women over the last twenty years.
About the Author
Alison Piepmeier directs the Womens and Gender Studies Program at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina, where she is associate professor of English. She is the co-editor of Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the Twenty-First Century and author of Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America.