calling all fandom grandmas
I’m working on a project for a pretty broad-spectrum ‘women in history’ class, and I’ve decided that the subject of my final project is going to be women in fandom. I’ll narrow that down further as I go along, but I do need some primary sources to work with!
I’d really love to talk with some women in fandom who are old enough to remember mailing lists, dreamwidth/geocities (?) pages, yahoo groups, etc. - basically the period just before LiveJournal, although anyone who remembers the earliest days of LiveJournal would be great too, since I only got into it in the few years before everyone left for tumblr.
Ideally it would be great if I could get in contact with someone who received or even worked on some of the old fanzines from the 60′s/70′s/80′s (ie Vulcanalia, Spockanalia, Bags End Gazette) or anyone who participated in fandom culture pre-internet.
On the off chance that any of those zines have been posted online, please let me know where I can find them!
If you’re cool with chatting for a bit, you can send me an ask here, or contact me on Twitter (queenofsaiyansx), and we can go from there! Obviously any info that I use will be properly cited.
Please reblog this, just to spread it around? Thanks!
Sure thing. There are lots of us on here who were around pre-LJ. Every time somebody reminisces about alt.tv.x-files or other Usenet stuff, half my followers chime in.
There are definitely fans around who contributed to old zines. You might have more luck if you identified specific people and asked if anyone has their contact info. Fanlore is often pretty accurate about who’s still alive. A lot of older zine fandom people are on Facebook. Some are on Tumblr, but I wouldn’t rely on enough just seeing this post.
Are you specifically looking for people who edited letterzines? Gen zines? Any media fandom zine? The older zines that I recall seeing posted online are mostly fic ones and mostly slash at that.
“Old enough to remember mailing lists/Geocities”… heh. Some of us remember when you had to ask for the slash zines behind the table that were only sold to people who already knew to ask for them.
@meeedeee needs to see this.
I sent them a message via tumblr.