daughter diaries #6: zines are the opposite of algorithm

written by Grace Anne McKean

When I created Daughter, I wasn’t thinking about a revolution. I was thinking about how to create something corporeal. Something with a body; a stomach, a head, a heart. If I was born in a different generation, or a different girl entirely, this might’ve been the point in my life where I would consider having a baby. But the idea never crossed my mind at the time.

Now, over a year later, all I can think about anymore is that there is something inherently dangerous about smart girls. There always has been. That’s why, historically, female literacy has been so closely monitored. That’s why so many women were silenced or killed for writing anything at all.

It’s easy to shrug off zines as a cultural medium, especially when you make one that looks like ours— all soft pinks and esoteric euphemisms. But Daughter isn’t a novelty or a cute aesthetic relic— it’s an altar. It’s ritual. It’s resistance: soft, sharp, and sacred in equal measure. We exist in a time where art is expected to monetize itself immediately. Where algorithms erase nuance. And where media—especially media led by young women—is expected to serve commerce first and community second. Zines refuse all of that. Zines linger. They imprint. They live in pockets and on bedroom floors and in the backs of notebooks. They are handmade and often badly photocopied and that is part of their magic.

The zines that emerged during the women’s labor movement, like The Lowell Offering, were not aesthetic objects. They were beacons in a storm— steady, urgent, and life-saving. They were written by working-class girls in textile mills who labored 13-hour days and still found time to publish essays, poems, and observations on their every day lives. This publication wasn’t just an outlet; it was undeniable proof that intellect does not belong only to the privileged or the powerful.

The Offering became a vessel of testimony in a world that preferred these girls silent. This tradition of feminist publishing has always been political and, in some form, underground. Zines are the literary form of passing a note under the table, or whispering a truth no one else is brave enough to say. They are resistance not through volume, but through intimacy. Zines say: I made this for you, not for them.

This is what Daughter hopes to be, too: a tiny, beautiful threat.

My mom told me one of the reasons they stopped putting pockets into women’s clothing was because women were passing around revolutionary literature. She’s been smugly repeating it to every new woman she gets into a conversation with since she learned about it. It makes her feel connected to something defiant. It makes me think that maybe Daughter fits inside those hidden pockets—something folded, something passed down, something worth keeping. The next wave of feminism will not be content. It will be care. It will be messy. It will be handwritten. It will be a printout taped to a bathroom wall. It will be anonymous and intimate and unmarketable. It will look a lot like a zine.

Daughter believes that the best work doesn’t fit into any kind of mould that already been shaped. We believe women should be allowed to make good and bad art without being reduced to their bodies, harassed in their DMs, or turned into content against their will. We believe that criticism is a form of devotion. We believe that literature is not dead—it just stopped wearing makeup. And we believe in the sacredness of a living record of what girls are thinking and feeling right now, even if it’s messy. Especially if it’s messy.