I’ve been thinking a lot about the ephemerality of the female ghost and media about the “female ghost” in particular. For four semesters, I’ve taught my class on hauntings, and I’ve always taught an article that was published in Bitch magazine right around the time the conjuring came out in 2013, The Feminist Power of Female Ghosts. It is certainly not the only article to make an argument like this, but it is filled with links, examples, and media that my students might be interested in. It’s also written in a way that is easy to read and attention-grabbing.
Andi Zeisler writes “In this way, ghost stories are often protofeminist tales of women who, if only in death, subvert the assumptions and traditions of women as dutiful wives and mothers, worshipful girlfriends, or obedient children by unleashing a lifetime’s worth of rage and retribution.”
It gives me a little kick of nostalgia for 2013, when I had just graduated from college and all of these references were new and relevant and fu .The media the article references is wide ranging—sure it discusses The Conjuring and The Ring, but also zines and b movies that students may not have encountered, that they sometimes want to watch or read and I love that. And in this article there is a feminist, horror zine, Ax Wound referenced and the link has been dead for years, I’ve been trying to find it for years and I’ve googled the creator, and I’ve googled the Zine itself, and I have gone on the way back machine and on WorldCat and I can’t find it. I have found meager proof that this feminist horror zine, Ax Wound, once existed. But like the ghosts written about by Andi Zeisler, the zine has seemingly disappeared from the earth. That’s probably untrue—there is probably a copy in a box somewhere or on the shelf of some other horror freak or in possession of the author. But for me, it’s gone.
The Bitch article was published in 2013, which means it is very possible that Ax Wound was only available in print, which makes things harder. There are fabulous Zine archives in universities across the country, archivists doing the lord’s work, but which Zines make the cut? Which zines are extant? And does this search, the search for Ax Wound, the search for Zines belie their very purpose: the handmade photocopied nature? The local emphasis of Zine culture? Or the creation for a specific smaller community?
Zines are inherently ephemeral, you get it while you get it. The archivists keep the ephemeral alive, but it’s not always possible. As long as I’ve been reading this article, teaching this article, I’ve been searching for the Zine. And then today, one of my students e-mailed me to let me the link to the Bitch article was broken. It led to a weird unsafe site. And I realized that even though Bitch Magazine shuttered and with it my dreams of writing for them and becoming a Bitch Fellow, I assumed the site would stay. That the record of this magazine would continue. But like Ax Wound, like so many sites before it, it only exists in the vapors of the internet archive, in the pdf I had blessedly saved. The only connection I had to Ax Wound now a ghost itself.
My students will be able to read the article but they won’t be able to click the links, they won’t be able to engage the text in the same way they could engage when it was live on that site, alive right in front of them. Now the search for the Zine has turned into a search for the article that linked to a link I can’t even click even though I know it would go to nowhere. The female ghost and her feminist power remain, if only ephemerally.
The Internet eventually disappears us, disappears everything but I also wonder who’s work and writing is preserved? The Internet can create ghosts, create ghosts of the people we were and the things we read that made us. And, maybe some of that’s good. Maybe we don’t need to be friends on social media with every single person we went to high school with but maybe instead we need to think about what becomes a busted URL and what is allowed to linger. Who becomes the ghost in the story, the Zine, the Bitch article? We need to ask ourselves before the internet makes ghosts of us all.
https://open.substack.com/pub/susanbordo/p/ghosts?r=384ha&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web