Shocking pink!

Appearing first between 1981 and 1982 and then resurfacing between the years 1987 and 1992, Shocking pink! was a groundbreaking feminist zine that challenged and ironised about the conventions of mainstream magazines for women. Produced by a collective of young women in London, it deployed ferocious critiques of political, gender and race injustices through an aesthetic that both digests the punk zines and anticipates the 90s wave of riot grrrl zines (e.g. see here a full coloured collection of covers and here an example of how they faced the introduction of Clause 28). You can read a very good introduction to the magazine in The F Word.

The collection holds six issues of Shocking Pink! : Library Catalogue.

An archive of all 16 issues is available in Grassroots Feminism. The Sparrow’s Nest Archive also offers high quality scans of four issues: #02, #06 (first series) and #01, #02 (second series).

For further research, the academic journal Contemporary British History published in 2012 the article “‘A Shock to the System’: Feminist Interventions in Youth Subculture—The Adventures of Shocking Pink” by Anna Gough-Yates. If you are a UAL student or member of staff you can access the full article logging in with your credentials into Taylor & Francis Online.