Riot Grrrl

Pussy Riot’s surprise punk prayer at the altar of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ Our Savior instigated significant controversy in Russia and resulted in the conviction of three Pussy Riot members on the charge of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” While the Russian Orthodox Church swiftly condemned the performance as blasphemous, Pussy Riot has contended that its punk prayer is consistent with the message of the Gospels. This study investigates the punk prayer controversy in relation to the figure of the holy fool, a radical behavioral model canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church and secularized in Russia’s literary and artistic traditions.

""Women working in digital media and sonic arts have been oftentimes overlooked for their male
counterparts.The representation of women in many sonic arts academic programs and associated
conferences seems to be drastically less than that of their male colleagues. I will offer a short presentation
on the recent trends regarding women in these fields, and how one can promote a more meaningful
awareness of the issues arising from this gender gap. With a brief discussion of movements such as the
underground Seattle based Punk rock RiotGrrrl movement, and the international sonic arts collective
GirrlSound, I will also discuss possible ways of promoting and encouraging young women to participate in
sonic arts and ways in which gender equality can be promoted in both an academic and non academic
environment.""

""Women working in digital media and sonic arts have been oftentimes overlooked for their male
counterparts.The representation of women in many sonic arts academic programs and associated
conferences seems to be drastically less than that of their male colleagues. I will offer a short presentation
on the recent trends regarding women in these fields, and how one can promote a more meaningful
awareness of the issues arising from this gender gap. With a brief discussion of movements such as the
underground Seattle based Punk rock RiotGrrrl movement, and the international sonic arts collective
GirrlSound, I will also discuss possible ways of promoting and encouraging young women to participate in
sonic arts and ways in which gender equality can be promoted in both an academic and non academic
environment.""

The game of Psychic Dictionary exists 1) as it has been
consistently performed, 2) as it is remembered by me, and
(perhaps) others. For the purposes of this exploration, the
congealing of these two definitions—indeed their existence as two
separate, inimical entities—will be entirely ignored. Reproducing
the game in good faith, as sincerely as possible, I will then attempt
to make an honest case for the game’s social/transcendent
capabilities using terms and concepts drawn from the fertile
tradition of the Frankfurt School scholars and writers.

The aggressive chords of Riot Grrrl's punk rock feminism emerged out of the United States of the early 1990's. Young women voiced their frustration with inequality with their loud and even obnoxious punk rock rebellion. Possibly as a result of this, outsiders tended to consider the movement mostly from formal perspectives, including those of music, performances, and looks. Many ridiculed or completely ignored the feminist ideology of the rebellious grrrls.

The Riot Grrrl movement was notably and regularly misrepresented both in the mainstream media of the early 1990's and the reactions of the earlier generation of feminists. It is from these misrepresentations that my argumentation stems. In my thesis, I interpret the misrepresentations as a sign of Riot Grrrl's threatening revolutionary potential. My analysis focuses on the unconventional and unacceptable womanhood of those involved in the movement, particularly the members of the seminal bands Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, and Huggy Bear. My discussion employs subcultural theory, radical feminism, and Judith Butler's construct of gender performativity.

The diversity of my findings reflects the inaccessibility of the Riot Grrrl movement, highlighted throughout my thesis. Yet, it appears central that the candid ambiguity of riot grrrls contested the perceptions of womanhood of both the mainstream media and established feminists, as well as that the supposedly unintelligible and repeatedly belittled movement posed a viable threat to conventional, patriarchally-defined womanhood. The misrepresentations expose the tendencies to restrict the influence of Riot Grrrl and, thus, the revolutionary potential of the movement.

The history of grunge and the meaning of its musical expression has suffered as a result of its early categorization as a hyper-masculinized and hetero-sexualized rock genre. This unfortunate classification at the hands of rock journalism and music media
outlets misinterpreted the artists’ cultural criticisms as simply anti-authority and generation X angst, when in fact, many artists posed serious challenges to late 20th-century conventions of gender, sexuality, and feminism. These male and female artists rebelled  against binary gender conventions by performing queered and camped identities, that were commercially misinterpreted, packaged as “grunge”, and sold to the masses. Consequently, in spite of commercial praise and success for their music, the
many gender provocateurs in grunge have been widely overlooked by scholarship and activism. The female grunge artists have had it the worst; lacking the recognition as both gender-fucking performers and as serious contributors to a unique music
movement that saw more female-led bands with mainstream airplay, high album sales, and more concert tickets sold, than ever before in rock history. This thesis, in order to exhume the untold history of grunge, discards the old categories and cultural trappings created for the genre and instead explores the performative value of its abstractions, contradictions, and abjections as feministic expressions. To begin to disinter the
marginalized female grunge artists, it is necessary to begin with unequivocally, the most marginalized and chastised female of all, Courtney Love. Love’s legacy has been so distorted that her counter-culture feministic expressions have been subsumed. This
thesis aims to illuminate the physical and lyrical hypertext deployed by Love to create her personal evolution of her punk feminism, grunge, into a new queered feministic expression examined through her albums Pretty on the Inside (1991) and Live Through This (1994).

This article draws on material from the Riot Grrrl Collection at New York University’s Fayles Library to examine the culture of ‘zine’ production in riot grrrl communities in the United States during the 1990s. After investigating the relationship between the political issues and aesthetic strategies explored by riot grrrl literary producers, the author analyses the points of tension arising within the movement, which become illuminated by zines’ revelatory confessional modes, or what Mimi Thi Nguyen
has called riot grrrl’s ‘aesthetics of access’. The author subsequently enquires after the implications for riot grrrl politics of understanding experiences of oppression and
transgressive behaviour as cultural commodities. Finally, the author goes on to trace the commodification of the transgressive feminist gesture in mainstream popular culture
and contemporary online feminist activism in the United States.

This essay analyzes the musical performances of Leslie Mah, biracial lead guitarist and backup vocalist for the legendary all-female, queercore punk band Tribe 8, whose members broke up in 2005 after fifteen years together. Inspired by the recent turn in performance studies toward studies of music as performance, this work employs multiple methods and objects to get at the complex totality of popular music’s performativity. Mah’s macha femme persona, playing style, and performance of identity as a lesbian woman of color within queercore punk music allow her to enter a carnivalesque realm of feminist menace, palpable rage, and unruly pleasure. Mah’s performance strategies and articulations of her queer and biracial identities in interviews are contextualized within feminist performance, riot grrrl, and punk music studies. Tribe 8’s lyrics, music, marketing, and band member personas provide cultural context for Mah’s distinctive performance of macha femme.

Feminist history comprises a myriad of movements and identities spanning generations of individuals. Its substance
is preserved and transmitted in innumerable ways, including through oral histories, independent bookstores, infoshops, school and community archives, and conferences — but how secure are that transmission and preservation?
Happily, there is now an established university archive at NYU for preserving and transmitting the history of one of those movements, the underground feminist punk movement known as Riot Grrrl, which emerged in Olympia in the early 1990s.

Tracing discursive formations of subaltern groups can uncover tactical choices that bring to light particular group motives. Drawing upon Lawrence Grossberg’s conception of “sensibilities,” an analysis of queercore, a punk-inflected queer musical movement, illuminates the discursive, nondiscursive, and performative sensibility of play that informs its cultural politics. Though queercore may ultimately aspire to “mere aesthetics,” its ludic politics stresses its symbolic defiance. As such, the essay contends that the tactical deployment of a playful sensibility can effect a powerfully subversive challenge to “serious” conventions of cultural normativity.

The article investigates areas of knowledge production in contemporary queer-feminist punk countercultures in/from the US and draws a connec-tion from countercultural accounts to academic anti-social queer theory. Based on the thesis that queer-feminist punk–countercultures, bands, mu-sicians, writers and organizers–can be understood as a political move-ment, their productions—lyrics, writing, sound and performances—will be seen as a form of queer-feminist activism and agency. The main argument developed in the article is that queer-feminist punk countercultural agents do not only engage with queer and feminist politics, as well as academic theory, but also produce queer-feminist political theory—a more or less coherent set of ideas to analyze, explain and counter oppressive social structures, as well as explicit and open violence and oppression. Queer-feminist punk musicians combine decolonial and antiracist accounts with their specific punk philosophy of anti-social queerness or q...

The act of material zine-making has been associated with young women as a mode of communication and community formation since the Riot Grrrl movement of the 1990s. This paper seeks to explore the connection young women have to the materiality of a girl zine and its role in promoting and fostering communication and community. Using a qualitative descriptive method for interpreting content, construction and production of girl zines, the method is informed—where appropriate—by concepts proposed by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life. Facilitated by a variety of examples of girl zines, further understanding regarding the importance of zine-making as an alternative form of media for young women can be unearthed. Through examining the discussion’s findings, the historical context, content, construction and production and the dissemination of girl zines, the future of girl zine production and dissemination can be seen to utilise both traditional and digital media.

Keywords: Riot Grrrl, third-wave feminism, zines, girl zines, women, community, materiality, communication, DIY activism, pop culture.

Previous research demonstrates how activists who do not identify as feminist sometimes engage in “implicitly feminist practices.” In this paper, I extend this research by asking: Do self-identified feminists also employ such implicit strategies in the course of their activist efforts? If so, why would they “do” feminism implicitly? Based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews at Girls Rock! Midwest—a week-long summer day camp program that aims to empower girls through rock music production—I develop the concept of implicit feminism. I define implicit feminism as a strategy practiced by feminist activists within organizations that are operating in an anti- and postfeminist environment in which they conceal feminist identities and ideas while emphasizing the more socially acceptable angles of their efforts. My research demonstrates how feminist-identified activists employ implicitly feminist practices as a strategic response to feminist dilemmas stemming from competing organizational demands, how they envision the possibilities and drawbacks of such a strategy, and what this suggests for the shape and future of feminist politics.

The exhibition included works by Miranda July with Shauna McGarry (Joanie 4 Jackie); LTTR; Stephanie Syjuco (The Counterfeit Crochet Project); Tammie Rae Carland;  Vaginal Davis, Nao Bustamante, SWOON with Tenessee Jane Watson; subRosa; Shinique Smith;  the Toxic Titties; Taraneh Hemami; Laurel Nakadate; Jessica Tully; Leslie Labowitz with Suzanne Lacy; Aleksandra Mir, Deborah Grant, Eve Fowler with Math Bass, Andrea Bowers; Lisa Anne Auerbach and MK Guth.

Abstract This work aims to understand how the continuity subcultural participation (Hodkinson, 2011) is present in women who are involved with Riot Grrrl and the Girls Rock Camps in Brazil. As methodology, the researcher Gabriela Gelain assumed, through a participant observation (online and offline) and inspired by movements of virtual ethnography, the position of insider researcher (Paul Hodkinson, 2005; Amaral,IS Working Paper, 3.ª Série, N.º 58 3 2009), since she is a volunteer in Girls Rock Camp Porto Alegre. So 63 interviewees from 10 Brazilian states, between 15 and 47 years old, compose the sample of this investigation, along our analizys about the answers and collected data. Finally, we note that older respondents have been linked to the subculture for 20 years or more and the adult women (25 years old) in the research sample are active in the subculture, playing with bands, producing feminist events, fanzines, teaching instruments to other women, in order to seek their empowerment, and there is also a greater concern with regard to their movements within the subculture Riot Grrrl in Brazil.

Tracing a genealogy of feminist avant-garde aesthetics from punk feminist author Kathy Acker’s 1979 novel Blood and Guts in High School to riot grrrl performer and activist Kathleen Hanna’s music and zine writing of the 1990s, I argue that this aesthetic formation deploys shock to complicate familiar concepts of consent. Acker’s use of fragmented narrative, plagiarized text, and hand-drawn images compounds the effects of her depictions of shocking sexual violence, forcing the reader into a relationship of constantly renegotiated consent. Because they consent to shocking violence under a kind of duress, readers reimagine the very nature of consent through their experience with Blood and Guts. I posit Kathleen Hanna as one of Acker’s most important readers and demonstrate how her zines and music also deploy sadomasochistic imagery to articulate the varied emotional responses women have to sexual violence. Drawing connections between formal strategies for eliciting shock and the limits of consent, I argue that Acker and Hanna’s feminist aesthetic of shock offers new ways of conceiving pleasure and danger. Shock, I contend, became a strategy for resisting the antipornography ethos that prevailed when Acker and Hanna were writing. In their moment and our own, where consent is a key term in debates about sexual violence, Acker and Hanna offer the possibility of artistic forms that allow for taboo affective responses to violence.

In dem Essay geht es einerseits um die historische Verortung des Begriffs Lady(festes), der Entstehung und den Grundprinzipien der Veranstaltungen mit besonderem Augenmerk auf den US-amerikanischen und den deutschsprachigen Raum. Gleichzeitig und damit verbunden wird Anhand der Zine-Kultur und Blogs ein queer-feministischer Zugang zu Arbeit mit Medien dargestellt. Abschließend wird Radical Cheerleading als Beispiel für eine sehr spezifische Aktionsform innerhalb von Ladysfesten dargestellt.

OF THE THESIS grunge feminism: performing gender paradox in queered plays of hypertexuality by Ann Linnea Zeiner Master of Arts in History San Diego State University, 2015 The history of grunge and the meaning of its musical expression has suffered as a result of its early categorization as a hyper-masculinized and hetero-sexualized rock genre. This unfortunate classification at the hands of rock journalism and music media outlets misinterpreted the artists’ cultural criticisms as simply anti-authority and generation X angst, when in fact, many artists posed serious challenges to late 20th century conventions of gender, sexuality, and feminism. These male and female artists, rebelled against binary gender conventions by performing queered and Camped identities, that were commercially misinterpreted, packaged as “grunge”, and sold to the masses. Consequently, in spite of commercial praise and success for their music, the many gender provocateurs in grunge have been widely overlooked ...

Subcultures have long been theorized as the domain of the young. Illustrating this connection, studies of the varieties of subcultural participation often use the terms ‘subcultures’ and ‘youth cultures’ interchangeably (e.g. see Epstein 1998; Skelton and Valentine 1998). This connection between subcultures and youth stems from a particular framing of adolescence as a transitional time between being embedded in school and families of origins (childhood) and entering the world of employment and marriage (adulthood) (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Frith 1981 ; Brake 1985). Yet subcultural participation as a ‘magical solution’ (Hebdige 1979) to the vagaries and stresses of adulthood historically has been a male domain. As Mike Brake notes, ‘If sub-cultures are solutions to collectively experienced problems, then traditionally these have been the problems experienced by young men’ (1985: 163). As young women in the 1960s and 1970s experienced greater parental control and social sanctions for taking up space in the streets (McRobbie and Garber 1976), many researchers of the era theorized that girl cultures started and finished in the bedroom (Frith 1981)—and thus afforded them less investigation than the more publicly visible and accessible cultures of boys (Brake 1985; McRobbie 1991).

Subsequent generations of researchers have intervened in these early conceptu-alizations of subcultures in two ways. First, the participation of girls and women in male-dominated and mixed-gender subcultures, such as punk rock (LeBlanc 1999), goth (Wilkins 2004) and queer (Halberstam 2005; see also Chapter 2 of this volume), has been documented widely, as has the formation of ‘girl-centred’ subcultures, such as Riot Grrrl, which take as their focal concern issues widely shared by women and girls (Kearney 1998, 2006; Schilt 2003a). Second, the premise that subcultures are only for the young has come under investigation. As Andy Bennett (2006) notes, the assumption that personal connections to music and subcultures should fade in early adulthood ignores the ways in which music is commercially marketed and how fandom can become a core part of a person’s identity. Taking the punk subculture as an example, some punks find strategies that allow them to negotiate continued community participation—even after they ‘grow up’ and ‘get real jobs’ (Andes 1998; Bennett 2006; Davis 2006). While ageing punks might transcend the punk aesthetic as they age (Andes 1998), they can still feel they embody a punk ideology that gives them a continued connection to a local, translocal and/or virtual scene (Bennett 2006). This focus on ageing subcultures calls into question a view of subcultural participation that is static and time-bounded, emphasizing the dynamic shifts that can occur across participants’ lives.

What is missing from this body of research is a merging of these interventions: women’s subcultural participation and ageing. With a few exceptions (Halberstam 2005; Vroomen 2004), research on ageing subcultures and fandom has illuminated more about men than it has about women. In this chapter, we seek to add to this lit-erature. We focus on girls’ rock camps, week-long summer-camp programs in which adult women teach young girls how to play instruments, form bands and put on shows. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation at girls’ rock camps in two major US cities, we show how the organizers and volunteers constitute a useful case study for examining women’s strategies for continued subcultural participation. Many of the volunteers and organizers come to rock camp with a history of participation in the Riot Grrrl movement in the 1990s, and continue to be involved as adults in their local music scenes as musicians and fans. Rock camps provide these women with an institutional location in which to share punk feminist ideologies, women’s musical history and technical knowledge intergenerationally. In contrast to ageing men in punk scenes, who may seek to establish themselves as authorities on punk history and authenticity (Bennett 2006; Davis 2006), these women strive to form collaborative efforts with young girls and to learn from the younger generations’ experiences. With their alternative appearances and often nontraditional career and family lives, the organizers also show dynamic trajectories for both adulthood and subcultural participation.

Anknüpfend an mein Referat zum Text „Rock & Sexuality“ von Simon Frith und Angela McRobbie, möchte ich mich im Folgenden ausführlicher mit dem Thema Gender Studies auseinandersetzten. Speziell möchte ich die Riot-Grrrl-Bewegung der 1990er Jahre thematisieren.

Ich möchte darlegen, inwieweit diese Bewegung Einfluss auf die Feminisierung der Rockmusik genommen hat und inwiefern sie dabei mit dem klassischen Feminismus im Konflikt stand. Außerdem möchte ich Gemeinsamkeiten aufzeigen.

Des Weiteren ist zu klären, welche Veränderungen die Riot-Grrrl-Bewegung hervorgerufen hat und wie sich diese auf die kulturelle Rolle der Frau, speziell im Rockbusiness, ausgewirkt haben. Hierbei stellt sich mir die Frage, ob die äußere Wirkung der Riot Grrrls mit ihren Werten und Zielen zu vereinbaren ist. Im Zuge dessen möchte ich klären, ob es hilfreich ist, sich bewusst sexualisiert darzustellen, wenn der Objektstatus der Frau eigentlich bekämpft werden soll. Schlussendlich möchte ich aufdecken, ob Ironie und Zynismus effektive Taktiken zur Bekämpfung von Ungerechtigkeiten in der Gesellschaft sind und ob sich die Riot Grrrls der möglichen Falschinterpretation und deren Folgen bewusst sind.

Zunächst möchte ich die Riot-Grrrl-Bewegung jedoch in den historischen Kontext der feministischen Bewegungen einordnen.