It’s the early 1990’s, and anger rings in the hearts and ears of girls all over the world. This is feminism — unapologetic womanhood. This is a revolution. This is riot grrrl.
From the ashes of punk, a new movement began to rise — one which would bring forward voices which had, until then, been silenced. The goal of the riot grrrl revolution was to give women a place in a male-dominated world. “BECAUSE we are angry at a society that tells us Girl = Dumb, Girl = Bad, Girl = Weak,” as argued in the Riot Grrrl Manifesto.
The outcome was a scene which, although trailblazing in its demand for women’s rights, failed to acknowledge the intersectionality of people’s experiences, a flaw which would contribute to its eventual fall later that decade and the taboo surrounding it today.
The movement’s origin is considered to be a meeting held in Olympia, Washington, by a group of women who wanted to address sexism in the early 1990’s punk scene. Even in a movement such as punk which focused on deconstructing authority, a social hierarchy existed. Put simply, riot grrrl was a counter to counter-culture.
While sexism has been a motivator for change for ages, riot grrrls’ musical inspirations were original. Bands like The Slits, The Raincoats and X-Ray Specs, and artists such as Poly Styrene, Siouxsie Sioux, Kim Gordon and Joan Jett paved the way for riot grrrl musicians to begin experimenting.
“Kim (Gordon) made me feel accepted in a way I hadn’t before. F***ing Kim Gordon thought I was on the right track, haters be damned. It made the bullshit easier to take, knowing she was in my corner,” said Kathleen Hanna in a 2013 Elle Magazine article. Tobi Vail wrote in the third edition of her zine “Jigsaw,” “I heard Patti Smith … and it was just voice and guitar and to know that she is human and that (genius) is possible, to be so strong, so powerful, so defiant(,) these moments run deep”
Apart from music, zines were another large component of riot grrrl. The declarative booklets were often hand-made, typed, printed with a Xerox machine and could contain anything from argumentative essays and poetry, to personal anecdotes and collages. This simple construction allowed for the literature to be easily accessible — either for a low price or none at all — serving as a way to reduce elitist and financial barriers between the writers and their audience.
Many zines from the 90’s also included interviews, reviews and work sent in from readers. They served as an outlet for women to speak their mind and preach about equity and uplifting the silenced. As one fan-submitted letter from the zine “Girl Germs” stated, “I just feel that we need to support people who have been marginalized … I’m trying to bring those voices into the center.”
Members of many well-known riot grrrl bands wrote zines of their own — Hanna, Kathi Wilcox and Vail are notably members of the group which shared names with their publication “Bikini Kill;” Molly Neuman and Allison Wolfe, at the time, students at University of Oregon, co-wrote “Girl Germs,” and would later go on to form Bratmobile. These zines, along with Vail’s “Jigsaw,” played major roles in instigating the riot grrrl movement.
Even the term ‘riot grrrl’ came from zines: It was a combination of Jen Smith’s suggested ‘girl riot’ and Vail’s ‘angry grrrl scene’ expression.
However, the movement was far from perfect. It was a culture which promoted blatantly transphobic styles of feminism — excluding people from a community whose purpose was supposedly inclusion. Events such as the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which allowed admission solely to “womyn-born-womyn,” contributed to the rampant discrimination.
It is a fact that neither rock music nor the women’s rights movement would exist or be where they are today without the work of Black people. Despite this, documentation of the riot grrrl movement is almost always whitewashed. Only one piece from New York University Library’s expansive Riot Grrrl collection was created by a Black woman — an issue of the zine “GUNK” by Ramdasha Bikceem.
As the experiences of Black women were not represented by the riot grrrl movement, Tamar-kali Brown, Maya Glick, Simi Stone and Honeychild Coleman created a scene of their own in 1997. These came to be known as the sista grrrl riots, and would recur throughout the year. Members and allies of the movement refer to themselves as ‘sista grrrls’ or ‘sista grrrl allies,’ respectively.
Though it is still imperfect, today’s riot grrrl scene has striven to improve its flaws. This can be observed in groups like The Linda Lindas, an “Half Asian and half Latinx” band whose members’ ages range from 13-19; Maria Antoineta y Las Decapitadas, a Latina four-person band from Mexico City, Mexico, whose songs cover topics from love to abortion rights (“Saca tu rosario de mis ovarios,” they write in one); Big Joanie, a two-woman Black feminist punk band formed through an online post; and Pussy Riot, an art collective of multiple anonymous Russian individuals, many of whom have been imprisoned for their protests.
Riot grrrl has even gained popularity amongst students at Grant High School. Their feelings about it are mixed, however, as they must grapple with the movement’s troubled past.
Some students praise the movement for the new voices and music scene it brought forward; one student shared that riot grrrl “not only created some killer music but was an opportunity to centralize punk music around the struggles of women and the queer community.”
While acknowledging its exclusion of other minorities, others emphasize the movement’s importance to the fight for women’s rights and its capacity for future growth. “While riot grrrl feminism’s origins are somewhat out of date with current politics, they helped create the conversations and spaces that allowed progressivism to reach the place it is today,” explains another student. “Modern riot grrrl movements that are more trans-inclusive, expansive and welcoming allow for community and conversation that can be productive.”
Some believe the movement has been condensed into a style or aesthetic, similar to the punk movement, through social media platforms. This simplification, for some, tarnishes the music’s meaning. One Grant alum says, “The music has now been co-opted by annoying chronically-online teenagers … making it all the more difficult to enjoy.”
Vail had similar worries, writing in 1991 that trends are “completely unimportant and even sort of repulsive to me … ‘it’s not the sound of the revolution.’” This theme would also be echoed in one line of the Riot Grrrl Manifesto, “BECAUSE we hate capitalism in all its forms and see our main goal as sharing information and staying alive, instead of making profits of being cool according to traditional standards.”
Riot grrrl continues to live and grow through women and queer people to this day. Why? Because grrrls built off the movement’s flawed past to forge a radical, more accepting scene that works to empower all. Or, according to Hanna, because “girls constitute a revolutionary soul force that can, and will change the world for real.”
