Riot Grrrl Movement

During the time our world was faced with a lot of social movements which are boosting it to be
into a continuous change. For example, the vision of Mari Diani, an Italian expert in social
movements, offer to us the next definition based on three criteria: "a network of informal
interactions between a plurality of individuals, groups, and/or organizations, engaged in a
political or cultural conflict, on the basis of shared collective identity".
Modern movements often utilize technology and the internet to mobilize people globally, but
what was the most usual way to create a social movement in the past, the 90s, for example?
While Eastern Europe was facing with movements for independence, in the United States took
ascension social movements like Universal Health Care Movement or Riot Grrrl movement.
Let's focus on the Riot Grrrl movement, how it start and what was the main goal of this Social
Movement? In the 90s punk rock was dominated by male bands like Nirvana which was one of
the most famous at that time. In that conjuncture occur the possibility for the female to affirm
their feminist wishes. From a simple meeting about sexism in the local punk scenes of the US,
was born music, feminist and political movement which had expanded to at least 26 other
countries. According to Michael Warner's article about Publics and Counterpublics Riot Grrrl
created an intimate counter-public that is, a space where girls established a feminist community
through shared texts – but one that sometimes worked against its own intentions: boundaries
erected for safety sometimes led to exclusion along lines of race, class, or gender identity.
Riot Grrrl, a 1990s feminist movement directed at young women and teenage girls, grew out of
punk subculture and adopted punk’s DIY modes of expression to encourage girls to address their
shared oppression. By forming bands, writing zines, and meeting in all-girl groups to share
experiences, riot grrrls sought to appropriate and radicalize the tropes of girldom in the service of
a girl revolution. Originating in Olympia, Washington, and Washington, DC, Riot Grrrl started
small, but owing to (largely unwanted) media attention, it grew to influence a generation of teen
girls and North American culture at large. The Riot Grrrl Collection at New York University’s
Fales Library & Special Collections documents the creation of early Riot Grrrl zines, music, and
activism, primarily through the personal papers of those involved in the movement. Because Riot
Grrrl was both a political and cultural movement, its output was diverse; the individual
collections comprise correspondence, artwork, journals and notebooks, audio and video
recordings, photographs, clippings, and flyers, as well as source materials related to the creation
of artworks, writings, fanzines, bands, performances, and events. Although the collection is not a
zine collection, zines currently make up approximately half of the paper holdings. (ELIZABETH
K. KEENAN and LISA DARMS)
As a subculture, the Riot Grrrl movement was blatantly political in its message and resistant to
the heteronormative and patriarchal standards maintained by the dominant culture (Huber, 2010).
In an effort to give nonconforming women a voice in society, Riot Grrrls vocally opposed power
structures that perpetuated limiting ideals of heterosexuality and traditional gender roles.
Kathleen Hanna, the front woman of the Riot Grrrl band Bikini Kill, explicitly defined the
mindsets and characteristics of a Riot Grrrl in her “Riot Grrrl Manifesto,” published in 1991 in
Bikini Kill Zine, one of the short, homemade publications used to promote Riot Grrrl ideology.
Hanna pitted Riot Grrrls against dominant American culture: “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.” Hanna further described Riot Grrrls as
“seek to create revolution in their own lives every single day by envisioning and creating
alternatives to the bullshit christian capitalist way of doing things.” Through their actions and
group identity, Riot Grrrls worked against “racism, able-bodieism, ageism, speciesism, classism,
thinism, sexism, anti-semitism and heterosexism” (Lindsay Wright, 2015).
German philosopher Jürgen Habermas defined the public sphere as "made up of private people
gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state" (  Soules,
Marshall. "Jürgen Habermas and the Public Sphere). Riot Grrrl manifestos were instrumental in
promulgating a form of radical feminism that demonstrates the enduring nature of feminist
radicalism. While a great deal of important work has been written on the movement, little
attention has been paid to how these manifestos developed a distinctive political language and
culture. By foregrounding the volatility of feminine youth and the historical erasure of the girl
subject as a radical political agent, Riot Grrrl manifestos redefined the gendered (and ageist)
exclusionary practices of the radical public sphere, promoting unified forms of resistance, often
symbolised as a personal, albeit contagious, awakening to the realities of harassment, repression,
violence and ridicule. This kind of molecular, contingent politics worked to exploit the
contradictions inherent in young women's lives rather than to overcome the differences that had
splintered more congealed formations of feminist politics. In rejecting the traditional claims of
the radical public sphere, Riot Grrl manifestos insist on a vernacular feminism that strategically
emphasises micropolitical action over grand narratives of resistance and revolution. While these
manifestos draw on aspects of second-wave radical feminism and older forms of avant-garde
culture, they push the genre of the manifesto into new territory by stressing everyday forms of
resistance, defining their imagined consistency as porous and reactive rather than exclusive or
over-determined. (Natalya Lusty, 2017).
Media-savvy grrrls hooked up through self-published fanzines and word-of-mouth. Their lyrics
and other writing centered on themes of sexual abuse, oppression, and body image. They
attended and organized conventions and fundraisers around feminist issues. They adopted
slogans like "Revolution Girl Style Now" and "Stop the J-Word Jealousy from Killing Girl
Love" (Klein). They took the original punk do-it-yourself approach to music-making,
encouraging female peers to pick up instruments and form bands. They were overwhelmingly
white, mostly middle class, many were college-educated, and a large proportion identified as
queer. Membership of Riot Grrrl was relatively small when compared to that of other
subcultures, such as punk or hip hop. According to the pop-cult website alt. culture, Riot Grrrl
numbers were "grossly over-inflated by a media titillated by the notion of a teenage girl army"
("rock women"). One must consider the context from which a subculture springs, as well as the
context within which it is received by the mainstream, in order to avoid overstating its
innovation tendency of early subculture theorists. As stated, Riot Grrrls was a musical and
political subculture, born of punk rock and feminism. Riot grrrls were certainly not the first
women in punk, nor were they the first feminists to make political music. But, as a group, they
were the first to deliberately and explicitly fuse the two realms with such an aggressive, in-your-
face style. A Bikini Kill performance, for example, was described as "not just a vague, fuck-
society punk gesture, but a focused critique of the scene itself'. Several writers have noted a
mid-'80s shift within punk toward a hardcore, misogynist scene that many females found hostile
and unwelcoming (Cateforis and Humphreys; Gottlieb and Wald; Klein; Wald). Many riot grrrls
were students or graduates of college Women's Studies programs, as well as being "daughters of
seventies women's libbers" feminist discourse and political action was familiar. In terms of the
context within which Riot Grrrl was received--or, why the media would be "titillated by the
notion of a teenage girl army' I believe it is significant that rap music was gaining widespread
popularity in the late 1980s; it is possible that angry white women seemed positively charming to
the media compared to angry black men. Antagonism between RG and mainstream media is well
documented. The most popular version of events is that distorted or dismissive press coverage of
Riot Grrrl led the girls to establish a nationwide media blackout in 1992-93. After all, according
to Kathleen Hanna, ''we weren't doing what we did to gain fame, we were just trying to hook up
with other freaks''. However, neither RG nor the media were homogenous groups and, despite
the call for a media blackout, there was no monolithic RG resistance to co-optation. For one
thing, some riot grrrls didn't mind talking to the mainstream press, and did so others continued to
do interviews with underground publications like Punk Planet and off our backs. The
"alternative," but-still-mainstream teen magazine promoted Riot Grrrl to some three million
readers, demonstrating that "the media, beyond its function to control and contain this
phenomenon, may also have helped to perpetuate it" (Gottlieb and Wald). In addition, for a
political movement that wanted to reach out to alienated girls, the media-blackout strategy closed
RG off to girls in smaller centers and risked defining RG as an exclusive, insular movement.
Indeed, Gottlieb and Wald advise that: ''If Riot Grrrl wants to raise feminist consciousness on a
large scale, then it will have to negotiate a relation to the mainstream that does not merely reify
the opposition between mainstream and subculture.''
Although this dilemma to remain "authentic" but risk elitism, or to reach a wider audience but
to "sell out" exists in all subcultures, I believe it was especially prevalent for RG because of the
movement's foundation in both punk rock and feminism. Depending on one's perspective, each
can be seen to limit Riot Grrrl’s ability to resolve the dilemma. On the one hand, while feminist
praxis ideally involves consciousness-raising and the fostering of women's diverse voices, punk
tends to be an insular scene with a high - degree of subcultural capital and disdain for outsiders
and commercial success; on the other hand, while punk promotes a strong ethic that opens itself
to amateurs, feminism traditionally has been a vehicle primarily for educated, middle-class,
white women. Discussion of this dilemma implies that there was a real choice to be made, that
the scene in question could take or leave the path to success. However, there is the distinct
possibility that Riot Grrrl music was ultimately unsellable: the combination of punk's abrasive
sound and low production quality with the grrrls' frank feminist lyrics may not have been as
attractive to the media as the grrrls themselves. Judging by the fact that the media did not
champion Riot Grrrl music, it seems the media felt riot grrrls were better seen and not heard. -
As one grrrl wrote in her zine, "the media didn't give a shit about any of the things any of the
girls were saying, they just wanted to sell their paper with pictures of angry grrrls and riot grrrl
fashion". Ultimately, media attention turned to other female rockers-women whose anger was
more palatable, like Alanis Morrisette and Liz Phair. Although Riot Grrrl chapters still exist
around North America and continue to start up worldwide, many of these grrrls "have no
tangible connection with the women from the beginning" and the original musicians have moved
on to new projects (Cateforis and Humphreys).
Despite generalizations made for the purposes of this paper, Riot Grrrl was not a homogenous
entity-nor was it self-contained. I suspect that many self-declared grrrls also reached beyond this
movement in their tastes and style, and it would be worthwhile to find out where Riot Grrrl
intersected with other subcultures and the mainstream. As well, it would be interesting to
compare the path of Riot Grrrl bands with that of women who attained commercial success in the
mainstream music industry. After all, Riot Grrrl’s inception-that is, pre-Jagged Little Pill, Lilith
Fair, and the Spice Girlspreceded the amalgam of "women in rock that peaked at the end of the
1990s. In particular, comparisons with the more visible major-label angry women may determine
whether "selling out" necessarily requires that women compromise a feminist stance.” (Alison
Jacques, 2001) Through this paper, I tried to show the contradiction if it can be true that Riot
Grrrl remains an authentic and the biggest impetus for thousands of girls around the world.
Referrences
 Diani, Mario (1992). "The concept of social movement". The Sociological Review. 
 Elizabeth K. Keenan and Lisa Darms, Safe Space: The Riot Grrrl Collection
 Lindsay Wright,2015. Do-It-Yourself Girl Power: An Examination of the Riot Grrrl
Subculture
 Natalya Lusty, 2017, December 18. Riot Grrrl Manifestos and Radical Vernacular Feminism
 Cateforis, Theo, and Elena Humphreys, 1997. "ConstructingCommunities and Identities:
Riot Grrrl New York City’’.
 Alison Jacques, 2001. You can run but you can't hide: The incorporation of riot grrrl  into
mainstream culture.
 Klein, Melissa, 1997. "Duality and Redefinition: Young Feminism and the Alternative Music
Community."
 Gottlieb Joanne, and Gayle Wald, 1993. "Smells LikeTeenSpirit: Riot Grrrls.”