Feminism in Music

Feminism in Music

RIOT GRRRL

Sloan Chase

"Girlhood is not a universal component of female experience; rather, the term implies very specific practices and discourses about female sexuality, women's cultural-political agency, and women's social location." -Gaye Wald

The end of the 80s brought the start of a new music genre: grunge, or as the women in Olympia called
it, "cock rock." They viewed the scene as a sort of boys club, with many of them feeling unsafe and unwelcomed at shows. One of these women was Portland native Kathleen Hanna. After moving to Olympia, she opened a small music venue called Reko Muse, to serve as a place for small traveling bands to perform, since there wasn't any other place in the area. Unfortunately, this soon revealed how the punk rock scene truly was. "I did everything from painting the floor to cleaning the grease off the floor to wiping their stupid cock-rock graffiti off the wall after they left," she said, "and picking up their cigarette butts, and spending my own long-distance money to book their dumb bands into our own club, and then having them yell at me because there's not enough orange juice backstage." She was slowly getting tired of it all. She had loved music all her life, and being exposed to this line of rotating bands from hell was something that offended her. On top of managing the venue, Kathleen had an internship at a domestic violence shelter where she did crisis counseling along with presentations at high schools about rape and sexual assault. She would counsel girls about their past trauma, and started to talk to them after shows. She would listen to endless stories about abusive boyfriends and fathers, hear countless stories on the news about women being killed, attacked, and raped. After reading a Time article about women who didn't consider themselves feminists, Kathleen came to the conclusion that feminism could save people's lives. Around the same time Kathleen Hanna made this revelation, Alison Wolfe and Molly Neuman were working on one of the first Riot Grrrl zines. Zines were an important part of Riot Grrrl, as they were a way for girls to express themselves and their anger towards this music scene, or even just the world in general. As Kathleen Hanna would write in her Riot Grrrl manifesto, "BECAUSE I believe with my whoelheartbodymind that girls constitute a revolutionary soul force that can, and change the world for real." Soon enough, Kathleen went on to form her band Bikini Kill, while Alison and Molly formed their band Bratmobile. They would put a lot of focus on femininity and girlhood as a way to break stereotypes against women in the music industry. At their shows, Katheleen would write phrases on her body such as "slut" or "whore," in order to take away their power. If men at their shows saw her dancing around in her underwear, and see exactly what they're thinking written on her, all the power goes. She's reclaiming the word, saying, so I'm a slut? So what?"

"Such an emphasis on girliness has enabled women performers to preempt the sexually objectifying gaze of corporate rock culture, which tends to market women's sexual desirability at the expense of promoting their music or their legitimacy as artists," (Wald). Although not part of the Riot Grrrl movement herself, Gwen Stefani from No Doubt was breaking barriers in a similar way. Their song "I'm Just a Girl" was a the top of the charts in 1995, creating almost the same effect that Bikini Kill and Bratmobile were trying to achieve. "The strategy of approaching girlhood, like the word girl itself, signifies ambiguously: as a mode of culturally voiced resistance to patriarchal femininity; as a token of a sort of 'gestural feminism' that is complicit with the trivialization, marginalization, and eroticization of women within rock music cultures," (Wald). By celebrating and reclaiming girlhood, these bands were able to break long standing narratives within the traditionally male rock cultures. As Tobi Vail of Bikini Kill wrote in her zine Jigsaw, "Of course if there was ever a good girl band... and they were a BAND... in the top 40 of course it would be likely to get a bad name... because girls +guitars is equal to sex +power."

The Riot Grrrl movement started to falter in the late 90s, as many women felt that mainstream media had entirely misinterpreted their message. Even though they were looking for equality - not superiority. USA today had published an article about the movement saying, "Better watch out boys. From hundreds of once pink, frilly bedrooms, comes the young feminist revolution. And it's not pretty. But it doesn't wanna be. So there!" Riot Grrrls weren't being taken seriously. They were seen as "man haters," teen gangsters, and self-absorbed. Corin Tucker of Heavens to Betsy and Sleater-Kinney said, "I think it was deliberate that we were made to look like we were just ridiculous girls parading around in our underwear. They refused to do serious interviews with us, they misprinted what we had to say, they would take our articles, and our fanzines, and our essays and take them out of context. We wrote a lot about sexual abuse and sexual assault for teenagers and young women. I think those are really important concepts that the media never addressed." Another way the movement failed was not being able to discuss feminism through an intersectional lens. Although there were Riot Grrrls of color in places such as California and New York, they didn't get as much focus or attention as their white counterparts. Riot Grrrl as we knew it isn't around today, but there are still women who continue to spread their message through zines and music. Many women of color sell their own zines on site such as Etsy. Though small, Riot Grrrl is still alive, as there is still a lot to be changed, and there is still a lot to fight for.