Lisa Darms - The Riot Grrrl Collection

PUBLISHED IN 2013 BY THE FEMINIST PRESS
AT THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
THE GRADUATE CENTER
365 FIFTH AVENUE, SUITE 5406
NEW YORK, NY 10016 FEMINISTPRESS.ORG Introducing the Riot Grrrl Collection copyright 2013 by Lisa Darms
My Riot Grrrl copyright 2013 by Johanna Fateman
Selection and compilation copyright 2013 by Lisa Darms ISBN: 978-1-5586-1822-0 Publication of this book was supported in part by a generous donation from the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University Individual copyrights retained by contributors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. First printing Cover and text design by Herb Thornby Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request table of contents Riot Grrrl is because I believe with my wholeheartmindbody that girls constitute a revolutionary soul force that can, and will, change the world for real. Bikini Kill 2 Riot grrrl was the collective brainstorm of a small group of smart, angry women that eventually became a national news story and influenced an entire generation of girls. Emerging from the punk scenes in Olympia, Washington, and Washington, DC, during the early 90s, riot grrrl called for the liberation of young women by taking control of the means of subcultural production.

In pointed contrast to mainstreamand undergroundculture, it sought to unify girls, calling out culturally ingrained jealousy and competitiveness between women while also recognizing and accepting individual girls differences. The movement aimed to revivify feminism, foregrounding sexual and psychic violence against women, while supporting young womens sexual expression and right to pleasure. A direct response to the dominance of straight white men in the punk scene, riot grrrl encouraged women to play instruments and start bands, write and distribute zines, and share experiences in the safe all-girl spaces of riot grrrl meetings. When I moved to Olympia to go to college in 1989, I didnt know that a radical punk girl revolution was just starting to germinate there. I went to punk shows, took photographs that sought to reclaim the words girl and slut in self-portraits featuring dolls and garter belts, read pro-sex feminist books, wrote essays positing a female appropriation of the male gaze, and developed fierce life-changing friendships with their women. But I never went to a riot grrrl meeting or called myself one.

My idea of punk was TOUGHER than that, I thought; but perhaps my reluctance to directly participate in the movement was nothing more than the kind of insecurity that riot grrrl was created to combat. Now, I often say that riot grrrl came too late for me, and perhaps that is part of the reason why I created an archival collection to preserve its history. Back when I went to my first punk show around age thirteen, at the O.A.P. Hall in my hometown of Victoria, Canada, I felt immediately comfortable in an audience made up of self-identified freaks and outcasts. Being punk in early 80s Victoria (a town proud to be a British colony well past the age of Empire) made you somewhat of a pariah. However, unlike many kids, my all-encompassing identification with punk was less a rupture with my past than it was a continuation of a kind of antiestablishment outsiderism Id learned from my feminist, expatriate American, draft-dodging family.

By the time I left for Olympia though, my experience of my hometown scene felt more like a replica of culture-at-large; a violent, self-destructive, and misogynist subculture where boys skated and played in bands, while girls watched boys skate and play in bands. I lived in Olympia off and on until 2001, but it never occurred to me during that time that riot grrrl would become so historically important to so man people. As I studied to become an archivist in he mid-200s at NYU, I realized that historical importance is partially a result of whats saved and preserved by institutions. It was with this sense of potential erasure in mind that I started the Riot Grrrl Collection at NYUs Fales Library and Special Collections in 2009, shortly after becoming the senior archivist there. That previous fall, around the time I was interviewing for the job, I had invited my old friends Kathleen Hanna and Johanna Fateman to a Fales panel about donating personal archives to institutions. Afterward, we fantasized about a riot grrrl archivean idea especially appealing to Kathleen, whod been a key figure in the movement, and had carefully saved her zines, artwork, lyrics, and videotapes in a filing cabinet for years.

Because Id just finished working on the David Wojnarowicz Papers in Faless Downtown Collection, and saw how radical, ephemeral materials could be preserved in a major research institution, I could envision a place for riot grrrl there too. The Downtown Collection was started by the Fales director, Marvin Taylor, in 1994 and documents New Yorks downtown art, performance, music, and literary scenes from the late 60s to the early 90s, with a focus on the 70s and 80s. It includes the personal papers of cross-genre figures like Wojnarowicz, Richard Hell, and Martha Wilson; the archives of collectives like A.I.R. (the first artist-run gallery for women in the United States) and the Guerrilla Girls; and many other collections documenting AIDS activism, experimental theater and dance, punk, and downtown art. When I brought the idea of a riot grrrl collection to Taylor, he immediately recognized the affinities between the downtown scene and the riot grrrl movement. And because Fales had long been preserving contemporary materials like flyers, zines, and audiovisual material, Taylor understood the archival value of the documents that came out of riot grrrl.

With Kathleens help, I began to contact people who had been active in the movements early days to let them know about the project and to ask for donations. The Fales Riot Grrrl Collection aims to document the movement from about 1989 to 1996. While this book primarily reproduces flyers and zines, the Riot Grrrl Collection is made up of mostly unique, archival material in over ten discrete collections. Each one represents a donors archive (or, in archives terminology, their personal papers) of what they kept from that period, documenting the process of zine-making, being in bands, and activism, as well as the finished products of these activities. It includes zines, flyers, and t-shirts, the original artwork that was used to make these items, such as cut-and-paste zine masters; and private letters, notebooks, draft lyrics, photographs, videotapes of performanceseven a skateboard. The Riot Grrrl Collection currently consists of donations from Kathleen and Johanna, as well as others involved with the movement: Becca Albee, Ramdasha Bikceem, Tammy Rae Carland, Zan Gibbs, Milly Itzhak, Kelly Marie Martin, Molly Neuman, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Lucy Thane, and Matt Wobensmith.

While not all are necessarily riot grrrls, they all had something to contribute to documenting its history. And it is a history thats proven to be extremely popular: although the collection is barely three years old, and makes up less that 1 percent of Faless physical holdings, it already accounts for 15 percent of our research use, and is further accessed by hundreds of students in classes that the Fales staff teaches on riot grrrl, feminism, queer activism, and zine culture. This book aspires to get some of the collectionin facsimile, and without interpretationto an even wider audience. It isnt intended as a coffee-table book, despite the fact that many of the documents are beautiful in their own right. Our goal is to make the content of these smart, radical texts more broadly available, because so much coverage of riot grrrl has been focused on its image instead of its message. Everything here was selected from Faless holdings, and is arranged in (very rough) chronological order.