Riot Grrrl Manifestos and Radical Vernacular Feminism

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that 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.

Acknowledgement

The author thanks the two anonymous reviewers who offered thoughtful suggestions for the revision of this article. The research for this essay was conducted largely at the Riot Grrrl archive at Fales Library, NYU. Her sincere thanks to Lisa Darms and the Fales archivists for their support with archival material. Her thanks to individual zine editors and authors for permission to reproduce material from Riot Grrrl zines.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Natalya Lusty is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2018–2022). She is the author of Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Ashgate, 2007), Dreams: A Cultural History (Routledge, 2013), with Helen Groth, and the co-edited collection Modernism and Masculinity (Cambridge University Press, 2014). She has just completed an edited collection with Donna West Brett, Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images (Routledge, 2018) and is working on a book on Feminist Manifestos and Political Modernity.

Notes

1 Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal avowedly addresses a non-scholarly audience, seeking to decouple the potentially transgressive nature of Lady Gaga's performances from her otherwise ‘clichéd political positions’.

2 See Catherine Driscoll's (1999) essay, ‘Girl Culture, Revenge and Global Capitalism: Cybergirls, Riot Grrls, Spice girls’ for a discussion of the dynamics of conformity and resistance in relation to ‘girl culture’ as a popular cultural form.

3 Mary Ann Caws’ early anthology, Manifesto: A Century of Isms, made available to readers for the first time a wide selection of twentieth century manifestos penned by artists and art movements. Janet Lyon's (2009) illuminating study, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern provides an important theorisation of the manifesto as a distinctive genre of political modernity and aesthetic modernism, ranging from the early manifestos of the Diggers and Levellers and key modernist manifestos to the feminist manifestos of Mina Loy, Valerie Solanas, Monique Wittig and Donna Haraway. Other important contributions include Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos and the Avant-Gardes and Laura Winkiel, Modernism, Race and Manifestos.

4 See Janet Lyon's illuminating study of the manifesto as both an important political genre and a defining form of aesthetic modernity.

5 Although many of the girls and women who participated in this grassroots feminist movement would never have perhaps identified directly as ‘riot grrrls’, the term has become a useful catch-all for a kind of grass-roots form of feminism among girls and women in this period who participated in the culture of zines and/or the independent music scene as well as riot grrrl chapters.

6 Mary Celeste Kearney (2006) has also argued that Riot Grrrls’ connection to the punk music scene has been privileged in academic analyses of the movement. See Girls Make Media, 52

7 Marion Leonard has usefully analysed the terminologies used to define the broad practices and mediated communities of the Riot Grrrl movement: labelled variously as a ‘a collective’, ‘a scene’, ‘an underground group of punkettes’, ‘a new movement’; ‘a network’. See ‘Rebel Girl, You are the Queen of My World’, 231–232. Throughout I have adopted the term ‘movement’ to describe the heterogeneous practices of Riot Grrrl, acknowledging its pervasive impact across feminist and broader cultural domains such as the underground music scene and new media communities.

8 Foucault's disenchantment with traditional Marxist politics, his theorisation of power and his attention to the history and politics of sexuality were influential in the emergence of queer theory as well as various activist groups such as ACT UP and Queer Nation.

9 Judith Butler's Preface to the second edition of Gender Trouble records the usefulness of her work for activist groups such as Queer Nation and ACT UP that emerged at the same time as the Riot Grrrl movement.

10 Aileeen Wuornos was the first woman to be tried as a ‘serial killer’ for the murder of seven men. Although Wuornos had claimed that her ‘victims’ had attempted to rape or assault her whilst she was engaged in sex work, she was sentenced to death by lethal injection in 2002.

11 Thorn was banned when it was sent to the queer zine conference, Spew, which was held in Toronto in 1993.