Feeling Collective: The Queer Politics of Affect in the Riot Grrrl Movement

Abstract

The Riot Grrrls were an underground, decentralized movement made up of young people who worked to channel feminist and queer politics through mediums of cultural production. To turn toward the affective and emotional dimensions of Riot Grrrl, I offer an analysis of the zine I ♥ Amy Carter. Focusing specifically on expressions of intimacy, I trace the contours of queer modes of being across the Riot Grrrl movement as a political force for imagining new relationalities. Mobilizing queerness as a possibility within their interpersonal relations, the Riot Grrrls embodied queer intimacies alongside a queering of intimacy through what I broadly identify as a “grrrl crush,” or an overlap and oscillation between friendship, admiration, and desire. As a specific articulation of queer intimacy, the grrrl crush offers a mode of belonging that is decidedly political, enabling greater theorizations of queer and feminist solidarity.

Keywords:

• Affect
• feminism
• intimacy
• queer
• Riot Grrrl
• zines

Notes

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Women’s Studies in Communication editor Kristen Hoerl, as well as Erin J. Rand, Rachel Hall, Dana Cloud, Gwendolyn D. Pough, Tasha Dubriwny, and R. L. Stephens for their feedback on earlier versions of this article. The author would also like to thank the Organization for Research on Women and Communication for funding the archival research for this article, as well as the archivists at New York University’s Fales Library and Special Collections. This article is derived from portions of the author’s master’s thesis, defended at Syracuse University in 2016; a portion of this project was presented at the National Communication Association Convention in 2016.

Notes

1 DIY refers to “do it yourself,” a mode of production associated initially with punk. DIY is premised on a political ethos of taking ownership of the production and circulation of a cultural product rather than relying on a large entity such as a corporation. DIY punk carries particular aesthetic markers as well, exemplified in the “cut-and-paste” markers of a zine, as well as in the “homemade” sound of punk music.

2 Similar to Riot Grrrl in that it was a politicized offshoot of punk organized around cultural production, the Queercore scene began in the early 1980s and distinguished itself by organizing around sexual identity, homophobia, and transphobia. Many understood Queercore as a grassroots political alternative to the “mainstream” gay and lesbian politics championed by organizations like the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF).

3 In conversation with Michael Warner’s concept of “strangerhood” is literature on counterpublics and enclaves, spheres that exist as explicit alternatives to wider publics. I opted to use Warner’s concept of “strangerhood” to explicate the relationship between materiality, affect, and intimacy, as counterpublic literature is more focused on instrumentality, which is not my focus here. While enclaves are defined as spaces of retreat, this conceptualization still operates within the logic of instrumentality as the enclave is defined in contrast to what counts as public or counterpublic. Warner’s concept of strangerhood allows me to theorize how the circulation of materials connects individuals through the cultivation of intimacy manifest as a particular kind of queer and feminist solidarity, without limiting this to an instrumental understanding of solidarity and political relationality. For more on counterpublics and enclaves, see Asen and Brouwer; Asen; and Fraser.