A young woman in a sleeveless t-shirt with a wild, 1990s-grunge pony tail bangs her head. She jumps up and down on stage to the loud guitar and equally loud screams from the crowd. This is a video of a performance by Bikini Kill, a band that pioneered the riot grrrl movement. The video played at University of Michigan’s Lane Hall on Monday afternoon as an introduction to Sara Marcus’s lecture on riot grrrl and feminism.
Riot grrrl, a feminist punk rock movement of the 1990s, is considered by many to be the start of third-wave feminism. Sara Marcus, a Brooklyn based writer and musician, came to the University of Michigan on Monday to discuss her new book Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution. The book chronicles her experiences with riot grrrl and provides an in-depth analysis of the movement.
Listen to Marcus talk about her book and her experiences with riot grrrl:
Sara Marcus, author of "Girls to the Front", speaks at Lane Hall about riot grrrl and third-wave feminism.
“I saw the story [of riot grrrl] being told in these really particular, narrow ways that … left out a lot of what had been most important to me. I definitely wanted my voice and my take to be in the mix,” Marcus said. She wants to avoid looking at riot grrrl through only one lens, instead examining it as a cultural movement with thorough discussion and analysis.
Marcus discovered riot grrrl through an article in Newsweek when she was 15. “It was just like, a weird description of everything that I had been absolutely wanting and hadn’t even known how to ask for or look for,” she said. Through riot grrrl, Marcus found a strong community of “powerful, feminist girls who were … just putting who they were out on the table and being unashamed of that, and counting it as a strength and making creative work out of it,” she said. In addition to the tightly knit communities of riot grrrl, the movement also played host to several creative outlets, ranging from music to art to the publication of fan made magazines, or “zines”.
The “do-it-yourself” culture of riot grrrl was a large part of the appeal of the movement, said Marcus. “There was an expectation that if you were in the audience, that didn’t mean that all you were was an audience member. It was expected that you were also doing something to create the scene. Maybe you played music, or maybe you set up shows, or maybe you took photographs, or maybe you had a zine and you wrote about things, or maybe you put on art shows,” she said. “Riot grrrl was basically about taking the ethos of D.I.Y. – do it yourself – and saying, hey, this ethos – create your own culture, make your own community – could be really helpful … we could mobilize that for explicitly feminist purposes … I think that ethos is super powerful and definitely accounts for a lot of the appeal of riot grrrl.”
Although the riot grrrl movement is technically over, Marcus still draws parallels between the political atmosphere that spurred riot grrrl and current politics. There is no exact 2011 version of the 1990s punk rock movement, but Marcus thinks a similar cultural wave is definitely desirable. “Certainly there’s not like, an exact replica or analog of riot grrrl right now, but I think that there’s a lot of work that’s being done, and there’s also a lot of room for people to insert their own ideas into the mix, and it really should happen.”
