Redefining a Movement: The Riot Grrrl Collection at Fales Library

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3 / Redefining a Movement: The Riot Grrrl  

Collection at Fales Library  

and Special Collections

The Riot Grrrl Collection is about the future—thinking ahead to 

the status of materials in one hundred years.

—lisa darms, senior archivist,  

Fales Library and Special Collections

In the early 1990s  , most people in North America, including most 

feminists, had never heard the term “Riot Grrrl.” By 1993, Riot 

Grrrl was synonymous with a style and politic signifying a new 

feminism—a feminism for the “video-age generation . . . sexy, 

assertive and loud.”

1

 This is the story told by Sara Marcus in 

Girls to the Front. Like most people, Marcus discovered Riot 

Grrrl in the November 23, 1992,  issue of Newsweek. As Marcus 

emphasizes in the history of Riot Grrrl she would publish nearly 

two decades later, for the young women connected to the Riot 

Grrrl scene in Olympia, the autumn of 1992 had been marked by 

a series of attempts to thwart the mainstream media’s coopta-

tion of their growing movement. The Newsweek article was “a 

culmination of the madness that had been going on all fall. The 

big difference was that the girls had managed to beat back all the 

previous incursions, but this time the media got its story.”

2

 The 

consequences of the Newsweek  article and subsequent main-

stream media profiles on Riot Grrrl were widespread. On the 

one hand, the article served as a call to arms for younger girls, 

like Marcus, who were not already connected to the Riot Grrrl 

scenes in Olympia, Washington DC, and Minneapolis. On the 

other hand, the Newsweek article opened the media floodgates, 

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86  /  redefining a movement

placing Riot Grrrls on the defensive in an economy of represen-

tation they had previously subverted through their astute sus-

picion of the mainstream media and savvy deployment of DIY 

media. Although it would be misleading to imply that Riot Grrrl 

necessarily lost control of its image after the Newsweek article, 

the publication of “Revolution, Grrrl Style” represented a turn-

ing point—Riot Grrrl had gone viral.

3

In many respects, the announcement of the Riot Grrrl Col-

lection at Fales Library bore uncanny resemblance to the 

movement’s initial “discovery” by the mainstream media. Lisa 

Darms, senior archivist at Fales Library and Special Collections, 

explains that news of the collection’s development was never 

a secret, but its announcement was also not something that 

remained entirely in either her control or that of the collection’s 

donors:

We issued an internal newsletter, which is for the library. 

It’s not private, but it’s simply a print and pdf newsletter 

about acquisitions. It generally goes to alumni and donors. 

They wanted to announce the acquisition of Kathleen 

Hanna’s papers. It was amazing to watch how quickly—I 

think the next day—at the

 L Magazine, someone who was 

probably associated with NYU in some way, found it and 

scanned it in black and white and put it on their online 

magazine. From there, it went viral. At that point, I barred 

myself—I worried about a flurry of people contacting me 

because it hadn’t gone through the press office, which is the 

normal way we would do such things, but instead of any-

one contacting me, all subsequent articles referred back to 

that one 

L Magazine article. I was somewhat ambivalent 

about it. I wasn’t trying to keep the collection secret, but 

I did want to reach a certain number of potential donors 

before making it public.

4

However, neither Darms nor her donors, including Kathleen 

Hanna and Becca Albee who were preparing their papers at the 

time of the announcement, are strangers to the media’s viral 

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redefining a movement  /  87

potential. In 1992, all three women were students at Evergreen 

State College in Olympia, Washington, where they witnessed 

and to varying degrees were implicated by the initial media cap-

ture of Riot Grrrl. If anything, the conditions under which news 

of the collection’s development went public were all too familiar.

Although the L Magazine’s decision to scan and repost an 

article about the development of the Riot Grrrl Collection from 

an internal university newsletter and its subsequent impact is 

far less significant than the historical arrival of Riot Grrrl in the 

mainstream media, the similarities are worth considering.

 5

 Like 

Riot Grrrl in its early stages of development, which was both 

public and fiercely protective of its ability to control its represen-

tation and circulation,

6

 the development of the collection was by 

no means a secret, but from the onset there was an attentiveness 

to maintaining control over the collection’s publicity. As Darms 

explains, the desire to control the collection’s representation 

was partly rooted in a commitment to ensuring it would not be 

defined too narrowly: “I don’t want it to be the ‘Kathleen Hanna 

Collection.’ She feels the same way. It’s a Riot Grrrl Collection, 

but most of the press was just about Kathleen.”

7

 Darms was also 

concerned about mitigating the circulation of misinformation 

about who would be able to access the collection and under what 

circumstances.

In the days following the L Magazine post, news of Fales 

Library’s Riot Grrrl Collection traveled quickly over multiple 

forms of media, proving especially viral in forms of media 

that had not yet come into being when Riot Grrrl entered most 

people’s consciousness in 1992 (for example, blogs, Twitter and 

Facebook).

8

 If many archivists and special collections librarians 

spend years attempting to generate interest in their collections, 

for Darms, this achievement was effortless. That news of an 

archival collection could “go viral” reveals as much about Riot 

Grrrl as a cultural phenomenon as it does about the significance 

of the Riot Grrrl Collection. The media interest in the collec-

tion points not only to what is potentially controversial about 

the collection’s development but also to the collection’s status 

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