Redefining a Movement: The Riot Grrrl Collection at Fales Library

112  /  redefining a movement

The problem of bringing a subcultural studies model to bear 

on Riot Grrrl, then, may have less to do with what such a model 

imposed on the movement and more to do with what the model 

effectively obscured about the movement’s origins, influences, 

and long-term impacts. As Fateman observes, “The ‘girl gang’ 

image was cultivated by some within the movement, and it was 

‘real’ in terms of certain guerilla tactics and punk antics, but 

Riot Grrrl was also an aesthetic thing (rhetorical, theorized).”

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Fateman adds, “Its status as a political movement and social 

phenomenon still seems to overshadow its status as an artistic 

movement. Its products still aren’t discussed much as art.”

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In Gender in the Music Industry (2007), Marion Leonard also 

addresses this oversight. She recognizes that “riot grrrl’s devel-

opment parallels the way a number of youth subcultures have 

established themselves. It emerges from within ‘underground’ 

music circles; was promoted through gigs, events and zine 

networks; and was greeted with considerable levels of fascina-

tion by the mass media.”

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 Leonard goes on, however, to warn 

that applying this model of analysis to Riot Grrrl is mislead-

ing. Emphasizing that “one of the flaws of subcultural theory 

has been its tenacious grasp of the concept of delinquency,” 

she observes, “Youth subcultures have often been positioned as 

oppositional to the ‘parent culture’ and thereby at odds with 

societal norms.”

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 This approach, she emphasizes, has “par-

ticular relevance to Riot Grrrl” because “to place riot grrrl 

in a tradition of delinquent youth theory would be to ignore 

the nature of its protest and dismiss its feminist objectives as 

mere teen dissent.”

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 Again, the scope and range of radical lit-

eratures, critical theory, and avant-garde works included and 

referenced in Hanna’s files in the Riot Grrrl Collection suggests 

that at least at its point of origin, Riot Grrrl was already far too 

self-reflexive and entangled in the institutions and industries it 

sought to occupy and critique to be understood simply through 

a framework of youth dissent.

Thus, on the one hand, the fact that the Riot Grrrl Collec-

tion is unavailable to every fan on a pilgrimage may appear to 

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redefining a movement  /  113

come into conflict with Riot Grrrl’s commitment to locating 

girls and young women as agents of knowledge and cultural 

production and social change. On the other hand, the collec-

tion’s development is entirely in keeping with the movement’s 

longstanding relationship to the academy. Like the movement 

itself, the collection reflects a tactical deployment of the acad-

emy’s resources and represents an attempt to use the academy 

as a means to shape how the movement will be taken up in a 

larger public sphere. In our interview, Darms reflected briefly 

on her own early experience of Riot Grrrl. Her recollection 

reveals the extent to which the movement is not only indebted 

to punk but to multiple and overlapping aesthetic and intellec-

tual traditions. Indeed, she emphasizes these complex lineages 

while simultaneously making a strong case for why the Riot 

Grrrl papers are at home among existing collections at Fales 

Library:

For me, Riot Grrrl is absolutely an off-shoot of punk. I 

don’t think that everyone experienced it that way, but his-

torically, it was definitely a reaction to punk and the fail-

ures of gender in that radical aesthetic. But there are also 

important intellectual connections. Take, for example, the 

Semiotexte Collection. The people who are in that collec-

tion, like Kathy Acker and Eileen Myles, are people who 

women involved with Riot Grrrl were reading and inspired 

by. But there’s also other connections—even the little 

pocket Baudrillard that I remember seeing at a friend’s 

house for the first time when I was still in Olympia—it was 

like an introduction to a whole world. The same day I saw 

the Baudrillard, my friend played me Kathleen’s spoken 

word 7-–inch. So in my mind, there are many connections 

both aesthetically and intellectually. Also, both collections 

[The Downtown Collection and the Semiotexte Collection] 

are very queer.

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From punk to Semiotexte, from Myles to Baudrillard, from a 

college-age Kathleen Hanna to New York’s downtown art scene, 

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114  /  redefining a movement

Darms covers immense ground here, but in so doing she effec-

tively demonstrates the slippages and connections that are inte-

gral to understanding Riot Grrrl. Far from a “bona fide subcul-

ture,” as Gottlieb and Wald argue in their early theorizing on 

the movement, Darms represents Riot Grrrl as queer feminist 

hybrid of punk, continental philosophy, feminism, and avant-

garde literary and art traditions. Thus, the Riot Grrrl Collection 

at Fales Library represents neither a form of institutionalization 

nor assimilation but rather foregrounds something that was 

always already part of the Riot Grrrl movement—its link to both 

the academic apparatus and to some of the theoretical and aes-

thetic movements it has sustained. 

Avant-garde Heritage

The idea that a radical movement might have an “avant-garde 

heritage” is, I admit, at least somewhat contradictory. If we 

understand the avant-garde along Bourdieu’s lines, then avant-

garde movements are by definition without a “heritage” or “lin-

eage” to which they can truly lay claim because “‘young’ writers, 

i.e., those less advanced in the process of consecration  . . . will 

refuse everything their ‘elders’ . . . are and do, and in particular 

all their indices of social ageing, starting with the signs of con-

secration, internal (academies, etc.) or external (success).”

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 But 

this, evidently, is a perspective that is either no longer relevant to 

theorizing on how avant-gardes are formed or one in which Riot 

Grrrl stands as a notable exception.

As Fateman emphasizes, “Some Riot Grrrls (especially after 

the Newsweek, USA Today, Sassy articles) were quite young and 

knew nothing about Kathy Acker, Karen Finley, Diamanda 

Galas, Barbara Kruger, etc but those in the most notorious Riot 

Grrrl bands most certainly did.”

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 It seems unlikely that a song 

like “Hot Topic,” released on Le Tigre’s debut album in 1998, 

could exist without such an awareness:

Carol Rama and Eleanor Antin  

Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneeman  

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