Redefining a Movement: The Riot Grrrl Collection at Fales Library
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redefining a movement / 115 You’re getting old, that’s what they’ll say, but Don’t give a damn I’m listening anyway 80 The song mentions a myriad of other artists, writers, perform- ers, and scholars, including modernist icon Gertrude Stein, contemporary poet and experimental prose writer Eileen Myles, and celebrated late twentieth-century artist David Wojnarow- icz. Notably absent from the list of venerated influences is Kathy Acker; however, Hanna’s connection to Acker is particularly illustrative. Among the articles and newspaper clippings Hanna chose to keep and include in her donation to the Riot Grrrl Collection are dozens of articles by and about Acker, but the Hanna-Acker connection is also an exception. In contrast to other connections between established innovative writers and artists and the Riot Grrrl movement, this connection has already been recognized as part of Riot Grrrl history. In a 2002 article in the Village Voice, in which Acker is described as “a riot grrrl ahead of her time,” 81
in 1990. As the legend goes, Acker told Hanna, “If you want to be heard, why are you doing spoken word? You should be in a band.” 82
was right—bands get more airplay than poetry. Whether Acker would have embraced the idea that she was a “riot grrrl ahead of her time” is unclear. After all, Acker was very much an individual, not a movement. Nevertheless, as a tough, sexually complicated, outspoken, punk writer and performer who had found a way to play with the boys and espouse feminist politics without being coopted by either camp, Acker was an ideal role model for Hanna and her peers. She exemplified what it meant to be both punk and feminist, political and theoretically engaged, a public figure but by no means an object of media manipulation. While the Acker influence on Hanna was the result of a direct encounter, for other Riot Grrrls, the influence of Acker and other avant-garde women writers and performers, such as Eileen Myles and Karen Findley, may have been neither as 116 / redefining a movement direct nor as widely acknowledged, but it is apparent in the work nevertheless. In Girls to the Front, Marcus makes a point of foregrounding these connections, and to her credit she care- fully avoids implying that they were merely about young women searching for feisty feminist role models in the late years of the second wave feminist movement. As Marcus emphasizes, con- nections, such as the one between Hanna and Acker, were first and foremost intellectual and aesthetic: Acker’s insolent, demanding fictions tackled female sex- uality head-on and took an ax to literary form. In Blood
and Guts in High School, the 1978 novel that got Kath- leen hooked, a young girl begs her father for sex, joins a gang, has two abortions, and goes to a Contortions con- cert—all in the first forty-three pages. The story is told in a fragmented, deadpan way, through shifting points of view and collage: fairy tales, scripts, poems, line drawings of men’s and women’s genitals, pages from a Persian-lan- guage workbook. Blood and Guts suggested that the reali- ties of women’s lives, especially with regard to sexuality and abuse, were too complicated to be told through typical narrative. Only contradictions, ruptures and refusals stood a chance of conveying the truth. 83 Directly or indirectly, with few exceptions, early Riot Grrrl writ- ing, such as the writing found in many of the zines published between 1990 and 1994, reflects this recognition that women’s lives, especially women’s experiences of sexuality and abuse, are too complicated to be expressed in linear narrative prose. As an example, consider the following passage that appears in the middle of an abuse narrative published in a Riot Grrrl zine from this era: 84 “Is my real life pain and abuse good enough to be an article in a fucking fanzine for you to read WHO ARE YOU? stop reading this. I said STOP RITE NOW. you’re still reading. its okay you know I really want you to.” 85 The use of such interruptions in a narrative that otherwise may be read as a typical confessional piece of writing on sexual abuse was by no redefining a movement / 117 means uncommon in Riot Grrrl writing at the time. In fact, a distinctive marker of early Riot Grrrl writing was its disjunctive narrative style, which frequently included insertions intended to make the reader aware of their complicity in the production of the text and at times their potential voyeurism. By extension, early Riot Grrrl writing had a tendency to destabilize the speak- ing subject, often rendering the writer’s intentions ambiguous and even inaccessible. As demonstrated above, the writing was also marked by notable typographical innovations and gram- matical irregularities, making it difficult for readers to ignore the extent to which language is a scene of power, regulation, and constraint that must be interrogated. Thus, while one could read such writing as a form of life writing or autobiography, the repeated use of these conventions suggests that early Riot Grrrl writers were by no means working on the assumption that lan- guage is a mere vehicle for representation. In this respect, their writing arguably shared much more in common with the dis- turbing, clever, and disjunctive narrative presented in Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School than with texts typically theo- rized as life writing or autobiography. My point here, however, is not that the unidentified writer of the above passage was neces- sarily directly influenced by Acker (as we know Hanna was) but rather that there is a substantial basis upon which to read such texts as more rhetorically and aesthetically sophisticated than they have typically been read. After all, many early Riot Grrrl writers (note, I am choosing to refer to them as writers rather than zinesters here) were, like Acker and her contemporaries in the avant-garde writing scenes in New York and San Fran- cisco, committed to creating a textual space where competing tendencies, narratives, truths, styles, and aesthetics could coex- ist; this, however, is something that has been largely ignored by researchers of Riot Grrrl. The question remains: why have critics generally assumed that Riot Grrrls were doing what they were doing (on the page and the stage) more or less naively, without a sense of the innovative literary and art movements that pre- ceded them?
118 / redefining a movement One could easily conclude that the relative neglect of Riot Grrrl cultural production as literature and art reflects the gen- eral status of women writers and artists, especially those affili- ated with so-called avant-garde movements. After all, even when women have been present from the onset, such movements often have been primarily or exclusively attributed to one or more male “geniuses” (hence, the hero worship of the Tzaras, Duchamps, and Debords). Following these lines, one might assume that the problem is nothing less than the “girl” in Riot Grrrl, but the relative absence of controversy surrounding the development of the Riot Grrrl Collection at Fales Library suggests that, in many respects, Riot Grrrl has already been recognized as a historically significant cultural phenomenon. The problem is not necessarily one of recognition but of the mode of that recognition, and as such gender alone cannot account for the oversight in question. Returning to the question of Riot Grrrl writing, it is important to recognize that, with few exceptions, researchers have tended to ignore the specificity of Riot Grrrl writing by classifying this writing within the broader category of girl zine writing. Viewed through this lens, most apparent are the common issues Riot Grrrl and other girl zines address (for example, abuse, eating disorders, sexuality, and so on) rather than the mode of address or the procedures at work in the texts. In other words, content is invariably privileged over form, pushing aesthetic questions to the margins. This is evident in Alison Piepmeier’s Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism. Notably absent from Piep- meier’s study is any extended discussion of zine writing in rela- tion to pastiche, détournement, appropriation, or questions of authorship. Rather than take up this writing as literature, Piep- meier understands both Riot Grrrl writing and other girl zine writing primarily in relation to its social and political content. When aesthetics are taken up more explicitly, it is in relation to concepts such as “bricolage,” an anthropological term and one with considerable currency in subcultural studies. 86 Although this is by no means a reason to overlook Piepmeier’s important study on girl zines, it reminds us—as Darms evidently hopes redefining a movement / 119 to foreground through the development of the Riot Grrrl Col- lection—that context matters and that context more specifically holds the potential to produce the critical perspectives that amass around a given cultural product to determine its status as a symbolic object in the field of cultural production. Recasting the Field of Cultural Production through the Archive To be clear, the objective of this chapter was not to rewrite Riot Grrrl as an avant-garde movement. After all, such a history merits an entire book, and it is a book that should be written. I wish to highlight here that the Riot Grrrl Collection at Fales Library and Special Collections holds the potential to facili- tate precisely such a rewriting of Riot Grrrl. On this basis, we can conclude that the collection’s development demonstrates how archives are implicated in, what Bourdieu describes as, “position-takings.” In other words, the collection reveals how archives are part and parcel of the process of endowing works of art and literature as well as individual artists and writers with varying degrees of cultural capital and prestige. If the archive is integral to such “position-takings,” however, it is to the extent that it is or holds the possibility to be engaged in the production of critics and their writings. As demonstrated throughout this chapter, the Riot Grrrl Collection not only draws attention to the role of the archive in the field of cultural production but also challenges Bourdieu’s understanding of how avant-gardes are established within the field by revealing how an avant-garde may be established through a strategic alliance with the past rather than through a “pushing back” of one’s predecessors. Finally, in addition to offering an occasion to challenge Bourdieu’s theoriz- ing (for example, his oversight of the archive’s position in the field of cultural production and assumptions about the condi- tions under which avant-gardes are formed), the development of the Riot Grrrl Collection offers an occasion to challenge both feminist critiques of Bourdieu and perspectives on the feminist subfield. 120 / redefining a movement As a response to Bourdieu’s theorizing on the field of cultural production, in her 2002 article, “Feminist Periodicals and the Production of Cultural Value,” Barbara Godard contends, “Gen- der . . . is not a category that Bourdieu introduces into his model of complex social stratification. For him, distinctions oper- ate primarily within differentials of class.” 87 Women, Godard observes, are only taken into account by Bourdieu as a target market of cultural products rather than as producers. Bourdieu’s oversight is especially relevant to understanding the status of “high art,” under which the so-called avant-garde, innovative, and experimental are typically grouped: Because of its relative difficulty or rarity, the “high-art” produced by the field of “restricted production” is consid- ered “pure” and functions as an element of social prestige. Such anti-economic behaviour paradoxically constitutes “symbolic capital”: disinterest in “‘economic’ profits” works dialectically to consolidate “a capital of consecration” by “making a name for oneself.” . . . Through the prestige of a signature or trademark, those agents can “consecrate objects” and so create cultural value across fields. 88 To illustrate, we might consider the success of some cultural movements/industries that emerged simultaneous to Riot Grrrl in the early to mid 1990s, which include “indie” film and music and open source programming. By initially rejecting profit as a primary motivation for their acts of creation, these largely male- dominated movements/industries gained a caché that was in turn soon converted into cultural prestige and economic capital (hence, the sudden trend of established Hollywood directors choosing to direct and produce “indie” films for prestige and profit or the for-profit redeployment of forms of digital creativ- ity that were anti-economic at their point of origin). By com- parison, Riot Grrrl, which opted out of established publishing and recording venues to embrace a DIY approach marked by a parallel anti-economic mandate, did not necessarily benefit financially or in terms of cultural prestige from its decisions. redefining a movement / 121 Godard maintains that such differentials reflect the conditions of the “feminist sub-field” in the larger field of cultural produc- tion: “In a feminist sub-field . . . [the] same disinterestedness or anti-economic behaviour is unable to transpose its disavowal of short-term profit in the marketplace into long-term prestige in other fields.” 89 Godard’s analysis provides a plausible explanation for why Riot Grrrl has, unlike other “indie” creative movements that emerged in the early to mid 1990s, remained both unprofit- able and largely unrecognized as an artistic and literary move- ment. What Godard’s analysis fails to fully account for, however, is that the “feminist sub-field” is also a space of possibilities. Far from preserving the history of Riot Grrrl as it has been preserved to date, the Riot Grrrl Collection represents a pos- sible interruption in both the field of cultural production and its feminist subfield. Although the possibilities are, thus far, mostly unexplored, as researchers use the collection its possibilities will become increasingly apparent. As emphasized throughout this chapter, without necessarily pushing Riot Grrrl’s status as a sub- culture or submovement of punk entirely into the background, the collection’s location at Fales Library and Special Collections relocates Riot Grrrl in relation to some of the “rarefied” and “consecrated” cultural products of earlier and concurrent avant- garde literary, art, and performance movements, hence drawing attention to the fact that the “grrrls” were engaged in forms of cultural and knowledge production that can and should be taken seriously as art, literature, and theory and not simply youthful rebellion. The collection’s development, which is the result of the longstanding relationship between the collection’s archivist and donors, reveals the extent to which these cultural producers rec- ognized the archive as the space and apparatus most capable of executing such a radical position-taking in the present. Yüklə 228,96 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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