Redefining a Movement: The Riot Grrrl Collection at Fales Library

88  /  redefining a movement

within a network of women, which includes women old enough 

to have heard Bikini Kill play live in the early 1990s and young 

enough to have been born after the Newsweek article, who iden-

tify with Riot Grrrl as an aesthetic, cultural, and political move-

ment unique to their generation of feminists. My primary con-

cern, however, is with neither the controversy nor the affective 

attachments generated by the collection. As I explore through-

out this chapter, preservation is a central part of the Riot Grrrl 

Collection’s mandate, but the collection holds the potential to do 

much more than preserve Riot Grrrl as it has been understood 

to date. As the collection develops, it also holds the potential to 

impact Riot Grrrl’s legacy and more specifically the legacies of 

the women most closely identified with its development. As I 

argue, the Riot Grrrl Collection may thereby be read as a radical 

form of “position taking” enacted in and through the archive.

Pierre Bourdieu’s theorizing on the field of cultural produc-

tion offers a useful framework for beginning to understand how 

the creative products of a so-called “subculture” might be trans-

formed through their entry into the archive and more specifi-

cally, how archivization might hold the potential to retroactively 

align previously unconsecrated cultural works with avant-garde 

movements. As Bourdieu maintains, every literary or artistic 

field is a “field of forces” and “field of struggles,” and the meaning 

of a work changes with “each change in the field within which it 

is situated for the spectator or reader.”

9

 The task of the literary or 

art critic is to understand the space of positions and “position-

takings” within the field of cultural production. This, however, is 

an invariably difficult task because the critic must reconstruct all 

the people, forces, and conditions that shape the field at any given 

time. On this basis, Bourdieu emphasizes that any sociology of 

art or literature must be able to account for “the social conditions 

of the production of artists, art critics, dealers, patrons, etc.”

10

 

and “the social conditions of the production of a set of objects 

socially constituted as works of art, i.e. the conditions of produc-

tion of the field of social agents (e.g., museums, galleries, aca-

demics, etc.) which help to define and produce the value of works 

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redefining a movement  /  89

of art.”

11

 The objective is ultimately to understand any work of art 

or literature as a “manifestation of the field as a whole, in which 

all the powers of the field, and all the determinisms inherent in 

its structure and functioning, are concentrated.”

12

Bourdieu’s theorizing aptly draws attention to the extent to 

which literature and art are symbolic objects constituted by 

the institutions through which cultural products are endowed 

with value. While he lists many of the most obvious institu-

tions engaged in such work, including museums, galleries, and 

the academy, he does not list the archive. Because there is no 

doubt that the archive does belong in this list, the oversight is 

especially notable, but the archive is also uniquely situated in 

the field of cultural production. Unlike either the gallery or art 

museum, which usually endows a literary or artistic work with 

value in the present, the archive’s work is more often than not 

retroactive. In other words, the archive is uniquely located to the 

extent that it permits works to migrate across the field of cultural 

production at different points in history. In this respect, a work 

originally produced primarily for a mass audience (or a work 

perceived as such) might become aligned with a work produced 

as “art for art’s sake.”

13

 The archive, thus, is not only an institu-

tion that Bourdieu overlooks in his theorizing on the field of 

cultural production but also the institution that arguably holds 

the greatest potential to disrupt the field as it is conceived in his 

work. Once more, as I emphasize, this is especially relevant to 

questions concerning the designation of an “avant-garde.”

While Bourdieu’s “field of cultural production” evidently 

privileges the spatial, his theorizing on the avant-garde is first 

and foremost temporal. If “conservatives” recognize their con-

temporaries in the past, then the avant-garde has no contem-

poraries and “therefore no audience, except in the future” (107). 

An avant-garde, according to Bourdieu, establishes itself not 

by recognizing their contemporaries in the past but conversely 

by pushing “back into the past the consecrated producers with 

whom they are compared” (107). If Bourdieu’s theorizing on cul-

tural production fails to account for the question of the archive, 

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90  /  redefining a movement

then perhaps it is because the archive, more than any other insti-

tution, holds the potential to interrupt this supposed process by 

prying open opportunities for an avant-garde to be established 

retroactively. This is not surprising, however, because the archive 

is first and foremost a temporal apparatus—at once committed 

to the endless accumulation of time, as Foucault emphasizes 

in his theorizing on heterotopias,

14

 of which library or archive 

exist as one example among many, as well as to the reordering 

of time. As I emphasized in chapter 2, materials in the archive 

are not necessarily aligned according to temporal logics. Players 

once estranged in the field of cultural production may become 

aligned. Contemporaries may be torn apart. Movements may be 

defined or redefined. In short, archival time challenges Bour-

dieu’s assumption that avant-garde movements are necessarily 

established via a series of displacements—through the anach-

ronization of one’s predecessors. In the archive, an avant-garde 

conversely may be established via a series of strategic realign-

ments that make present players who never had the opportu-

nity to play in the same field but in many respects comfortably 

occupy the same field nevertheless.

The archive as an apparatus can be effectively wielded in a 

reparative manner, and this is precisely the movement I chart 

in this chapter. I specifically examine how relocating the Riot 

Grrrl papers from haphazard personal storage situations across 

the United States to the Fales Library and Special Collections in 

New York represents an attempt to redefine Riot Grrrl as a cul-

tural movement as deeply marked by feminist politics and punk 

aesthetics as it is by legacies of avant-garde art, performance, 

and literature. After all, in contrast to the other collections fea-

tured in this book, the Riot Grrrl Collection is housed in an 

archive known for its art and culture collections (for example, 

the Avant-Garde Collection and the Downtown Collection) 

rather than holdings related to women’s history. As a result, 

across Fales Library’s special collections, one discovers the 

papers and cultural artifacts of several generations of innovative 

visual artists, performance artists, and writers. Among them are 

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