Redefining a Movement: The Riot Grrrl Collection at Fales Library

redefining a movement  /  97

has played in the collection’s development. Johanna Fateman 

explained, “It definitely helped that Lisa is a close friend, and that 

I trusted her to have a sensitivity to the issues surrounding the 

project.”

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 Similarly, for Hanna, the decision to donate her papers 

to Fales Library appeared to be directly linked to Darms’s posi-

tion there as senior archivist. “I really don’t think I would’ve been 

interested if someone else, besides Lisa Darms, had approached 

me,” explained Hanna. “It just felt like the universe lined up and 

it was meant to be.”

34

 In a sense, the universe had lined up, as the 

following origin story recounted by Hanna suggests:

Lisa and I and our friend Johanna had gone to an event 

about feminism and the archive at Fales before she got a job 

there and I LOVED Marvin, the head of Fales, from the sec-

ond he started talking. As we were leaving Jo and I started 

joking about how great it would be if they did a Riot Grrrl 

Archive so we could get rid of all the stuff we’d kept over the 

years. 6 months later Lisa was hired as Fales’ senior archi-

vist and called us up saying “What if a Riot Grrrl Archive 

really existed, would you all be involved?” I was completely 

thrilled. It was a dream come true scenario.

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While Darms emphasizes her historical connection to Riot Grrrl 

(for example, the fact that she was in Olympia in the early 1990s 

when Riot Grrrl was taking shape), Hanna emphasizes that 

Darms’s present connection to the donors is at least as essen-

tial as her historical link to the movement: “I really trust Lisa’s 

intelligence and her ability to make great things happen. . . . Her 

proximity to the places and events that shaped RG make things 

a lot easier for sure, but to me, that’s secondary. More important 

is the fact that she has a great sense of humor which I think is 

pretty important if you’re going to put something together of 

this magnitude.”

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Although many women who came of age in the 1990s and 

beyond feel a personal connection to the papers in the Riot 

Grrrl Collection, it is not necessarily their archive. That so many 

women have interpreted the collection as an archive of an entire 

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generation of feminists rather than a collection that contains 

several individuals’ personal papers, however, is not entirely sur-

prisingly. Documents and artifacts connected to traditionally 

marginalized groups have historically been more likely to enter 

archives because they represent a demographic or cultural phe-

nomenon than on basis of their connection to individuals. Many 

collections of women’s archival materials, for example, are com-

prised of diaries and letters written by anonymous or unknown 

women writers rather than writers who gained notoriety for their 

work; the materials are valuable because they tell us something 

about the conditions of women’s everyday lives in a particular era 

and not because they tell us something about the individual writ-

ers. In many respects, the zine collections at both Barnard College 

and Duke University extend this tradition of collection develop-

ment in women’s archives. While both collections contain zines 

produced by or about the women whose papers are also housed 

in the  Riot Grrrl Collection, it is important to bear in mind that 

even the same zine may represent something different in the col-

lections at Barnard College or Duke University than it does in the 

collection at Fales Library. As Jenna Freedman, the founder and 

librarian responsible for the Barnard Zine Library, emphasizes, 

her collection is one that belongs to and represents “every girl.” 

A zine by or about Kathleen Hanna in the Barnard Zine Library 

is there as part of a larger and still growing collection of zines by 

girls and women and gender-queer subjects. By contrast, Darms 

emphasizes that her collection focuses on Riot Grrrl and more 

specifically on the papers of some women connected to the move-

ment’s development. In this context, a zine by or about Hanna is 

not representative of DIY publishing or “girl power,” as it might 

be elsewhere. At Fales Library, it is one document among many 

that tells us something about Hanna’s development as an artist, 

performer, and activist.

By creating a collection with a mandate “to collect unique 

materials that provide documentation of the creative process 

of  individuals and the chronology of the movement overall” 

(emphasis my own), Darms is not only creating the first collection 

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redefining a movement  /  99

of Riot Grrrl papers, but she is also effectively relocating and 

redefining Riot Grrrl in ways that will profoundly impact how 

writers will consider Riot Grrrl and particular Riot Grrrl fig-

ures in the future.

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 This collection’s development, including the 

combined geographic and symbolic acts of relocation it entails, 

represents a realignment of Riot Grrrl that highlights both the 

movement’s intellectual and artistic lineages and, by extension, 

the archive’s status as a historiographic technology.

Continental Drift

Like many observers, when I first heard about the develop-

ment of the Riot Grrrl Collection at Fales Library, I immediately 

questioned the choice of location. After all, while Riot Grrrls 

were active in New York in the early 1990s, the city was neither 

an early site of Riot Grrrl activity nor was Riot Grrrl NYC neces-

sarily typical of the form Riot Grrrl scenes took in other cities.

38

 

More importantly, I questioned whether Riot Grrrl could have 

emerged when it did and with such impact had it been conceived 

by a group of college-age women at a small liberal arts college 

in New York rather than one located in a bucolic setting on the 

Northwest Coast. Beyond the fact that finding space on a stage 

in New York is presumably more difficult than finding space on 

a stage in Olympia, especially if you are a young women with a 

limited performance history, other circumstances would have 

made New York an unlikely scene for Riot Grrrl’s emergence in 

the early 1990s.

From 1989 to 1992, while Riot Grrrl was taking shape at 

Evergreen State College in Olympia, rising rates of HIV infec-

tion and HIV-related deaths combined with government apathy 

at the municipal, state, and federal levels had left New York’s 

downtown scene caught in a cycle of death, mourning, and 

activism. Young queer women were by no means immune to 

the impact of AIDS and the political and cultural movements it 

incited, even if few were ever infected by the virus. As revealed 

in the interviews that comprise Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schul-

man’s ACT UP Oral History Project, an extensive online archive 

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