Redefining a Movement: The Riot Grrrl Collection at Fales Library

100  /  redefining a movement

of interviews and interview transcripts with a surviving genera-

tion of AIDS activist, lesbians, perhaps especially in New York, 

were deeply involved in ACT UP and the many allied organi-

zations and collective projects it generated in the late 1980s to 

early 1990s.

39

 On this basis, it seems reasonable to conclude that 

to be a young queer feminist in Olympia and New York in the 

late 1980s to early 1990s meant radically different things. What 

was pressing in New York’s downtown scene during this period 

was day-to-day survival, making it difficult, if not impossible, to 

imagine the conditions under which a girl-centered movement 

could have emerged in this context.

This is not to suggest, however, that Riot Grrrl was entirely 

untouched by either the impact of AIDS or the activism the cri-

sis engendered. This indirect influence is apparent in the follow-

ing passage from an unpublished essay by Hanna (now housed 

in Johanna Fateman’s files in the Riot Grrrl Collection at Fales 

Library). Reflecting on her formation, Hanna writes:

I came of age as an activist/artist during the short lived 

media hey day of ACT UP, Queer Nation, The Guerilla girls 

and WAC. I watched these groups using confrontational, 

theatrical tactics to disrupt “the powers that be” and liked 

a lot of what I saw. At times I tried to use the same kinds 

of strategies within the punk/feminist community I was 

very much a part of at the time. Sometimes doing this drew 

much needed action and discussion to the issues I cared 

about most.

40

For Hanna, ACT UP, emblematic of a particular moment of 

media savvy queer and feminist activism in the late 1980s to 

early 1990s, exemplified how the creative deployment of the 

media might be used to achieve both aesthetic and political 

objectives. In Girls to the Front, Marcus also emphasizes the 

indirect influence organizations like ACT UP had on Riot Grrrl. 

As she explains, it is no coincidence that Angela Seguel—best 

known for posing naked with “every girl is a Riot Grrrl” writ-

ten on her torso in the British magazine i-D—had spent time 

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redefining a movement  /  101

engaging in ACT UP activism. As Marcus emphasizes, “Angela 

knew, from her time in ACT UP, that a carefully orchestrated 

image could say a lot,”

41

 and the infamous photograph she staged 

for i-D exhibited just such awareness.

Thus, while there is no doubt that some Riot Grrrls were 

involved in or at least impacted by the political struggles reshap-

ing queer and feminist communities in the late 1980s to early 

1990s, it seems likely that Olympia’s location away from the dire 

battles facing gay men and lesbians in New York, San Francisco, 

and other large urban centers at the time was at least a factor in 

Riot Grrrl’s development. Given the geographic specificity of Riot 

Grrrl’s emergence, however, on what basis might we justify the 

movement of the Riot Grrrl papers to the Fales Library and Spe-

cial Collections in New York two decades later? If Riot Grrrl could 

not have emerged in New York when it did (at least not in the same 

form), what makes Fales Library such an appropriate home now? 

This question is particularly significant given that the Downtown 

Collection, with which the Riot Grrrl Collection holds most in 

common, was founded at the height of the AIDS crisis in 1993, 

in part owing to Fales Library and Special Collection’s Director 

Marvin Taylor, who realized the urgent need to create a home 

where the papers and artifacts of recently deceased artists could 

be housed and properly preserved.

42

If Taylor’s impetus to create the Downtown Collection was 

the result of an urgent and even dire need, Darms has had the 

privilege of developing the Riot Grrrl Collection under much 

less pressing circumstances. When she considers the question of 

location, Darms first points to the practical challenges one faces 

when attempting to establish any special collection. “Perhaps, 

in an ideal world, they would be in an institution in Olympia 

or Washington, DC,” she admits, “but you need an institution 

that is committed to preserving these materials in the long term 

and that requires institutional backing and subject knowledge to 

support the materials.”

43

 Darms also emphasizes that New York 

is more accessible to researchers than other possible locations, 

such as Olympia, DC, or Minneapolis, and may even benefit 

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102  /  redefining a movement

from a certain “neutrality” because it is not one of these loca-

tions, which are more synonymous with Riot Grrrl’s early devel-

opment.

44

 Beyond such practical considerations, there are other 

issues at stake. Locating the collection in Olympia, Minneapolis, 

or DC may honor the movement’s geographic specificity at its 

moment of origin, but privileging geography also risks reinforc-

ing the idea of Riot Grrrl as a subculture. After all, subcultures 

have historically been defined along the basis of not only style 

and cultural practices but also geography. This is evident in both 

British and North American theorizing on subcultures, which 

have frequently privileged and even romanticized the specific 

neighborhoods that have allegedly given birth to subcultures, 

from London’s East End to New York’s Harlem and the Bronx.

45

 

Rather than privilege geography, the Riot Grrrl Collection privi-

leges the movement’s historical lineages. Once again, in this 

respect, the collection’s adjacency to Fales Library’s existing spe-

cial collections, especially the Downtown Collection, is signifi-

cant, but Darms explains the difference: because “the Downtown 

Collection is obviously so specific to New York,” the connection 

is “more of an intellectual and aesthetic relationship.”

46

It is important to acknowledge that the question of reloca-

tion is by no means a question unique to the Riot Grrrl Collec-

tion at Fales Library. Echoing other theorists on the archive, in 

the final chapter of An Archive of Feelings, Cvetkovich concludes, 

“The history of any archive is a history of space.”

47

 But as she fur-

ther emphasizes, gay and lesbian archives have been especially 

engaged in transforming spaces because “their existence has been 

dependent on the possibility of making private spaces—such as 

rooms in people’s homes—public.”

48

 On this basis, she further 

argues that gay and lesbian archives are an “intriguing locus of 

debates about institutionalization and the tensions around assim-

ilation in gay and lesbian politics.”

49

 In other words, the archive 

is not simply a space that promises to preserve traces of marginal 

subjects’ lives but also a locus that holds the power to integrate 

and even “mainstream” such subjects. Much of the controversy 

surrounding the Riot Grrrl Collection has focused on whether the 

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