Redefining a Movement: The Riot Grrrl Collection at Fales Library

106  /  redefining a movement

even legal documents. So I don’t think that it’s material 

that really needs to be accessible to anyone. I feel strongly 

about that in terms of archival reading rooms, even if it’s 

not a popular way to view library practice but in terms of 

the archive, this is really standard practice.

60

This is not to suggest that Darms is uncommitted to supporting 

venues where Riot Grrrl materials are more readily accessible. 

In fact, she sees herself working in collaboration with other 

archivists and librarians building Riot Grrrl related collections: 

“there are still going to be venues where people can go to look 

at zines and that’s really important to me. That’s what Jenna 

Freedman is doing up at Barnard. But people are also taking it 

upon themselves to scan zines and create online archives. Those 

online archives may not last very long but it does create a way to 

make the zines accessible now.”

61

In addition to extending Riot Grrrl’s practice of facilitating 

access to information without entirely relinquishing control over 

its circulation, the Riot Grrrl Collection extends the movement’s 

longstanding practice of tactically deploying the academic appa-

ratus. As Hanna explains, “Universities have more money than 

most left political groups and personally I don’t want lefty femi-

nist groups spending their resources maintaining archives when 

they could be doing more important things.”

62

 In many respects, 

Riot Grrrl has always operated as a parasitic presence on the 

academy, never colonizing its host but consistently deploying its 

resources (intellectual and material) to further its own agenda. 

Once again, in this respect, it is important to recognize that the 

movement emerged in and around a college campus. Known for 

its innovative curriculum and commitment to collaborative and 

self-designed programs of study,

63

 Evergreen State College not 

only served as an institutional base from which to initiate spe-

cific projects (for example, a Riot Grrrl zine distribution network 

was started as an independent study course at the college),

64

 but, 

at least indirectly, it also supplied the movement with resources 

from copy paper and other zine-making supplies to space.

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redefining a movement  /  107

In the early 1990s, however, Riot Grrrl was doing much more 

than leaching the academy of material resources. Referring to 

the early years of Riot Grrrl and her own college experience at 

Evergreen, Darms emphasizes that “a lot of the materials people 

were reading were academic. It was a really smart movement, 

a well informed movement.”

65

 While academic feminist dis-

courses by no means had been absent from an earlier genera-

tion’s community newspapers and journals, the range of schol-

arly discourses in nonrefereed second wave publications and 

forms of cultural production was limited. Outside the academy, 

and at times even inside the academy, it was de rigueur for sec-

ond wave feminists to eschew theoretical discourses perceived as 

“elitist,” “difficult,” and “inaccessible.” By the early 1990s, how-

ever, the divide between so-called “academic” and “grassroots” 

feminisms was already dissolving, and Riot Grrrl was what it 

was because it emerged at this particular theoretical and politi-

cal moment,

66

 when fixed notions of identity were rapidly giv-

ing way to a more nuanced and complex understandings of the 

subject—the moment when everyone appeared to be celebrating 

both the “smartness” and political potential of irony, parody, 

pastiche, and appropriation. After nearly two decades of steady 

political gains by feminists both inside and outside the academy, 

the early 1990s was also a privileged moment, a brief interval in 

which young feminists could afford to embrace emerging theo-

retical positions while remaining fully committed to most of the 

tenets of second wave feminist politics. And perhaps this is why 

Riot Grrrl, from the onset, sought to embrace and even celebrate 

rather than eschew contradictions.

On my first trip to access the Riot Grrrl Collection at Fales 

Library in February 2011, I spoke to Darms, whom I had origi-

nally interviewed for this chapter in June 2010 (before the col-

lection had been made available to researchers). After hearing 

about the form this chapter was taking, she directed me to five 

file folders of photocopied articles in the still unprocessed papers 

of Kathleen Hanna. Although it is not entirely clear at what point 

Hanna started to collect the materials contained in the files, the 

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108  /  redefining a movement

range of materials not only points to the breadth of the artist’s 

reading and influences but also offers insight into the intellec-

tual and political orientation of the Riot Grrrl movement. I offer 

an abbreviated list of some of the articles and clippings found in 

Hanna’s files. The list, to be clear, is not a finding aid but simply 

a selection of what I chose to record while looking through the 

first three of the five folders. In some cases, I have added notes, 

including notes about the bibliographical information, margina-

lia and mark-ups that appear on the photocopied materials.

David James, “Hardcore: Cultural Resistance in the 

Postmodern”

Kathy Acker, “Realism for the Cause of Future Revolution”

Chris Straayer, “The She-man: Postmodern bi-sexed perfor-

mance in film and video” (copied from Screen, Autumn 

1990)

Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (copied from 

Signs 1, no.4, 1976)

A book review of Derrida’s Glas (marked with pink high-

lighting)

Gregg Bordowitz, “Dense Moments”

Hazel V. Carby, “The Politics of Difference”

Hilton Als, “The Furies”

Robin West, “Pornography as a Legal Text” (note on back in-

cludes references to Lesbian Ethics by Sarah Lucia Hoagland, 

Daring to be Bad by Alic Echols, Not for Sale by Laura Cot-

tingham, Illusions of Postmodernism by Terry Eagleton, Yes 

by Yoko Ono, and the Collected works Felix Gonzales Torres)

Review of Kathy Goes to Haiti, My Death My Life by Pier 

Paulo Pasolini, and Florida by Kathy Acker

William Burroughs, “Is the Body Obsolete” (published in 

the Whole Earth Review in 1989)

Kathy Acker, “Dead Doll Humility” (copied from Postmod-

ern Culture, 1990)

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