Grrrl Research Articles

Between necessity and fragments of alternativity: DIY experiences in French roller derby

Between 1935 and 1970, roller derby was a co-ed North American sport practised on roller skates and played on a banked track. The 2000s marked its revival when a group of women decided to give it a new lease of life: roller derby is now exclusively for women and takes place on a flat track. Teams assert their independence from established institutions and follow a model of ‘do-it-yourself’ organization. According to some critics, the roller derby revival is a continuation of the feminist Riot Grrrl movement. This article aims to understand how French roller derby players use the ‘alternative’ heritage of American women. By mobilizing the frameworks of Cultural Studies and Sport Subculture, the article reflects on the ways in which the legacy of Riot Grrrl, as a movement to challenge a dominant order, enables derby teams to create alternatives to mainstream sports models. Through 90 interviews and participant observation conducted between January 2020 and the present day, the study was able to show a use of the DIY ethos articulated between resourcefulness and a claim to independence. While Riot Grrrl radically defends the values of the punk movement, against the prevailing economic and gender order, French roller derby and its teams propose a hybrid sporting model, articulated between reflections on a different way of looking at sport and a move away from the DIY model of the early days.

Screaming along to mixtapes: Yellowjackets and the choral female voice as subversive noise

ABSTRACT Engaging with collectivist voice that challenges the “communicative injustices” of neoliberal feminism, this article analyses how the TV horror series Yellowjackets’ soundscape employs unruly female chorus as a form of branded “feminism,” vocalised in places traditionally coded as masculine: punk scenes, the wilderness, and soccer as a team sport. Analysing the opening credits, the title track “No Return” employs Riot Grrrl feminist noise that is synaesthetically embodied by the show’s female characters. Synaesthetic embodiment continues within the series where the female choral voice pendulates between the monstrous screamscape acousmêtre and the joyous singing along to pop music. Furthermore, the article demonstrates how such sonic solidarity becomes the source of “feminist nostalgia” for the then-adult characters whose “affective dissonance” with, and siloing within, present-day neoliberal society leaves them longing for the yesteryears of the 1990s. Finally, the article critically interrogates this nostalgia that, on the one hand, fosters increased diversity onscreen, yet on the other, revises history in popular feminist fashion that obfuscates past and present structural inequalities and the marginalisation of non-hegemonic identities.

The Use of Thread and Fabric in Feminist Zines

The Use of Thread and Fabric in Feminist Zines

A Study on the Correlation Between Third-wave Feminism and the Riot Grrrl Movement in the 1990s in the United States by Analyzing Bikini Kill and Bratmobile

The main goal of this paper is to dive into the 1990s and try to understand the interrelation between third-wave feminism and the musical and political movement, Riot Grrrl, through careful analysis of two representative bands of the movement. With the understanding established, the paper would then try to analyze the reasons why the movement was ephemeral. Bikini Kill and Bratmobile, two specific bands symbolic of the Riot Grrrl movement would be investigated to appreciate the values of the movement with an analysis of their songs lyrics and live performances. Another close look at the mainstream media as well as male rock stars and listeners would be taken with the hope of gaining specific insights into the reasons and steps for the rapid decline of the movement. The result of the study shows a complex relationship between the Riot Grrrl movement and third-wave feminism that happened around the same period, in which neither one was fully dependent on the other and both promoted the improvement of the other. The ephemeral existence of the Riot Grrrl movement was also a direct cause of the young activists, weary of misinterpreted publicity, choosing their results not by their own will, but due to pressure from public media. In the intercorrelation of third-wave feminism and the Riot Grrrl movement, both movements affected each other in a way that feminism provided the foundation for which Riot Grrrl movement and Riot Grrrl reversely provided strength and intensity third-wave feminism with its distinct features of directness as well as auditory and visual violence. Despite similarities between the two, the Riot Grrrl movement eventually diverges away from third-wave feminism, withering away from history due to criticism that resulted in Riot Grrrls rejection of the mainstream criticism and misrepresentation of their images while leaving remnants of their rebellious spirit and distinct music that people today still are affected by.

Intimacy and Failed Solidarity in the Teen Girl Film Lollipop Monster (2011)

Abstract: In this article I analyze the 2011 German indie film Lollipop Monster as a contemporary model for what Lauren Berlant calls "intimate publics." This film twists the genre of the teen girl film by portraying female friendship as a catalyst for unleashing suppressed emotions and subverting oppression. Instead of directing their aggression internally as self-harm, the protagonists of Lollipop Monster use violence against others to reinforce their strong social bond. By employing cinematic techniques from the popular multimedia genre of the music video, Lollipop Monster harkens back to the imagined sisterhoods of Riot Grrrl culture. In its nostalgic celebration, the film fails to address the racism of this movement, ultimately remaining focused on whiteness and failing to fully explore possibilities for solidarity between Black and white women. Overall, Lollipop Monster updates Berlant's cautionary theory, illustrating how gendered intimate publics co-create neoliberal landscapes of digital, multimedia music and social media stardom.

Authorships of Resistance

Abstract In this article, I focus on the contexts in which the Brontë juvenilia and Riot Grrrl zines were created, rather than offering a literary study of them. My focus is on how the different creators produced their texts. I explore the theoretical approach of feminist media studies with particular attention to its notions of identity formation as foundation for the comparison of these texts. I outline the Brontë juvenilia and provide a brief history and background of Riot Grrrl zines and offer a comparative analysis of the two media. I conclude by identifying the importance of studying girls’ engagement with the practice of writing in terms of identity formation and expression, and suggest ways that this study can be applied to future critical work.

“I Wanna Be That Cool”

This article elaborates recent work on a strain of contemporary indie rock by focusing on a case study of one of its chief practitioners, Soccer Mommy. This particular approach—which I refer to with the term “Big Feelings”—produces various feminist affects that are irreducible to any one parameter, but which emerge through a cohesive synthesis of several characteristics. That is, listeners feel this music’s feminist orientations even in the absence of overt references. Primarily performed by Gen-Z musicians, the Big Feelings that these artists articulate must also be read in the context of the successive socio-political crises that are not literally referenced in the music, but which nevertheless inform it. Lyrical analysis of the 2018 single “Cool” shows how Soccer Mommy resonates with but also departs from riot grrrl models, where queer-feminist politics are implied by never stated outright. Harmonic analysis of the same song exemplifies the ways in which Big Feelings expands the sonic palette beyond the two and three note chords typical of masculinized rock music, instead incorporating extensions that track with Susan McClary’s arguments regarding the feminized semiotics of chromaticism. Finally, I read 2020’s “Circle the Drain” alongside excerpted interviews I have conducted with fans of the music, using their words to help corroborate and elaborate my reading of Big Feelings as an orientation that is made meaningful in part because of the traumatic context in which young musicians and fans, permanently in crisis, create spaces of community, catharsis, and care.

Collecting Sarah Piatt at the Ohio State University's Rare Books & Manuscripts Library

Collecting Sarah Piatt at the Ohio State University's Rare Books & Manuscripts Library

Criticism as punctuation in the riot grrrl backlash

This article argues that music criticism from the early 1990s was central to media backlash against feminism in this period. As Daphne A. Brooks has noted, music criticism remains widely untheorized, despite being so entangled with the sustainability of popular music. In this article, I give focused attention to a small body of critical writing, exploring the relationship between recordings and the reviews that describe and evaluate the music. I present a reading of backlash against the riot grrrl band Bratmobile from 1993 to 1994, including reviews from the zines Cake, Snipe Hunt, trust kill and Genetic Disorder as well as from Artforum, SPIN and Option. I apply Janice A. Radway’s concept of ‘rhetorical containment’ to this set of criticism, highlighting shared critical manoeuvres evident in the reviews. This builds on Peter Szendy’s idea of ‘punctuation’ as that which shapes phrasing in a dialogue; on one level, criticism of Bratmobile punctuated the musical releases by legitimizing them and by reinforcing key themes in the music. But the critics also undermined the band in ways both subtle and explicit. I conclude by suggesting that critical backlash against riot grrrl can be understood as a matter of power and solidarity, with every critical utterance containing elements of both.

Alanis Morissette’s Voices

Combining the slick production of post-grunge rock with raw, feminist lyrics reminiscent of Riot Grrrl punk, Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album Jagged Little Pill introduced a new rock femininity that rippled throughout the late 1990s. As several commentators have discussed, though, Morissette’s pop-critical reception as the quintessential “angry white female” overlooks the broad range of social and emotional content presented throughout the album. This expressive range comes not only from Morissette’s lyrics but also—perhaps especially—from her versatile and idiosyncratic vocal delivery. In this article, I take a detailed look at how Morissette uses her voice across Jagged Little Pill to express aspects of her album persona. I begin by identifying Morissette’s primary palette of six vocal styles, which I term “speech-song,” “modal voice,” “belt,” “soft voice,” “sweet voice,” and “squeal.” Each of these styles has its own mode of delivery, which I demonstrate through a set of binary parameters, and its own timbral profile, which I demonstrate using spectral analysis. I show how Morissette strategically deploys her vocal palette throughout the album for expressive effect, synchronizing with not only her songs’ lyrics but also their form. In so doing, my analysis shows how voice can serve a fundamentally structural role, one at least as powerful as harmony or melody in shaping a song’s formal process.

What the Afterlife ofSCUMCan Teach Us about Autotheory

AbstractThe emerging genre of autotheory has been tied to a longer lineage of feminist and queer writing. Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto (1967) forms an important context for contemporary autotheoretical practices not only as an influence but also as a cautionary tale. Published in 1967, just one year before its author shot Andy Warhol, the SCUM Manifesto was quickly overdetermined by readings that saw the shooting as a fulfillment of the manifesto’s vision, rewriting the manifesto as a kind of autotheory in reverse. Tracing SCUM’s afterlife in a range of cultural texts, including Riot grrrl zines and Andrea Long Chu’s autotheoretical work Females (2019), reveals consistent anxieties about the relationship between the manifesto and the shooting. As a parallel cultural formation arising alongside autotheory, SCUM’s afterlife shows how anxieties about interpretation drive the autotheoretical impulse.

Bogoroditsa, stan’ Feministkoi?

Abstract In this article, I compare two female-only feminist groups from the Soviet Union and Russia: one of them, the Leningrad feminists, were active in the Soviet Union in the late 1970’s and the other, Pussy Riot, appeared in the 2010’s. By placing Pussy Riot in the (post-)Soviet context and comparing them with the Leningrad feminists, I arrive at a novel reading of both. The similarities between both their structures and messaging are striking: both groups initially split off from larger, male-dominated dissident collectives; both faced challenges as mothers; and both groups appealed to the Virgin Mary as their guardian. These similarities are often obscured in readings that compare Pussy Riot with the Russian male actionists or Western riot grrrl feminists. By forging a different genealogy and comparing these two constellations of women, this article highlights both activist potentials and feminist genealogies in the (post-) Soviet space that have remained largely invisible.

Digital Lectures Round-Up Introduction

At the beginning of this volume year, we gave introductory space in the Field Notes section to digital lectures, the online style of conference presentation that COVID-19 foisted on us. As I wrote then:One effect of the Covid crisis has been to highlight digital lectures: the recorded combination of a speaking voice, a PowerPoint, and perhaps an on-camera presence. As “asynchronous presentations,” these works have substituted for in-person teaching and also for in-person conference talks. They have the strong disadvantage of removing liveness from the equation: attention might be divided; consumption might be partial. But they do also put a somewhat new kind of voice into the world, which we can contemplate from the position of popular music studies. Digital lectures, often about 15 minutes long in their conference form, can be seen as podcasts with visuals, or off-the-cuff moments you can subsequently share with those unable to attend in person. Ideas about music, presented and received in this way, can take shapes that other formats don’t as easily afford.Now, to conclude the volume year (though not the crisis, alas), we present a fuller survey of the form, drawing in particular on work presented at the two gatherings most closely tied to JPMS: the IASPM-US annual conference and the Pop Conference.Alexandria Arrieta uses the immediacy of video to interpret the endless reusing of certain sounds in that most addictive of formats these days: TikTok. Mike D’Errico saturates us with EDM’s excessive vices, even as he dissects them. Dan DiPiero posits a feminist affect, Big Feelings, he thinks has taken indie music from riot grrrl into our present: the digital lecture format lets us reach for meaning with him. DeAngela Duff romps through the archives to show Prince blowing smoke at us: conjuring mystique to establish a persona. Beza Fekade makes the relationship between Minnie Riperton and a manipulated sample of her by A Tribe Called Quest a model for resisting the easy celebrations of digital utopianism. Zalika U. Ibaorimi makes dizzying fusion of the “ho ontologies” of Summer Walker and 1973 film, Ganja & Hess–“daylight and night bleed together” as the digital lecture encourages experiments in prose. Pil Ho Kim and Wonseok Lee turn to XXX, a Korean industrial hip-hop duo working a space of resistance against a nationalist entertainment sector. James Denis Mc Glynn creates a taxonomy of one episode of HBO’s Watchmen revamp to talk us through the ways musical cues convey trauma, droplet by sonic droplet. John McGrath explores Laurie Anderson’s “transmedial storytelling” as a fractured form of communication that he tracks via hints he detects in her oeuvre. Kwabena Slaughter makes an African American saying, “She put her foot in it,” the springboard for a take on tap dance that uses the digital lecture’s nimbleness to do just what the phrase says, formally−motion as glyph. Finally, Sarah Suhadolnik makes the “hype videos” used by sports teams in Detroit and New Orleans a soundscape of strategic urbanity.The text provided here is meant as a transcript and captioning aid only. Please make the digital lectures themselves your focus: the works in their intended format.

Big Feelings

Hi everyone, thanks for tuning in. My paper is too long, so I’m going to get right to it. The purpose of this paper and its broader idea is to formulate one of many possible responses to the question, What happened to feminism in indie rock after riot grrrl?1 In both mainstream criticism and in music scholarship, the conventional and to a large degree accurate narrative about feminism in popular music usually pivots away from rock around 1995, when The Spice Girls heralded the coming postfeminist turn.2 But while postfeminist pop music—from The Spice Girls to Avril Lavigne all the way to Taylor Swift—has clearly constituted the dominant articulation of feminism in popular music since that time, feminist indie rock has continued to exist, and more recently, to thrive.Here, I am not concerned with describing the state of indie rock generally, nor do I want to limit the question to women performers per-se. Within the increasingly heterogeneous indie rock space, I want to focus on a particular, limited affect that I hear as indicative of some of the aesthetic and political shifts that indie rock has undergone in the past decade, and which continues to bind together certain sensibilities in our contemporary moment. Big Feelings attempts to name and trace this affect.3In trying to understand this change, I’ve compiled a working list of what seem to me the essential characteristics of the music I’m trying to identify. Together, these characteristics produce a feminist affect that is irreducible to any one component, but is perceptible nonetheless.4 We have almost no time for a sampling, but I’ll play a bit of music from Snail Mail and Land of Talk to give us an idea of the aesthetic I’m trying to get a handle on.[Play “Heat Wave” (:50-1:45), “This Time” (23:35-24:40)]How do we begin to talk about music like this? It certainly presents some common characteristics, but at the same time, I don’t know if these characteristics constitute a genre, because not all of them are present in all of indie rock, or even, as we’ll see, in feminist indie rock from the post-2000s period. This is what makes Big Feelings more of a tendency or an orientation than a genre. I’ll spend the rest of the paper outlining what seem to me the key elements of this approach.Together, these are the five elements that at least right now seem central to producing the kind of affect that I hear in Big Feelings, a too-much sound that puts feelings first, using them as a vehicle to explore other themes. This affect is in my view inherently feminist, because of the historical effeminization and therefore de-valuing of feelings and emotionality, the traditional segregation that as Lauren Berlant puts it, keeps women “the default managers of the intimate.”11 This is obviously not the only music that deals with feelings in the umbrella of indie-rock, which is itself difficult to define. But it does seem to me a distinct, 90s-based and feminist-inflected approach to playing that is not shared by other groups. I hope that it could prove promising for future research: if the aesthetic that I have sketched here is coherent, then the next step would be to trace its origins and its effects, both socio-politically and musically. It is also critical to caution that—as a concept that relies on affect—all of the dynamics outlined in this paper, especially the political reading, must be understood as singular and relational. That is to say, if these characteristics hold across several bands, they nevertheless manifest and function in different ways for every case. This is another reason I am eager to explore these dynamics and musicians further in the future. Thanks so much for listening, and I hope to see you out there in the real world someday.

Riot grrrls and shredder bros: Punk ethics, social justice and (un)popular popular music at School of Rock

This article presents a case study of riot grrrl music in a School of Rock franchise in the Midwestern United States. It presents the school as a place in which gender is bound up in specific notions of what it is to play rock music, notions that directly inform what constitutes popular popular music within this context. The article examines the Riot Grrrl project using frame analysis, presenting and discussing three frames through which riot grrrl was taught: as music, punk ethics and social justice. It examines a case of frame conflict as played out in a disagreement between the programme’s two male instructors. It suggests that multi-frame approaches to popular music teaching, including clashes that may arise from conflicting frames, are effective in disrupting the musical-cultural status quo and in creating spaces in which students may productively and empathetically encounter the unpopular popular music of marginalized musical ‘Others’.

Review: Revenge of the She-Punks: A Feminist Music History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot, by Vivien Goldman

Review: <i>Revenge of the She-Punks: A Feminist Music History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot</i>, by Vivien Goldman

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

Reformulating the Riot Grrrl Movement: Space and Sisterhood in Kathleen Hanna’s Lyrics

Music has become a crucial domain to discuss issues such as gender, identities and equality. With this study I aim at carrying out a feminist critical discourse analysis of the lyrics by American singer and songwriter Kathleen Hanna (1968-), a pioneer within the underground punk culture and head figure of the Riot Grrrl movement. Covering relevant issues related to women’s conditions, Hanna’s lyrics put gender issues at the forefront and become a significant means to claim feminism in the underground. In this study I pay attention to the instances in which Hanna’s lyrics in Bikini Kill and Le Tigre exhibit a reading of sisterhood and space and by doing so, I will discuss women’s invisibility in underground music and broaden the social and cultural understanding of this music

‘We Want Freedom Not Just Safety’: Biography of a Girlfesto as a Strategic Tool in Youth Activism

Girls are increasingly visible as activists demanding social change, equity and justice. Yet communication between girls and policymakers is fraught with challenges over how to translate young people’s knowledge into policy change. This article traces the history of the manifesto as a form for the marginalized to articulate new social visions, drawing on the Riot grrrl manifestos as examples of this genre. It describes the creation of the first Girlfesto at the 2018 Circles Within Circles event that brought together girls, young people, activists, researchers, and policymakers from six countries in the Global North and South to consider the role of community art-based activism by girls and young people in challenging gender-based violence, concentrating on colonial systems of violence against indigenous women and girls in Canada and South Africa. We analyse the Montebello Girlfesto and the opportunities and challenges in using the Girlfesto model, with reflections from girl participants.

Object-Oriented Diaspora Sensibilities, Disidentification, and Ghostly Performance

Object-Oriented Diaspora Sensibilities, Disidentification, and Ghostly Performance