On Sunday the New York Times reviewed a Kathleen Hanna tribute concert that took place six months ago, as an entry into a discussion of how the 1990s feminist movement of riot grrrl (which included, but was not limited to, music) has, and has not, been remembered. The article’s timing coincided with the DVD release of the documentary Who Took the Bomp? Le Tigre on Tour, which follows one of Hanna’s bands, Le Tigre, on their farewell tour in 2004 and 2005. The film is distributed by Oscilloscope, a company owned by Adam Yauch, whose fellow Beastie Boy Adam Horowitz is Hanna’s husband, and is one of several recent examples of riot grrrl veterans writing their own histories. The Times article also mentions Sara Marcus‘s recent book Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Movement, as well as NYU’s Riot Grrrl Archive.?
Of course, within a movement so (rightfully) focused on identity politics, turning stories into histories is never that simple. One criticism of Marcus’s otherwise exhaustive history is that although the book discussed the movement’s complicated, and sometimes failed, interactions with the issue of race, women of color within the movement largely went unheard. And the documentary details a promotion with Jane Magazine that almost falls through because of the use of the word “lesbian” in the ad copy (a story that is extra-harsh for, though unsurprising to, ex-Sassy girls).?
It’s natural that the physical riot girl archive would exist at NYU, a school with a robust performance studies department, including scholar Diana Taylor, Ph.D, who wrote a landmark work about the blurred line between archive and repertoire. This complication is arguably manifested in the Times‘s failure to mention an equally important archive run by Hanna herself: the online Bikini Kill Archive, which collects personal stories related to another of Hanna’s bands. The riot grrrl rejection of media (a “blackout”) after an infamously misrepresentative Newsweek profile kept the movement firmly within the realm of repertoire until these recent attempts to historicize.
And yet, when Hanna spoke to AOL’s Spinner and to CNN about the documentary, she faced, to an extent, the same media misunderstandings as ever. Dan Reilly at Spinner asked Hanna for a ruling on Odd Future, and Abbey Goodman at CNN looked to Hanna to confirm her claim that ”singers like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Ke$ha” claim to be “touching on themes of gay empowerment in their music, but for some reason [they don't] quite resonate.” (As we’ve noted, that claim rejects an audience’s own agency.) Hanna is still held to higher standards than the rest of us, and called on to be unrealistically definitive and authoritative. Do we need Hanna to be our feminist figurehead? Can’t we be our own feminists?
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