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Girl Zine Networks, Underground Itineraries, and Riot Grrrl History: Making Sense of the Struggle for New Social Forms in the 1990s and Beyond

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2016

JANICE RADWAY
JANICE RADWAY*
Affiliation:
Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University. Email: j-radway@northwestern.edu.
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Abstract

Drawing on recently established zine archives and oral-history interviews with former girl zine producers, as well as with zine librarians, archivists, and commentators, this essay explores the significance of the fact that dissident girls and young women developed an interest in what are now called “girl zines” through a number of different routes, with a range of different interests, and at different moments over the course of the last twenty-five years. Some were directly inspired by riot grrrl bands in the early 1990s. Others happened upon zines at alternative bookstores and info-shops and as part of their participation in the larger punk underground. Still others learned of them through popular magazines, college courses, and public and private libraries, or through quite varied friendship networks. The fact of this social, material, and temporal variability raises important questions about whether “girl zines” should be thought of as a unitary genre and, correlatively, about whether the girl zine explosion itself should be construed as a secondary effect of the riot grrrl phenomenon of the early 1990s. Building on recent critiques made by punks and zinesters of color of the now-dominant narrative about the history of riot grrrl and the role of zines within it, the essay traces how that narrative developed in the context of a backlash against feminism and how it led, ultimately, to the creation of the genre now known as “girl zines” and the founding of archives designed to ensure their preservation. Though both are seen as significant political achievements for feminism, by considering Mimi Thi Nguyen's recent claim that the dominant narrative and the genealogies it constructs tend to ignore the important but often differently motivated contributions of punks and zinesters of color, the essay explores the question of what it might mean to focus on the varied itineraries that girls pursued into the punk underground and on how those itineraries affected the zines they created for often quite distinct purposes. Ultimately, the essay asks how riot grrrl and girl zine-ing ought to be understood. That is, should they be construed as a singular event, as a coherent social movement, as a fractious discourse, as a complex set of social practices, as a political intervention, or as something else? In the end, the author argues that attending to the disagreements and contestations among girl punks and zinesters who constantly called each other out over their differences suggests that as a youthful cohort profoundly affected by the vast social and cultural change associated with what is now call neoliberalism, these young people were arguing among themselves and with the surrounding culture over how to craft new, more flexible forms of subjectivity and sociality adequate to the challenges of the twenty-first century.

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Articles
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Journal of American Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , February 2016 , pp. 1 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2016 

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References

1 Available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q8_1ZcSwRo.

2 For a thorough review of these issues and an important discussion of the impact of the linguistic or discursive “turn” within the field of history see William Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). Thanks to Nick Couldry for drawing my attention to Sewell's book.

3 As this paper will show, the literature on riot grrrl emerged almost simultaneously with the appearance of the first riot grrrl bands and exploded outward from there. Developed first within underground circuits and appearing later in the mainstream press as well as in academic circles, this literature tended to link riot grrrl with feminist politics but differed over the precise nature of the connection. As far as I am aware, the first characterization of this literature as one organized by a “dominant” narrative was made by Mimi Thi Nguyen in her important article, “Riot Grrrl, Race and Revival,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 22, 2–3 (July–Nov. 2012), 173–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As will become clear, my work in this paper has been heavily influenced by Nguyen's arguments and seeks to build upon its central insights. I have also been influenced by Anita Harris's work, especially “Riding My Own Tidal Wave: Young Women's Feminist Work,” Canadian Women's Studies, 20, 4 (Winter–Spring 2001), 27–32Google Scholar; and by her later book Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). Although there are clear similarities between Harris’s larger argument and some of the observations I make here, especially in the last section of this essay, I want to stress that my temporal focus is somewhat different from Harris’s. I focus here on riot grrrl activity and girl zine production during the first half of the 1990s, before girl activism began to appear on the Internet. A significant portion of Harris’s evidence is drawn from chatrooms, blogs, websites, and other online sources, and from cultural discourses that were consolidated in the latter half of the decade. In effect, I am dealing with what might be considered the immediate prehistory to the developments Harris is detailing and thus seeking to trace how girl opposition and activism began to emerge in new forms at least in the US.

4 The literature on riot grrrl is vast and ever-expanding. As examples of the dominant narrative, Nguyen herself cites some of the earliest and most influential work, including Gayle Wald and Joanne Gottlieb, “Smells Like Teen Spirit: Riot Grrrls, Revolution, and Women in Independent Rock,” in Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose, eds., Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 250–74; Mary Celeste Kearney, “The Missing Links: Riot grrrl–Feminism–Lesbian Culture,” in Sheila Whiteley, ed., Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender (London: Routledge, 1997), 207–29; Marion Leonard, “‘Rebel Girl, You Are the Queen of My World’: Feminism, ‘Subculture,’ and Grrrl Power,” in ibid., 230–55; Rosenberg, Jessica and Garofalo, Gitana, “Riot Grrrl: Revolutions from Within,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 23, 3 (Spring 1998), 809–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Nguyen also mentions two books which have since become two of the most frequently cited sources on riot grrrl: Nadine Monem, ed., Riot Grrrl: Revolution Girl Style Now! (London: Black Dog Press, 2007); and Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010).

5 Although my project has been focussed for some time on the zines produced by girls and young women in the 1990s, I have found it necessary to engage with the history of riot grrrl because those zines have almost always been discussed as “girl zines” originating from within the movement. My own archival work has suggested, however, that the corpus of zines produced by young women is more diverse in terms of the topics they take up and the political positions they articulate than those specifically linked with the riot grrrl bands, their music, or the loose social movement that developed around them. Nguyen's work has been useful to me in part because it helped make sense of that diversity and pushed me to inquire further into its scope and historical significance. In the effort to take account of that diversity, I have found it necessary not only to rethink the nature of the connection between zines and the riot grrrl movement, also but to rethink the category of “girl zines” and riot grrrl itself, including its relations to feminism, punk, and the larger historical moment in which it emerged.

6 The literature on punk is enormous and contentious. Standard sources include Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979); Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Jon Savage, England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1992). For a sense of the ways in which the dominant interpretations of punk have been contested see Legs McNeill and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (New York: Grove Press, 1996); Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen, We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L. A. Punk (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001); and Mimi Nguyen and Golnar Nickpour, Punk (New York: Guillotine Press, 2013).

7 See, for instance, Sara Marcus's discussion of her own entry into riot grrrl, which was sparked by an account of the bands' growing popularity in Newsweek, in Girls to the Front, 1–11.

8 The zine Bitch Rag, for instance, which seems to have been produced in Orlando, Florida, proclaims above the title, “WE ARE NOT A RIOT GRRRL ZINE!!!”. Lest the reader wonder what the producer thinks is wrong with riot grrrl, she advises on the title page, “Want to be a writer? It's so easy. Write something personal (that's the best way to impress me), and send it to me today! Yes, that is easy! NO POETRY, NO FICTION, NO HAIKUS, NO ‘COLLEGEY’ CRAP, just simple everyday language. We're Bitch Rag, ya know?!!?”. Copy in author's possession, collection of anonymous interviewee. For a more detailed discussion of this zine see my article “Girls, Zines, and the Miscellaneous Production of Subjectivity in an Age of Unceasing Circulation,” No. 18 (2001), Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Writing and the Literacy & Rhetorical Studies Minor, series editor Lillian Bridwell-Bowles, editor Mesut Akdere. It was in this 2001 article that I first explored the connection between the girl zine explosion and cultural debates about the status of feminism and the nature of girlhood.

9 For a discussion of the unruliness of girls' nonconformist subject construction in zines and its roots in punk see Mary Celeste Kearney's important chapter “Grrrl Zines: Exploring Identity, Transforming Girls' Written Culture,” in Kearney, Girls Make Media (New York: Routledge, 2006), 135–187.

10 Many years ago, during a seminar at the University of Gothenberg, where I presented an exploratory lecture on girl zines, I was asked by an anonymous interlocutor whether the activities and effects I was attributing to riot grrrls and girl zinesters might actually have characterized the activities of youth more generally. At the time, I didn't have a good answer to that question but it has troubled me ever since. I would like to acknowledge my interlocutor's long-range influence here and thank him for his intervention. For an introduction to the large literature on neoliberalism see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neo-liberalism (London: Oxford, 2007); Nick Couldry, Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics after Neoliberalism (London: Sage, 2010); and Harris, Future Girl.

11 Kathleen Hanna, “My Herstory,” at www.letigreworld.com/sweepstakes/html_site/fact/khfacts.html, accessed 31 July 2013.

12 My account of riot grrrl history is indebted to Hanna's account in “My Herstory,” as well as to those given by Sara Marcus in Girls to the Front and Julia Downes, “Riot Grrrl: The Legacy and Contemporary Landscape of DIY Feminist Cultural Activism,” in Monem, 12–51. I have also relied on Johanna Fateman's “My Riot Grrrl,” in Lisa Darms, ed., The Riot Grrrl Collection (New York: The Feminist Press, 2013), 13–17.

13 According to Marcus, it was Tobi Vail who coined the terms “revolution girl style now” and “angry grrrl zines.” See her discussion in Girls to the Front, 48 and 81–82.

14 On the history of Sassy see Kara Jessella and Marisa Meltzer, How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time (New York: Faber and Faber, 2007). See also Bailey, Courtney, “Bitching and Talking/Gazing Back: Feminism as Critical Reading,” Women and Language, 26, 2 (2003) 1–8Google Scholar.

15 Marcus, Girls to the Front, 89.

16 On Girl Night and the way it foregrounded the disruptive presence of the riot grrrls within the masculinist world of punk see Lauraine Leblanc, Pretty in Punk: Girls' Gender Resistance in a Boy's Subculture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999).

17 On these developments see Sara Marcus, 125–70; and Sara Dyer, “A Brief History of My Life in Zines,” at http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingdb/zines/dyer, accessed 7 August 2015.

18 Emily White, “Revolution Girl-Style Now! Notes from the Teenage Feminist Rock ’n’ Roll Underground,” LA Weekly, 10–16 July 1992, reprinted in Evelyn McDonnell and Ann Powers, eds., Rock She Wrote: Women Write about Rock, Pop, and Rap (New York: Cooper Square Press, 1999), 396–408. This article has been enormously influential in the construction of the dominant narrative about riot grrrl. White uses the term “movement” to describe the riot grrrl scene (which she attributes to the riot grrls themselves) and explores the nature of the connections between the bands, the zines, their feminism, and their general opposition to “the bullshit, christian, capitalist way of doing things,” a quote from a two-page riot grrrl manifesto. Although White was certainly sympathetic to riot grrrl, she expressed some reservations about the riot grrrls' affective style and commented on the “political shortcomings” of the movement for involving only white, upper-middle-class young women. For a more skeptical treatment see Chideya, Farai and Rossi, Melissa, “Revolution Girl Style: Meet the Riot Grrrls – A Sassy New Breed of Feminists for the MTV age,” Newsweek, 23 Nov. 1992, 84–86Google Scholar.

19 France, Kim, “Grrrls at War,” Rolling Stone, 8–22 July 1993, 23–24Google Scholar.

20 See France's discussion of the commentary of Joan Jett, Courtney Love, and Kim Gordon about the riot grrrls. See also Sara Marcus's (210–33) thorough discussion of riot grrrl media coverage and the problems it created for the bands. For a good sense of how the media fastened on dissension within riot grrrl as a way of casting doubts on its feminism see Nina Malkin, “It's a Grrrl Thing,” Seventeen, May 1993, 80–82.

21 For a list of riot grrrl chapters see the Riot Grrrl Chapters Map, an online collaborative project created for the Alien She exhibition, initially mounted at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University in 2013. This map assembles research from various people and the public. It can be accessed at www.bit.ly/RGmap.

22 Wald and Gottlieb, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” 253. For another, equally important, early article about riot grrrl see Mary Celeste Kearney, “The Missing Links: Riot Grrrl – Feminism – Lesbian Culture,” in Whiteley, Sexing the Groove, 207–29. In this article, Kearney takes issue with the way riot grrrl was treated at the time as a minor musical subculture within punk. By exploring the connections between riot grrrl, lesbian feminism, and womyn's music, she argues that riot grrrl should be seen as a political form of feminism. Although she seeks to distinguish her claims from those of Gottlieb and Wald, I believe she simplifies their argument. Although they, too, begin by treating riot grrrl as a musical movement, their ultimate aim is to argue that riot grrrl is a form of feminist politics and a movement.

23 Interview with Kristen Schilt, 6 June 2012. As part of her engagement with riot grrrl, Schilt created a notebook, “Girls Kick Ass!”, with pasted-in clippings from zines, letters, magazines, and other sources, which she commented on in her own handwriting, sometimes with acid sarcasm and sometimes with angry, politically aware exuberance. Among the letters included in the notebook is one from Kathleen Hanna. Thanks to Kristen Schilt for sharing this notebook with me.

24 See her articles Schilt, Kristen, “‘A Little Too Ironic’: The Appropriation and Packaging of Riot Grrrl Politics by Mainstream Female Musicians,” Popular Music and Society, 26, 1 (Feb. 2003), 5–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schilt, , “‘I'll Resist with Every Inch and Every Breath’: Girls and Zine-Making as a Form of Resistance,” Youth and Society, 35, 1 (Sept. 2003), 71–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schilt, “‘The Punk White Privilege Scene’: Riot Grrrl, White Privilege, and Zines,” in Jo Reger, ed., Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women's Movement (New York: Routledge, 2005), 39–56.

25 Tristan Taormino and Karen Green, A Girl's Guide to Taking over the World: Writings from the Girl Zine Revolution (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1997). For other early anthologies that include the words of self-described riot grrrls see Hilary Carlip, Girl Power: Young Women Speak Out! Personal Writings from Teenage Girls (New York: Warner Books, 1995), 31–63; Barbara Findlen, Listen up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation (Seattle: Seal Press, 1995).

26 Cherie Turner, The Riot Grrrl Movement: The Feminism of a New Generation (New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, 2001). For an idea of what Rosen publishes see their website at www.rosenpublishing.com.

27 Ibid., 55.

28 On the intentions and activities of Pussy Riot, along with celebrations of them by well-known feminists and celebrities, including Toby Vail, Johanna Fateman, and Yoko Ono, see Pussy Riot! A Punk Prayer for Freedom (New York: The Feminist Press, 2013).

29 For a concise summary of Hall's understanding of the dual meanings of the term “articulation” see Grossberg, Lawrence, “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall,” Journal of Communication Inquiry, 10, 2 (June 1986), 45–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 See Alison Wolfe's comments in her oral history interview with the Experience Music Project, which was conducted in Seattle in 1999. I would like to thank Jacob McMurry at EMP for giving me access to the audio and transcripts of this interview and others, which were conducted with many of the participants in the early girl band scene in Olympia. Wolfe's observations suggest that the band members were themselves transformed by being pulled into the vortex of energy generated around their music and zines and thus increasingly interpellated by the narrative construal of their intervention as an explicit and deliberate feminist act, one characteristic of a new, Third Wave form of feminism. Indeed, although the lyrics of many of their songs and their zine writings drew on familiar feminist concerns and languages around sexual violence, the early riot grrrls were often critical of Second Wave feminism. For Kathleen Hanna's own confession of a “mistake” in the way she understood feminism at the time see Celia Hex, “Fierce, Funny, Feminists: Gloria Steinem and Kathleen Hanna,” Feminist eZine (2000) at www.feministezine.com/feminist/funny/Fierce-Funny-Feminists.html, accessed 11 May 2011. See also Hex, “Gen X Survivor: From Riot Grrrl Rock Star to Feminist Artist,” in Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millenium (New York: Washington Square Press, 2003), 131–37.

31 For commentary on the particulars of such disillusionment see Nguyen and Nikpour, Punk, 3–9. For an account of the continuities between riot grrrl zines and Second Wave anti-sexual-violence discourse see Virginia Corvid, “Girl Love and Girl Power Is Warning a Girl about a Guy Who Raped Someone so They Won't Be the Next Victim: Anti-Sexual Violence Discourse in Riot Grrrl Zines,” senior thesis, University of Washington, copy in author's possession. Thanks to Virginia Corvid for sharing her thesis with me and for permission to quote from it.

32 The term “backlash,” of course, comes from Susan Faludi's book of the same name, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women (New York: Crown, 1991), published almost simultaneously with the first Bikini Kill and riot grrrl zines.

33 For three comprehensive accounts of the 1980s and 1990s and their impact on feminist politics see Catharine Lumby, Bad Girls: The Media, Sex & Feminism in the 90s (St. Leonards, NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin,1997); Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London: Sage, 2008); and Susan Douglas, Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message That Feminism's Work Is Done (New York: Times Books, 2010).

34 For an account of the way the in-your-face style of the riot grrrls was contained, especially through the promotion of a new group of girl singers, see Kristin Schilt, “A Little Too Ironic,” especially 5–6.

35 On the emergence and differential organization of these archives see Kate Eichhorn, The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013). Eichhorn's work over the years has had a significant impact on my own thinking about zines and riot grrrl and I'd like to thank her for the ongoing engagement. See also Kelly Wooten and Liz Bly, Make Your Own History: Documenting Feminist and Queer Activism in the 21st Century (Los Angeles: Litwin Books, 2012). On zines and archivy see Jessie Lymn, “Queering Archives: The Practices of Zines,” PhD dissertation, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, 2013.

36 For trenchant critiques of the way the history of feminism and feminist theory have been told see Wiegman, Robyn, “Feminism's Apocalyptic Futures,” New Literary History, 31, 4 (Autumn 2000), 805–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wiegman, Object Lessons (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); and Joan Wallach Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

37 The question of the racial politics of punk is a highly fraught one. For an introduction to the issues involved see Nguyen, Mimi Thi, “It's (Not) a White World: Looking for Race in Punk,” Punk Planet, 8 (Nov.–Dec. 1998), 256–68Google Scholar, where she not only calls out punk for its “‘whitestraight-boy’ hegemony,” at 258, but also explores what it means to view the punk scene from elsewhere; that is, from a vantage point marked by multiple forms of difference, which she describes as “‘Asianqueergirltomboy’ specificity,” at 260. See also Golnar Nikpour, “White Riot: Another Failure,” Maximum Rocknroll, 17 Jan. 2011, a hard-hitting review of Stephen Duncombe and Max Tremblay, eds., White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race (New York: Verso, 2011).

38 Nguyen, “Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival,” 192

39 V. Vale, Zines!, Volume II (San Francisco, CA: V/Search Publications, 1997). It should be emphasized here that Vale's anthology points to another genealogy, one quite different from the one I have been discussing in this article. That genealogy would trace the historical and political diversity of alternative self-publishing efforts from the Situationists to the samizdat publications of the Soviet era, to the underground comix, broadsheets and newsletters of the 1960s and 1970s, through to the zines of the punk era and beyond. In such a narrative, riot grrrl zines would be seen as one instance of a more general practice of alternative publication. To a certain extent, Stephen Duncombe's important book Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (New York: Verso, 1997) relates such a narrative, making thoughtful arguments about zines more generally as a historically specific political intervention. In my view, however, despite its many strengths, his approach fails to deal adequately with the way gender, sexuality, and race inflected zine production in the 1980s and 1990s. Consequently, he gives short shrift to riot grrrl zines, queercore zines, and zines by people of color, all of which are now among the most discussed of all zines, an historical fact itself worthy of discussion. My larger project will take on that question specifically. Vale's anthology, which was published the same year as Duncombe's book, confirms that this other genealogy was at least as prominent as the semi-autonomous ones then being constructed around gender and sexuality and, as the following discussion will demonstrate, around race. Thus, in Vale's book, although Mimi Nguyen is interviewed along with the members of the Revolutionary Knitting Circle (“a mostly teenage feminist collective”), she is also placed in a context that includes “Dishwasher Pete,” Keffo, the creator of a zine called Temp Slave, and Otto von Stroheim, the producer of Tiki News, which was devoted to “the preservation, celebration and revival of “Tiki Culture.”

40 Vale, 54.

41 Ibid., 56, original emphasis.

42 In that prologue, Nguyen spoke directly to her readers: “welcome to a race riot,” she wrote, “the vietnamese phrase below reads, ‘she supports her little sister,’ approximately anyway.” She continues, “I began this in August 1995 at the end of my p-rock [heart] affair. i finished this in August 1997 at the beginning of what my best friend iraya calls a MULTISUBCULTURAL revolution.” Evolution of a Race Riot, Ailecia Ruscin Zine Collection, Duke University, Box 4, Folder Evolution, 4. This particular iteration of Nguyen's zine appears to be a 1998 reprint executed in August with “updates and additions, including 13 new zine titles.”

43 Ibid., 4.

44 On Nguyen's later thinking about refugees see her book The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

45 Vale, 57.

46 Ibid., 59.

47 Ibid., 61.

48 Ibid., 61, original emphasis.

49 Ibid., 65.

50 I have not yet been able to construct a full chronology of writings about race in the girl punk scene. Even at this stage in my research, however, it seems clear that the discussion emerged first within the zine scene itself, as is demonstrated by Nguyen's ability to draw upon more than 30 zines by people of color for her 1997 anthology. Some of the first academic discussions of race in girl punk include Kristen Schilt, “The Punk White Privilege Scene”; and Licona, Adela, “(B)orderlands' Rhetorics and Representations: The Transformative Potential of Feminist Third Space Scholarship and Zines,” NWSA Journal, 17, 2 (Summer 2005), 104–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In addition see Licona's later book, Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012). See also Gayle Wald, “One of the Boys?” Whiteness, Gender, and Popular Music Studies,” in Mike Hill, ed., Whiteness: A Critical Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 151–67. Although this article focusses principally on the racialized performances of Janis Joplin, Wald also mentions more recent female performers like Courtney Love and Kim Gordon and references the developing work on masculinity and race in rock.

51 Nguyen, “Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival,” 173.

52 Ibid., 183, original emphasis.

53 Ibid., 186.

54 Ibid., 186–87.

55 Ibid., 187, emphasis added. The point that what Nguyen calls “multisubcultural participation” traversed both punk and hip-hop is a significant one since it points to the problem of the underlying “event” under discussion in the present article. What is the significance of focussing on the “event” called riot grrrl, rather than on the literary genre “girl zines,” or on the temporally close development of punk and hip-hop, or on something even larger, yet apparently more diffuse – certain tendencies emerging more broadly among youth in the 1990s? That is the question this article and my larger project seeks to explore. For an intervention that explored the co-presence of hip-hop and punk feminisms see the website for the Hip Hop and Punk Feminisms: Theory, Genealogy, Performance conference, held 5–6 Dec. 2013 at the University of Illinois. The program, participants, and reading list can be accessed at http://hiphopandpunkfeminisms.weebly.com.

56 Nguyen, “Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival,” 188. For accounts of the LA punk scene see Alice Bag, Violence Girl: East L. A. Rage to Hollywood Stage. A Chicana Punk Story (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2011); and Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen, We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L. A. Punk (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001).

57 On queercore (also referred to as homocore) see du Plessis, Michael and Chapman, Kathleen, “Queercore: The Distinct Identities of Subculture,” College Literature, 24, 1 (Feb. 1997), 45–58Google Scholar. See also Isaacson, Johanna, “From Riot Grrrl to CrimethInc: A Lineage of Expressive Negation in Feminist Punk and Queercore, Liminalities, 7, 4 (Dec. 2011), 1–18Google Scholar; and Camille Erickson, “Querying Sex, Gender, and Race through the Queercore Zine Movement: G. B. Jones and Vaginal Davis Protest Conformity,” 2013 Gateway Prize for Excellent Writing, Digital Commons @Macalester College. See also Amy Spencer, DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture (London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 2005). For a differently organized archive, one focussed around queercore and homocore zines as well as a range of others addressing “expressions of gender and sexuality,” see Q-Zap, the Queer Zine Archive Project, organized by Chris Wilde and Milo Miller. This is a web-based archive that can be accessed at www.qzap.org/v8/index.php.

58 For a discussion of the way queercore functioned as a counter public sphere for individuals seeking to mark their difference “from dominant straight culture and lesbian/gay parent culture alike,” see du Plessis and Chapman, especially 45–49 and 54–55.

59 Halberstam, Judith, “What's That Smell? Queer Temporalities and Subcultural Lives,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 6, 3 (2003), 313–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 There is some evidence to suggest that some of the original riot grrrl band members were uncomfortable with the way riot grrrl was taken up as an identity form. Indeed Kathleen Hanna often stressed the fluidity of the term, “riot grrrl,” and insisted that it could be taken up by anyone and made to mean in multiple ways. Vail, especially, emphasized the importance of action rather than identity and distanced herself from riot grrrl early on because of the way it developed in the wake of media publicity that drew many younger girls to it who were not interested in activism and change. See Marcus, Girls to the Front, 257, for an account of Vail's disaffection, where she is quoted as saying, “I'm all for grass roots girl power movements, but this riot grrrl thing to me has been so taken out of context by the media that it almost seems ridiculous to insist on calling yourself one and I just wonder if it could possibly mean anything at this point … The main problem to me is that it's all about identity, and an illusive one at that, rather than on action – everybody's talking about what kind of girl, nobody's starting a riot.” For more of Vail's thinking on this issue as well as about Marcus's book and the riot grrrl revival see her blog, Jigsaw, especially posts for 28 Sept. 2010 and 13 Oct. 2010, at jigsawunderground.blogspot.com/search/label/riot%20grrl, accessed 11 July 2013.

61 My thinking about the possibilities and limitations of identity politics has been significantly influenced by the work of Wiegman, Robyn, especially “Feminism's Apocalyptic Futures,” New Literary History, 31, 4 (Autumn 2000), 805–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 For wildly different but useful introductions to the complicated history of the 1990s, see, in addition to Harris, Future Girl; and McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism, Timothy Garton Ash, History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s (New York: Random House, 1999); Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Colin Henderson, American Culture in the 1990s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Hardt and Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004); Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006); William L. O'Neill, A Bubble in Time: America during the Interwar Years, 1989–2001 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009); Paul Smith, Millenial Dreams: Contemporary Culture and Capital in the North (New York: Verso, 1997); Joseph Stiglitz, The Roaring Nineties (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004); and Phillip E. Wegner, Life between Two Deaths, 1989–2001: U. S. Culture in the Long Nineties (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

63 For a fuller discussion of the modes of sociability created by girl zine networks see my earlier discussion “From the Underground to the Stacks and beyond: Girl Zines, Zine Librarians, and the Importance of Itineraries through Print Culture,” in Christine Pawley and Louise S. Robbins, eds., Libraries and the Reading Public in Twentieth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 237–54. For a discussion of the relationship between alternative media and the concept of prefigurative politics see Chris Atton, Alternative Media (London: Sage, 2002); Nick Couldry and James Curran, Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); and Olga Bailey, Bart Cammaerts, and Nico Carpentier, Understanding Alternative Media (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2008).

64 Sadie Bening, Tammy Rae Carland, Carrie Brownstein, Johanna Fateman, Kathleen Hanna, and Miranda July and are only a few of the now well-known artists and filmmakers who had ties to the early riot grrrl bands. For more information on the aesthetic afterlives of riot grrrl participants see the website for the Alien She exhibition at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, 21 Sept. 2013–16 Feb. 2014, which can be accessed at http://millergallery.cfa.cmu.edu/exhibitions/alienshe.

65 For an important account of the way the Plotzki Femzine, a print and online zine project, functions as a new form of rhizomatic media and thereby “problematize[s] existing scholarship on feminist zines” see Chidgey, Red, Payne, Jenny Gunnarsson, and Zoble, Elke, “Rumours from around the Bloc: Gossip, Rhizomatic Media, and the Plotzki Femzine,” in Feminist Media Studies, 9, 4 (2009), 478–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Chidgey, Red, “Free Trade: Distribution Economies in Feminist Zine Networks,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 35, 1 (2009), 28–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 For the way in which girl zines strain after new forms of subjectivity and sociability see my earlier discussion, “Zines Then and Now: What Are They? What Do You Do with Them? How Do They Work?”, in Anouk Lang, ed., From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the Turn of the Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 27–47. For a related account of the way life narratives of the Occupy Wall Street movement demonstrate efforts to articulate new subjectivities and political forms see Cherniavsky, Eva, “‘Refugees from This Native Dreamland’: Life Narratives of Occupy Wall Street,” Biography, 37, 1 (Winter 2014), 279–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I learned of Cherniavsky's article only as this manuscript was being finished. For additional work on girl zines and subjectivity and their relation to Third Wave feminism see Alison Piepmeier, Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism (New York: New York University Press, 2009).