What Riot Grrrl Means to Me

Despite being trans and seen as a boy by the rest of society, I identified as a feminist as far back as I can remember. The group of guys I hung out with in high school used to play a game the rules of which could basically be summed up as 'let's see who can say fucked up shit that will offend Jamie first', which would usually mean saying some racist or sexist bullshit. My identity as a feminist was rough-hewn and didn't stem either from some sort of a progressive upbringing (in fact, my parents are anything but feminist) or me dipping my toes into genuine feminist theory and discourse (this wouldn't happen until late high school). Where it came from was the fact that, internally, I thought of myself as a girl and could empathise with the things I saw the girls around me going through as they were growing up, as well as the fact that the men around me, thinking of me as another one of them, did not put on the usual filters they would when cis girls were around. In some ways, being trans is actually what contributed to my feminism and I doubt I would be the same if I were a cis woman.

Sometimes, I wish high-school me had access to riot grrrl or some other form of feminism accessible to young people, but it was not meant to be. The year 1996 is often listed as the year the riot grrrl movement's shining star faded. The usual story goes that this was due to media misrepresentation, establishment of hierarchies, lack of intersectionality and the simple fact that most of the girls who started riot grrrl and fed its flames through zines and music got older. I was two years old then, being raised as a boy on the other side of the Atlantic. Besides, even in my teenage years, I was never really a punk kid - I was raised on Pink Floyd and heavy metal, moved over to more symphonic forms of rock and metal, where women actually saw some representation (although usually only as singers) and ended up with post-rock.

Despite that, some two years ago, I decided on a whim to give riot grrrl a try. I think this had to do with a number of factors, but the two major ones was that riot grrrl music and culture featured heavily in the game Gone Home which came out in 2013 but which I didn't get to play until roughly 2015. It's a story about two girls falling in love in mid-90s Pacific Northwest, so, you know, exactly my jam. In that game, you find cassettes from bands like Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy and, of course, Bikini Kill and can play them around the house. I don't know why it took a second playthrough with my girlfriend at the time for me to actually sit down and look up that music, because even the first time, it captivated me - it felt like I'd fallen back through time to being my 16-year-old self, confused and lost, stuck with so many feelings of sadness and rage. Listening to riot grrrl for the first time, despite the fact that most of the music was 25 years old at that point, felt like those feelings were, for the first time in my life, given a voice, a sound and an aesthetic. It helped me channel them into a vision of feminism that wasn't just pure theory, but that a feminism that brought with it a sense of urgency and, most importantly, community. It wasn't just that these girls in the early-to-mid-90s were upset with the current state of the world, but that they weren't alone, that together they could try and build a better world.

Flyer written by Kathleen Hannah (singer of Bikini Kill) in 1990 - The Riot Grrrl Collection

In some ways, 2016 couldn't've been a better year for me to discover this piece of feminist history. With the election of Trump, the collective grief briefly (sadly) gave birth to new feminist communities and movements. Armed with my background in feminist theory and some practical experience (GamerGate, which broke out in 2014, was a sort of tipping point for me and a lot of other women and feminists in video games), I jumped to action, excited to build a new and radical movement that would perhaps continue in the spirit of riot grrrl, but would finally be truly intersectional. This did not come to pass, as the movement quickly became overwhelmed with white, middle-class cishet women who were largely unwilling to commit themselves to the radical action that the rest of us - queer women, trans women, poor women, women of colour - needed and pushed for. We made steps backwards instead of forwards, learning nothing from our past. The sheer number of clueless #resistance types I had to deal with has, in all honesty, left me somewhat bitter and anxious about participating in feminist events that aren't organised by people I know and trust. (Most recently, there was a feminist art exhibit in Prague that looked great, but I decided not to go both because national TV was going to be there and because the organisers referred to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's We Should All Be Feminists as 'one of the holy grails of feminist literature', completely disregarding the issues with the book itself and CNA's transphobia.)

As I started listening to Bikini Kill on repeat, I decided that it would be good to find out more about queer music of the era, as well as other music by women-centering bands. This has proved to not be an entirely easy thing to do as a lot of the music by these bands, despite being referenced in queer and feminist literature and by people who'd lived through the era, are quite difficult to find, legally or otherwise. Nevertheless, I persevered and added other bands to my angry dyke repertoire, such as: Adickdid, Babes in Toyland, The Butchies, Huggy Bear, Julie Ruin (Kathleen Hannah's solo project), Le Tigre, Sister George, Slant 6, Sleater-Kinney, Team Dresch and Tribe 8. This line-up has become really important to me, even if it's a difficult kind of thing to get other people interested in. Riot grrrl bands and some of the other bands listed here were seriously a time-and-place sort of deal and, if you aren't interested in the experiences of American queer women in the 90s the same way I am, it probably won't speak to you. 

Hell, what is more time-and-place than what is probably my favourite Bikini Kill song 'Thurston Hearts the Who', which was an off-the-cuff performance that, to my knowledge, only exists in one recording - the show where Bikini Kill recorded their first record, which was somehow, magically, recorded on video, too: