International Girl Gang Underground

lookuplookup:

I know I talk about my conflicted relationship with riot grrrl a lot, but I just watched this video of Kathleen Hanna speaking on her involvement with riot grrrl & her post-Bikini Kill projects and I’m really, really glad that I did. There are so many good moments in this but two things that resonated with me were:

1. Kathleen talking about calling girls to the front at shows not just to facilitate a safer space, but to make the female musicians onstage more visible so that girls in the audience would realize that playing music is not magic, it’s not a secret skill, it’s something that anyone with time and resources can be a part of. That’s something I think about a lot as someone who is constantly in the process of learning to play the guitar — the importance of having visible models for what I want to achieve, for being aware of music that is accessible to me, that says, “You can do this too.”

2. Le Tigre and the politics of representation when it comes to feminist music. Kathleen explains how she envisioned Le Tigre as a feminist *NSync, as a band with costumes and dance moves and a stage show — all things that she had once thought to be inappropriate for/unaccessable to feminist musicians. She also talks about using Le Tigre as a means of navigating the conversations around authenticity/fakery that surround female musicians, whether or not they’re associated with feminist politics.

So much of what I see on tumblr re: riot grrrl is the rehashing of old riot grrrl slogans, so it was really restorative for me to listen to/see something that goes deeper, that reminds me that the women involved in riot grrrl are living, breathing, growing, learning people with interesting thoughts and perspectives — that they’re not just the static words and images that people reblog endlessly.

Towards the end Kathleen namechecks the International Girl Gang Underground zine and I felt a twinge of guilt because I have a piece in it against riot grrrl revival… but I do think it’s important to continue to critique and challenge and (most importantly?) improve upon these movements, so hopefully I won’t feel too guilty for too long…