I. WHAT WAS RIOT GRRRL?

Constructing a historical account of any series of social, cultural, or economic developments is a fraught activity. Decisions must be made about one's animating research questions, about which archives and documents are to be investigated, about how to bracket and punctuate one's understanding of the chronological time to be surveyed. One also has to make decisions about the kinds of narrative tropes to be employed in structuring the resulting account. Together, these and a host of theoretical assumptions and methodological protocols enable certain phenomena – actors, actions, institutions, and events – to wheel into view as the apparent “facts” demanding explanation.Footnote ²

I invoke this historiographic common sense as a way of rendering contingent the now familiar history of the riot grrrl movement of the 1990s, which has emerged in recent years in dominant form through a range of different accounts, both popular and scholarly.Footnote ³ Although these narratives differ significantly and in important particulars, for the most part they are constructed around a core set of apparent “facts” that construe riot grrrl as a more or less coherent social movement that radiated out from punk music circles and, through sonic and embodied performances, as well as supporting zine production, created new forms of feminism for the 1990s.Footnote ⁴

This narrative is not mistaken. Indeed there are many reasons to continue to tell the story of riot grrrl in this particular way. Nevertheless, I want to raise questions about how to narrate the disparate activities that coalesced around certain female-fronted punk bands in the 1990s and continued in mutating form for some time after. I want to do so because my study of girl zine creators and the networks of communication they generated has begun to suggest that the act of naming what happened in and around these bands as a movement, and as an autonomous one at that, with a certain coherence and “organicity” and an identifiable trajectory, may narrow and fix the fluidities of social process too much and iron out complexities and contradictions that ought to be attended to with greater care.Footnote ⁵

What concerns me is that as these histories organize a messy, distinctly wild, range of social practices into the thing-ness of a “movement,” they thereby miss the disparate routes young women traveled as they intersected in different ways with the loose constellation of activities and technologies known to constitute the punk and post-punk scenes and the cultural underground more generally.Footnote ⁶ These activities were many and included producing and listening to music; frequenting clubs and shows; creating, reviewing, and reading zines; attending zine fests; developing extended networks of dispersed but like-minded friends; crashing in punk houses with fluid groups of others; and occasionally organizing and meeting in local activist groups. Some girls and young women participated in all of these activities. Others did not. Some focussed their investment around the bands exclusively, while others ranged more widely. Some girls came to zine production via the music, whether riot grrrl-identified or not. Still others picked up zine-ing later at the suggestion of friends or because the mainstream media had publicized the activities of riot grrrl.Footnote ⁷ Some identified explicitly as riot grrrls, while others felt compelled to refuse that identity altogether.Footnote ⁸

The question I want to raise here about all of this activity concerns the larger significance of girls' different forms of engagement with the particulars of underground and alternative cultural scenes. What might emerge more clearly if, rather than focussing on a single trajectory into one set of activities, accounts attended to the distinctions and variability, to the fluidity and dynamism, of the practices and performances that were explosively generated when young women of different ages, different backgrounds, and different concerns crossed paths and interacted – or at least acted in each other's vicinity – for a time? What happened when they used punk and zines to behave in certain ways, to interrogate who they were, what they had in common, how they were different, and why they were nonetheless drawn to each other's compelling outpouring of anger and exuberance? What is the significance of the variability of the practices that hailed them and enabled them to situate themselves in new ways with respect to each other, to the larger social worlds around them, to their pasts, and to the concrete present opening out before them? And, finally, what might those practices have to do with other changes during the same period, whether social, cultural, economic, or technological?

This is an ambitious set of questions. Given space constraints, the present article seeks only to set forth the rationale for posing them and begins to sketch out the structure of a larger project aiming to address them. The focus is on three tasks here. The following section, section II, details the dominant narrative about riot grrrl as a feminist social movement and explores how it was generated over time by disparate actors within the punk and zine scenes, in the larger realm of print culture, and within certain “legitimate” cultural institutions. Section III considers the significance of critiques of this narrative by women-of-color zine producers, most particularly Mimi Thi Nguyen. Finally, section IV explores the connections between those critiques and my preliminary research findings, which have emerged from the pairing of oral history interviews with archival research in different zine collections. Read in juxtaposition, those interviews and zine collections provide evidence not only of a distinct unruliness in performances of subjectivity among disaffected girls in the 1990s, but also of multiple zine networks and disparate itineraries through the cultural underground which, when foregrounded as different, suggest that the history of riot grrrl might usefully be told in ways other than it has been heretofore.Footnote ⁹

Indeed, my interviews and archival research have begun to suggest that it might be worthwhile to rethink riot grrrl less as a unified social movement and more as a kind of underground crossroads, a social nexus at which many underground itineraries intersected. The interactions that resulted may have generated their own kind of explosive energy and become a kind of vortex whose centripetal force attracted a variety of girls, young women, and even some men who had disparate reasons for disidentifying with the cultural mainstream. Riot grrrl might perhaps best be thought of, then, as a generative space that intersected with and influenced, but did not necessarily initiate, a range of distinct modes of subject performance that themselves produced different confrontations with the dominant social formation and different trajectories into adulthood. Ultimately, I want to explore the possibility that these ephemeral itineraries and trajectories, which – ironically – the materiality of zine archives and collections renders at least partially traceable, do not deny or erase the feminist interests of riot grrrls. Rather, they weave them interstitially into a larger, highly unsettled and disordered social situation that was experienced with particular intensity by young people who were children in the late 1970s and the 1980s and came of age in the 1990s.

The decentering and de-reification of riot grrrl that results surfaces the boisterousness of the multifarious practices that young people generated in conversation with each other in response to the pressures they experienced. What emerges, as a consequence, is a more acute sense of the intersections, tensions, and quarrels that were generated as youth sought to cope with the effects of the neoliberal, high-consumerist social formation then being consolidated all around them. Riot grrrls were not alone in dissenting from the mainstream. In fact, they actively struggled along with, beside, and even in conflict with other youth to articulate dissident subject positions and social forms that might address what all perceived to be the duplicities, inconsistences, and forms of violence characteristic of the dominant culture. In so doing, they strained to give form to more fluid, more flexible, less hierarchical social relationships in the face of the instrumentalist, consumerist, and individualist orientations to the world pressed upon them by authorities associated with the coalescing social formation.Footnote ¹⁰

II. RIOT GRRRL: ACCOUNTING FOR THE FAMILIAR ORIGIN STORY

The dominant narrative about riot grrrl goes something like this. Sometime in the mid-1970s, at a range of different places around the globe, a new musical form dubbed “punk rock” emerged. Among its legions of fans was a young woman named Kathleen Hanna, born in 1968 in Olympia, Washington, who was, according to her own testimony, obsessed with only three things in high school – punk, weed, and alcohol.Footnote ¹¹ Subsequently, Hanna enrolled at the Evergreen State College, where she studied photography; admired the work of Kathy Acker, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and Cindy Sherman; and mounted an exhibit about sexism, which was taken down in the middle of the night by the college administration.Footnote ¹² In response, she established an art gallery called Recko Muse with two friends and then created a series of bands with names like Amy Carter, Viva Knievel and, most famously, Bikini Kill, formed in 1990 with Kathi Wilcox, Billy Karren, and Tobi Vail. Hanna had approached Tobi Vail because she admired her zine, Jigsaw, which Vail had begun self-publishing in 1988, the same year that Donna Dresch created the zine Chainsaw, and Laura McDougal, who had previously played in the LA-based band Snakepit with Billy Karren, created her zine, Sister Nobody. Zines, which were handmade pamphlets self-published through small-scale reproduction and circulation, were a ubiquitous presence within the punk scene, and these three titles, along with Girl Germs by Molly Neuman and Alison Wolfe, were among the first to explore the angry views of girls interested in calling out the multiple ways they were dismissed, scorned, violated, and controlled not only in the punk scene but also in their daily lives.Footnote ¹³

In February of 1991, Neuman and Wolfe joined Erin Smith to play their first show as Bratmobile, on the same bill as Bikini Kill. Smith was the co-author of a zine about old television shows entitled Teenage Gang Debs. Almost simultaneously, Sassy, a glossy yet hip new magazine for young women, launched a feature known as the “Zine Corner” where the editors informed their readers about the exploding universe of underground zine publication by girls.Footnote ¹⁴

Then, during the summer of 1991, a number of related developments augmented the sense that something significant was happening among punk girls and women. Some of the members of Bikini Kill and Bratmobile relocated to Washington, DC, where they connected with Sharon Cheslow and a number of other female musicians who had already been trying to intervene in the punk scene there. In early July, Hanna joined Allison Wolfe, Molly Neuman, and Jen Smith at the office of Neuman's father, where they produced the first issue of a zine they titled riot grrrl, which they described as a “free weekly mini-zine,” focussed on “the general lack of girl power in society as a whole and in the punk rock underground specifically.” With the help of Cheslow and others, Hanna and her friends then sought to organize conversations among “like-minded female punks” by calling meetings at a space in Arlington, VA occupied by Positive Force, an organization aiming to channel punk disaffection into activism and community service. The meetings that resulted, as Sara Marcus has noted, would “retroactively” be referred to as the first meetings of a movement that became known as “Riot Grrrl.”Footnote ¹⁵

Later, in August, Bikini Kill and Bratmobile traveled back to Olympia, where they joined 7 Year Bitch, Heavens to Betsy and a number of other female and queercore bands at 7 August 2015 Love Rock Revolution Girl Style Now, the first night of the five-day International Pop Underground Convention. By all accounts, Girl Night, as it came to be known, was startling, even electrifying, if not also controversial within the highly gendered world of punk.Footnote ¹⁶ As a result, Bikini Kill and Bratmobile regularly performed to growing audiences around the country. Then, the following summer, an explicitly named Riot Grrrl Convention was subsequently organized in DC, where Hanna helped to organize a two-hour session called Unlearning Racism. Around the same time, Riot Grrrl New York was organized, as was Riot Grrrl Press, which was established by Erika Reinstein and May Summer to help girls distribute their zines. Sara Dyer also began publishing Action Girl Newsletter, a review zine designed to enable young women and girls to find self-publications by other girls.Footnote ¹⁷

Very quickly, this feverish activity attracted the attention of alternative and mainstream media who variously sought to make sense of what was going on. Although some of that media coverage was sympathetic, as was, for example, Emily White's generally positive piece for the free tabloid newspaper LA Weekly, entitled “Revolution Girl-Style Now! Notes from the Teenage Feminist Rock ’n’ Roll Underground,” others were somewhat skeptical and even critical as they focussed on contradictions and controversy within the movement.Footnote ¹⁸ Among the most sensational, perhaps, despite its fairly complex treatment of riot grrrl, was a report appearing in Rolling Stone in 1993, which explored tensions between the riot grrrls and earlier female punk musicians, and began,

Although sensationalized publicity like this seems to have expanded the audiences for riot grrrl-associated bands and girl zines, it also produced dissension within the bands themselves and within the larger music scene.Footnote ²⁰ Ultimately, it led some of the riot grrrls to withdraw from speaking with the mainstream press. Still, most of the riot grrrl bands continued to perform through the 1990s; various riot grrrl conventions were independently organized across the US in places like Philadelphia, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and Kansas City; and girls continued to circulate zines through the mail, hailing each other as like-minded misfits and outsiders.Footnote ²¹ In their zines, they discussed domestic violence, incest, and rape; wrote about sexuality and explored the meaning of identifying as lesbian, queer, straight, or even straight-edge; and laid out their hopes for a more egalitarian, girl-friendly future. Despite such frenetic activity, by the end of the decade the most prominent of the riot grrrl bands had disbanded, including Bikini Kill, and what had appeared to some as a new kind of feminism for the 1990s seemed to have run its course.

And yet – even as the explosive energy that had circulated around riot grrrl began to dissipate during the second half of the decade, some of the young women who had been caught up in these musical practices and self-publishing efforts moved deliberately to suggest that they ought to be viewed together as precisely a consequential form of feminism. As early as 1994, in fact, Joanne Gottlieb and Gayle Wald, then Princeton graduate students active in local punk scenes, published one of the first academic articles about riot grrrl in the collection Microphone Fiends, edited by Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose. Entitled “Smells Like Teen Spirit: Riot Grrrls, Revolution and Women in Independent Rock,” the article marshaled careful arguments suggesting that “Riot Grrrl – the name refers to the movement-at-large – has forged salient connections between musical subculture and explicitly feminist politics.”Footnote ²²

Only a year later, Kristen Schilt, an undergraduate sociology major at the University of Texas at Austin, mailed a questionnaire to seventeen young women whose zines she culled from the large collection she had assembled as part of her intense involvement in punk subcultures and in riot grrrl specifically.Footnote ²³ She was interested in the way these titles addressed feminist issues and intended to use her respondents' answers as the basis for her senior thesis research into the similarities between friendships among riot grrrls and girl zine-makers and those of the Victorian women chronicled by women's historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, whom she had read in one of her sociology classes. Subsequently, Schilt continued her investigations by conducting additional interviews with some of the most prominent riot grrrl band members for her UCLA master's thesis in sociology. Schilt would later add significantly to the corpus of early academic articles about the meaning and significance of riot grrrl.Footnote ²⁴

In 1999, as Schilt was writing her thesis on riot grrrl, one of the first full-length books to treat the relationship between girls and punk was published by Rutgers University Press, testifying even more resolutely to the fact that within a very short time, some girl punks, as well as riot grrrls, had moved from clubs, alternative bookstores, and info shops into the precincts of legitimate culture carrying their mix tapes and zines in messenger bags and backpacks as they traversed the space between the underground and academia. Like Schilt, Lauraine Leblanc, the author of Pretty in Punk: Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boy's Subculture, described herself as a former punk and drew on her insider's knowledge of the scene to underwrite her interviews with girl punks conducted from 1993 to 1995 and to ground her analysis in the academic languages of sociology, anthropology, and women's studies. Though her book treats riot grrrl as only one aspect of a much larger phenomenon, she credits riot grrrls with being among the few in punk to contest the masculinism of punk style. Leblanc's account was important for the way it legitimized and explained the oft-noted tendency among riot grrrls to recode the markers of girly femininity and to attempt to renew feminism for the 90s by refusing what they saw as feminism's puritanism and anti-femme stance.

The developing legitimization of a public narrative that linked riot grrrl with feminism's past and its potential for a renewed future was further secured as the 1990s closed when a number of former girl punks, riot grrrls, and zine producers began to donate their zine collections to libraries and archives. In 1999, Tristan Taormino donated her collection of zines to the Sophia Smith Collection: Women's History Archives at Smith College. She had assembled that collection with Karen Green in the process of producing the first mainstream press anthology devoted entirely to “writings from the girl zine revolution,” A Girl's Guide to Taking over the World.Footnote ²⁵ That same year, though wholly independently, Action Girl creator Sara Dyer wrote to the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University seeking a home for her sizeable girl zine collection. And, somewhat later, in 2003, another self-described radical librarian and zine creator, Jenna Freedman – who came to zines not through riot grrrl but at library school at the behest of her friend and by then well-known zine producer Celia Perez – moved to establish the Barnard Zine Collection at Barnard College. Together, the establishment of these collections in such prominent centers for the study of women's lives helped to cement and underwrite the narrative I have been relating here, a somewhat schematic version of the dominant story of riot grrrl as a form of feminist movement for the 1990s.

Indeed, that narrative had already been repeated so often during the second half of the 1990s that as early as 2001 Cherie Turner could redact it and lay it out in a large-type reader targeting very young girls. Entitled The Riot Grrrl Movement: The Feminism of a New Generation, her book was issued as part of the Need to Know Library by the Rosen Publishing Group, an independent publisher of materials for k-12 schools focussing specifically on “high interest topics for children and young adults.”Footnote ²⁶ Turner's book secured its titular claim to place riot grrrl within a longer history of feminist movement not only through a narrative that mentioned, as I have, Hanna, Bikini Kill, Girl Night, riot grrrl meetings, the media response, and girl zines, but also by splicing together high-color images of contemporary riot grrrls and images of women's activists from the 1970s. Although Turner's concluding paragraph is perhaps more hopeful than some, it underscores the fact that, rhetorically, the standard account of riot grrrl was constructed as an origin story about a self-identified social movement seeking to build consciously on feminist legacies and to realize a feminist future. “Riot Grrrl,” she writes, “has had a tremendous influence all over the world. It has given girls and women who wish to live outside of the system – a system that they did not create and that does not allow them to fully express themselves – a place to exist.” She continues, “And there are no signs that Riot Grrrl is near the end. In fact, it may not be too far-fetched to believe that Riot Grrrl will reach its ‘ultimate goal.’ As Kathleen Hanna states in Punk Planet, ‘We change the entire system.’”Footnote ²⁷

That some twenty years after the founding of Bikini Kill a small group of Russian women who identified as feminists and activists could name themselves Pussy Riot and stage a nonviolent performance in one of Moscow's main cathedrals testifies to the ongoing inspiration many have derived from riot grrrl's example. That they could also find themselves arrested, tried, and imprisoned for “hooliganism” testifies as well to the ongoing challenge to normative views posed by feminist-identified cultural activists like riot grrrl and Pussy Riot.Footnote ²⁸

Given the “fact” of this continuation of the sort of “history” I have narrated here, it would seem that the feminist character of the historical phenomenon denominated by the term “riot grrrl” is indisputable, if not self-evident. However, I want to call attention here to certain key linkages – or, to use Stuart Hall's term, articulations – between and among the various practices constitutive of this brief history. These articulations, with their dual character as links and as meaning-making acts, suggest that, despite its apparent transparency, the narrative I have repeated here is one that was actively constructed over time by specific individuals situated in particular contexts building on, elaborating, and sometimes even disputing the claims and interventions of others.Footnote ²⁹

The “feminist” character of the larger story is usually established by citing Kathleen Hanna's early admiration for feminist artists like Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Cindy Sherman; by the stated intentions of her Evergreen College photographic work; and by its institutional censorship. Hanna has since testified that her feminism should also be traced to the fact that she was raised as the child of a feminist mother who had herself come of age during the 1960s and 1970s so-called Second Wave. Despite some early comments by other girl band members that tend to foreground their musical interests over their political aims in forming their bands, they have subsequently also reported similar relations to feminism and noted that they were distinctly aware of the rise of the New Right and the ongoing backlash against the women's movement.Footnote ³⁰ When they became disillusioned with the misogyny of a punk scene that had initially attracted them by its self-proclaimed support for radical egalitarianism, they began to work out their own rhetorics of protest in music, lyrics, performance styles, and zine production that repeated certain feminist concerns of the 1960s and 1970s while also taking issue with other aspects of feminist discourse as they understood it at the time.Footnote ³¹

Despite their search for new languages and rhetorical styles, the apparently “feminist” character of their protest and the much-remarked-upon “anger” embedded in their music and performances were then taken up by a media establishment that was actively seeking to document the perceived “backlash” against feminism as a way to sell newspapers, magazines, and television shows.Footnote ³² In some cases, it may well have been repeated as part of a deliberate effort to undermine the legitimacy of feminism in the eyes of the young. Indeed the 1990s saw the rise of reactionary, pro-family politics; repeated attacks on “working mothers,” “angry girls,” “sluts,” and “welfare queens”; and the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings that produced the demonization of Anita Hill.Footnote ³³ It was in this context that mainstream outlets sensationalized the riot grrrls by willfully misconstruing their ironic display of an openly sexualized girliness. In doing so, their ridicule moved to contain the challenge that riot grrrls posed to normative understandings of girls, femininity, and, I would add here as well, feminism as previously conceived.Footnote ³⁴

Despite such media treatment, other individuals and institutions were more positively disposed. They were, I suspect, because they employed young women who had themselves been affected by feminist discourses during their youth as well as during their university years in the late 1980s and early 1990s. During that time, universities hosted the proliferation of women's studies curricula and programs and feminist theories of various kinds profoundly affected most of the humanities and social-science disciplines. This created an intellectual infrastructure that both preserved and extended feminist thought in the cultural zone of academia. When the young women who first encountered these forms in the early 1990s graduated, some wrote for outlets like the LA Weekly and the Chicago Reader, for Sassy and Seventeeen, and some worked in publishing houses trying to reach what was thought of then as the MTV generation. It was their interest in and connections to youth culture that enabled houses like Random House and Warner Books to publish books on hip, up-to-date subjects like riot grrrl and girl zines as a way of garnering new, younger readers.

The ongoing placement of riot grrrl bands, performances, zines, and conventions within the long history of feminism and the women's movement was then further secured when subsequent students also taught by feminist academics began to build on their own underground involvements in punk, riot grrrl, and zineing by writing about them as political acts. To do so, they adopted the languages of feminist theory and women's history and noted, as chronicled here, the importance of women's friendships; girl zines' tendency to juxtapose the personal and the political; and the importance of reading the pain of individual experiences with abuse, harassment, domestic violence, and petty ridicule not as personal problems but as the result of structural, patriarchal arrangements.

In the end, what enabled riot grrrl to emerge as a public form of feminist social movement was the active articulation or linking of a set of actions by an initially inchoate group of young musicians and zine-makers with the actions of others – from those of their mothers in the past, to those who engaged with them contemporaneously by collecting their music and their zines, to those who later commented on and analyzed both in contexts that foregrounded gender issues. As these discursive and social connections were forged, others were drawn not only into the circle of riot grrrl but also into the broader universe of the women's movement and feminist thought. This can be seen clearly in the last step in this process – at least as I have narrated it here – when girl zines were identified as such – that is, as girl zines – and gathered together in collections already organized by gender, in archives designed to enable the documentation and analysis of the lives of women and girls.Footnote ³⁵ Such collections had initially been created because earlier feminists had noted the absence of women's materials in collections focussed largely on the political, military, and cultural exploits of men.

Thus the dominant story about riot grrrl is a story that has been made possible by the connections and affiliations actively forged among women and girls across different cohorts and generations. The differential but undeniable investment of many of them in the ongoing relevance of feminism in the face of reactionary efforts to contain it is in part what enabled riot grrrl to wheel into view in the first place as precisely a significant “feminist” movement and to coalesce over time as an important “event” in a longer history, the history of a singular, coherent women's movement.Footnote ³⁶ For obvious reasons in this so-called “postfeminist” age, when there is supposedly no longer any need to protect women from domestic abuse or to foster their participation in the public world of work even as women continue to be paid significantly less than men, as poverty continues to be highly gendered, and as women continue to suffer multiple forms of violence committed against them, this is a story we cannot afford to abandon entirely.

III. VIEWED FROM ELSEWHERE: THE ORIGIN STORY AND ITS EXCLUSIONS

Despite the political value of remembering riot grrrl as a feminist intervention, I want to point out that certain lacunae embedded in this familiar story rest uneasily within it, and, from different perspectives, appear as something other than unremarkable background context. These include brief references to the LA punk scene, to lesbian- and queer-identified zines like Sister Outsider and Chainsaw, to the appearance of queercore bands at Girl Night, and to a shared interest in mainstream popular culture. In this context, it's not possible to elaborate on the significance of all of these lacunae, but I do want to take up what is perhaps the most significant unincorporated detail in the riot grrrl narrative I have repeated; that is, the fact that riot grrrl emerged from within the punk music scene, a scene that, though not uniformly white, was plagued from the beginning by complicated racial politics and outright racism.Footnote ³⁷ In most versions of the dominant narrative, there is a reference to Kathleen Hanna's involvement in a seminar on “Unlearning Racism” at the first riot grrrl convention in 1991. Although the citation of this detail is meant to establish riot grrrl's progressive politics around issues of multiculturalism, its inclusion also suggests that even for a feminist movement devoted to the principle of “universal girl love,” and even at this moment of its public emergence, the question of race was a fraught one.

Mimi Thi Nguyen has been pointing to this problem for a while, as she noted in an important 2012 article, “Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival.” There, she observed, “This essay has been a long time in the making – almost the entire duration of my life in punk!”Footnote ³⁸ Indeed, Nguyen first made public claims about the problematic racial politics of punk and riot grrrl not in an academic context but in her zines, Aim Your Dick and Slant. Then, she elaborated on her frustrations in an extended interview with the underground publisher V. Vale, which was published in book format in 1997 in Zines!, Vol. II. Vale interviewed Nguyen for a collection that was designed to advance the project he had begun with his first volume, which was to highlight the diversity of alternative and underground publication occurring at the time.Footnote ³⁹

What is most interesting about his interview with Nguyen is the way it demonstrates his awareness of the developing gender-based genealogy for riot grrrl zines but appears ignorant of another developing around questions of race. In fact, Vale moves resolutely to place Nguyen's previous work solely within a gender-based genealogy, one that attributes the significance of her zines to her stance as a feminist critic of the misogyny of the punk scene. Indeed the interview begins with Vale's observation, “In Aim Your Dick and Slant, you critiqued sexism in the punk rock scene.” Significantly, Nguyen deflects his privileging of her gender critique by responding bluntly, “The intersection of racism and sexism has always been an issue for me. In Aim Your Dick #2 I wrote about how somebody had jokingly asked me about ‘Oriental sex secrets.’ I really went off on that one. It's such a ridiculous myth.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Nguyen's deflection and effort to redirect Vale's orientation suggests that, for her, race was at least as important a concern as gender in the crafting of her zines as well as in her initial attraction to punk. Indeed, when asked directly, “Why did you start Slant?” she notes,

That Nguyen herself worked tirelessly to foster such a network can be seen from her introduction to one of the most widely copied and discussed zines ever to come out of the punk underground, Evolution of Race Riot, which she produced in 1997 as a compilation zine collecting excerpts from zines produced by people of color.Footnote ⁴² In her introduction to the collection, Nguyen traces its origin to her irritation with a white woman's call for submissions to a planned compilation zine to be focussed on racism. She writes, “And she's calling it Sister We Are One or something equally homogenizing, something to deflect conflict and differences across race and class and geography, something to domesticate the threat posed by women of color.” Nguyen continues, “And I'm thinking, this call for submissions … is typical, this is an affirmation of existing and far too dominant white feminist/radical discourse that magisterially invites the person of color to participate, not in dialogue with other people of color, but with white women and men.” She then notes that her own project

Vale's book and Nguyen's zine were both published in 1997. It is not clear whether Vale knew of this project when he interviewed her. It is clear, however, that he was acquainted with Aim Your Dick and Slant and that both, as Nguyen insists in the interview, were heavily preoccupied with race in punk. It is also the case, as Evolution of a Race Riot clearly shows, that, prior to 1997, many zines had already been published by people of color with titles like Bamboo Girl, Hey, Mexican, Chop Suey Spex, and Chica Loca. It's all the more startling, then, to note that Vale never picks up on Nguyen's refusal to speak only about gender in discussing her zines or her involvement in punk. Indeed, although he listens carefully to Nguyen's recounting of the autobiographical context within which she encountered punk, a narrative which foregrounds her position as the child of Vietnamese refugees, he returns again and again to her critique of sexism in the punk scene.Footnote ⁴⁴

Nguyen speaks at some length about her Vietnamese family in the interview and about growing up as an outsider in a white working-class suburb of Minneapolis.Footnote ⁴⁵ She further notes that she first gravitated to televised images of punks because their look of being out of sync with supposedly “good” people connected with her feelings as an “Asian, with slanted eyes, feeling visually out-of-sync.” She notes, “I felt, ‘Wow, they're in control of how freaky they look. Looking “other” is something that's always been imposed on me – now I can turn that around’… I just knew I wanted to be this aggressive spectacle, to fit how I was made to feel.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Continuing her narrative, she recounts moving to San Diego, becoming an “alterna-teen” there and hanging out with a group of Filipina gang girls, concluding that by the time she was sixteen in 1990 “she was heavily into punk.” Vale's only response is to ask, “Back in 1991, was Riot Grrrl an inspiration?”

Again, instead of confirming Vale's privileging of gender over race, Nguyen responds flatly, “Riot Grrrl is a complicated issue for me.”Footnote ⁴⁷ What follows is worth quoting at some length for the way it demonstrates clearly that although she knew riot grrrl intimately, Nguyen came to its apparent girl-centeredness and feminism from a different starting point and as a result of a different itinerary:

In effect, Nguyen makes it quite clear that she was drawn to punk, riot grrrl, and feminism not simply as a girl or young woman but as someone trailing a different history, a history that prevented her from ever separating her gender identity from her inscribed place in an intensely racialized social hierarchy. The interview ends with “Mimi's Recommendations,” a bibliography that includes titles of zines by people of color; the names of her favorite women-of-color feminists, films and filmmakers; and the titles of anthologies such as Piece of My Heart: A Lesbian of Color Anthology, Our Feet Walk the Sky: Women of the South Asian Diaspora, and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology.Footnote ⁴⁹

These titles secure Mimi Nguyen's point that she came to punk and riot grrrl not simply animated by the gendered nature of the underground music scene but also by the profound impact of global racial history on her daily life and on her ability to make sense of her identity and place within US culture of the 1990s. Given the fact that Evolution of a Race Riot has repeatedly been cited in many other zines since its first appearance, and the additional fact that it appears in faintly copied and recopied form in many different extant zine collections, it seems clear that Nguyen's perspective and take on punk and riot grrrl spoke to others who were grappling with similar problems and felt the need she had articulated for a differently inflected network than that represented by riot grrrl alone. Indeed, Evolution of Race Riot and the other zines it drew from seem to have successfully solicited the attention of young people who suffered different forms of vulnerability and precarity than those experienced by young white women in the 1990s. By all accounts, the number of zines by people of color increased over the course of the late 1990s and even afterward, just as they also began to attract academic attention for the way they explored intersectional identities and borderland forms of subjectivity.Footnote ⁵⁰ In effect, then, Nguyen's compilation functioned as an intersecting but significantly different incitement to discourse than had the original riot grrrl bands or the zines they inspired, a discourse that didn't necessarily dismiss feminism outright but one that demanded that it be responsive to the concerns of other than middle-class white girls.

And yet, despite the fact that Mimi Nguyen and others have been making this argument at least since the mid-1990s, the dominant narrative about riot grrrl has not been substantially altered even when race has been taken into account. In fact, this is one of several consequential claims that Nguyen makes in the 2012 piece I cited earlier. Nguyen states openly in her abstract that her essay “ventures a critique of the existing historiography of riot grrrl and how the movement is narrated both ‘then’ and ‘now’ to contain and subsume the disruptions of race.”Footnote ⁵¹ In response, she seeks to construct counterstories that reread the intersection between riot grrrl, young women of color, and the question of race as something other than an interruption in the otherwise organic development and evolution of a new form of feminism for the 1990s.

To begin with, Nguyen rereads the familiar claims that riot grrrl opposed the way mainstream culture set girls in competition with each other by promoting intimacy and universal girl-love instead. She notes, in fact, that this aspect of riot grrrl discourse has been the most remarked-upon feature in academic studies of its feminist politics. Nguyen acknowledges that practices of self-revelation and sharing among intimates can sometimes function as forms of resistance to structural determination. However, she notes as well that such practices usually leave structural determinations in place as the individual, improved self – that is, a self-improved by confession and the admission of certain faults – becomes the only measure of change. This, she suggests, was the problem with riot grrrl's promotion of girl-love and intimacy. It did little to alter the structural conditions that left young women wounded in so many ways.

But riot grrrl's emphasis on intimacy was additionally and perhaps even more problematic, she suggests, when its demand for self-exposure was made of others marked by racialization and working-class status. Nguyen remarks that “establishing the intimate as a preferred and privileged mode” could sometimes “mirror the forms of surveillance that required some persons, – persons of color, for instance – to reveal themselves, to bear the burden of representation (‘you are here as an example’) and the weight of pedagogy (‘teach us about your people’).” As evidence, she draws strategically on zines by young women of color to show that many found riot grrrl invitations to conversation to be an intrusion rather than an opening to true dialogue. Zine writers of color exposed such invitations as limited by suggesting that the expressed desire for knowledge of racial others was not actually about those others or about the conditions that structured their lives but rather functioned as a performance of virtue that was wholly self-referential. Indeed, in a discussion of riot grrrl efforts to address racism and to demonstrate their own distance from racist beliefs, Nguyen argues that statements like those made by Ericka Reinstein in Fantastic Fanzine and in an interview in Wrecking Ball functioned as little more than “possessive investments in an antiracist whiteness.”Footnote ⁵²

Yet even as Nguyen develops her argument that it is necessary to tell the story of riot grrrl feminism differently as a story about “the violence of girl–girl intimacy, the force of smothering love, [and] the menace of liberal subjecthood,” she also insists that interventions like Reinstein's, which generated a great deal of controversy within the riot grrrl scene, did not just perpetuate the privileges of whiteness or wound young women of color. In fact, they also functioned differently as spurs to discourse among young women of color like her, who had already been exploring related issues in the zines they had created in response to a punk scene that was both openly racist and utterly dependent on poaching symbols of outsiderness and outlawry from underclass cultures. As Nguyen puts it, “it is important to observe that people of color made significant connections outside of these conversations, writing – or singing – about language loss and acquisition, the ghosts of empire, mixed-raced identifications, migration histories … the pitfalls of non-profit organizing, queer color of critique, ‘black girl travel stores,’ and much more.”Footnote ⁵³ She then references a litany of titles that constitute, in effect, a different zine archive than the one usually cited in dominant versions of riot grrrl history, one created by people of color who produced them as part of their own “multisubcultural” participation, which, significantly, traversed punk and hip-hop scenes as well as others.Footnote ⁵⁴

This latter point is crucial. Nguyen is suggesting that for young women of color, underground participation was organized differently, even when it intersected, as it did for her, with riot grrrl. This is why she objects so strenuously to the way the activities of young women of color are contained within dominant histories of riot grrrl that construe riot grrrl simply as a continuation and alteration of feminism. Such practices of incorporation generally treat race as an intervention and even as a hindrance to the ongoing evolution of a prior and thus wholly privileged set of developments and discourse. They fail to accord the work done by people-of-color zine-writers its own integrity or position within histories those writers tell that are conceived quite differently and on the basis of other commitments. As she puts it, “In these other histories, other archives, race is not an interruption into a singular scene or movement but the practice of another, co-present scene or movement that conversed and collided with the already-known story, but with alternate investments and forms of critique.”Footnote ⁵⁵

IV. RIOT GRRRL DECENTERED: ON THE POSSIBILITIES OF OTHER STORIES

Mimi Nguyen's insistence on the co-presence of alternate scenes within the underground world of punk and of the different genealogies that produced them is a consequential argument for many reasons but especially because it helps make sense of a notable and troubling feature of nearly all archives and collections of “girl zines”; that is, the extraordinary diversity of interests and attachments represented within them and the divergent networks of citation, circulation, and friendship that course through them. Such diversity is troubling in part because it suggests that defining zines created by girls as girl zines or riot grrrl zines, or as feminist zines, potentially ignores or backgrounds a whole range of other commitments and preoccupations represented within those collections with just as much energy as feminist critique. By leaving out whole chunks of underground history as revealed in those zines, such narratives potentially reinscribe familiar privileges of gender, sexuality, race, and class, and deny the significance of multiple, contentious, changing forms of dissent in the 1990s. Echoing the words of her friend Iraya Robles, Nguyen asks,

By quoting her friend, Nguyen references some of the other lacunae that, along with alternate race-based genealogies, languish within dominant histories of riot grrrl. These lacunae, and the different itineraries and genealogies they hint at, deserve exploration in their own right. Bikini Kill band members Tobi Vail and Billy Karren, for instance, came out of the LA scene mentioned by Robles, a scene that was racially and ethnically diverse and connected in significant ways with queercore, a form of punk that had emerged sometime in the 1980s.Footnote ⁵⁷ In fact, Vail's zine Jigsaw, which Kathleen Hanna admired, included contributions from Donna Dresch's zine Chainsaw, which is considered an early queercore zine. Similarly, Karren played in the band Snakepit with Laura McDougal, who created another early queer zine, Sister Nobody, which debuted with a review of Chainsaw. Additionally, many of the bands that played Girl Night at the International Pop Underground Convention, including Bikini Kill, had ties to queercore bands and explored lesbian identities and same-sex relationships in their music and zines.

In fact, one does not have to spend much time at all in any girl zine collection now extant to realize that for many of those who produced and read them, zines were semiprivate yet shared spaces where inchoate same-sex desires could be explored; where questions might be asked about what it would mean to identify as lesbian, as a butch or a dyke, as queer or as trans; where young people who disidentified with heterosexual norms could perform subjectivity in alternate ways and thereby seek confirmation in the recognition offered by others. When others wrote back, offering their own zines in exchange, they mirrored another dissident perspective on the mainstream world and suggested not only that such a perspective was shared but that it might be explored and acted upon in realms other than the paper universe constituted by zines; that is, in queer corners of the punk underground.

My own interviews with former girl zine producers – including some who identified as riot grrrls and as feminists, and others who criticized riot grrrl for its racialized, limited understanding of feminism – have suggested that punk and zines were important to them not only as ways to refuse traditional, girlish femininity. They also served as routes away from heteronormative object choice and into worlds characterized by queer pleasures, same-sex relationships, and different orientations both to sexuality and to sociability.Footnote ⁵⁸ When they offered hesitantly nonconforming views and opinions to others in their zines, these young women actively took up alternative, even risky, perspectives on themselves and then waited fearfully at first, expectantly later, to see whether and how others might write back. When they did, new friends, new networks, and new relationships with already existing gay and lesbian, queer and transgender, scenes were established.

Indeed, my interviews have suggested that this kind of mutual subject confirmation through zine exchange often broadened into different kinds of relationships in the world through letter-writing, pen-pal exchange, carefully orchestrated first meetings, friendships, and even intimate relations. And as these young women pursued these new practices of self-articulation and forms of friendship lived out both through zines and in the queercore punk underground, they were propelled not simply into new forms of personal identification but also into different public orientations as well. Indeed, they took up different forms of sociability and activism that were connected with other histories, histories like those race-based histories referenced by Mimi Nguyen that were also co-present with feminism and the women's movement but oriented differently to different projects and different goals.

In the 1990s, some of these young women were as deeply affected by ACT UP and other forms of queer, lesbian, and gay activism as they were by the feminism of riot grrrl. As a consequence, they pursued somewhat differently oriented associational networks that sometimes extended beyond riot grrrl or connections with other women in punk to intersect with other queer scenes and social movements that had nothing to do with punk. Indeed in an article as important to the narration of the history of underground culture, punk, and riot grrrl as Mimi Nguyen's, Judith Halberstam has explored how these attachments and extensions were encouraged by the explosion of queer subcultures in the 1990s.Footnote ⁵⁹ Those subcultures, she argues, offered participants alternative forms of sociability to the kinship-based notions of community and commitment underwritten by mainstream society's obsession with the family, reproduction, and normative heterosexuality.

But even if we juxtapose Halberstam's critique with Nguyen's, queer interpellations with racially and ethnically inflected ones, the argument they make together for the significance of intersectionality as a corrective to the dominant history of riot grrrl and its relatively privileged understanding of feminism still does not quite get at the multiple commitments, attachments, and forms of dissent that coursed through the pages of the thousands of zines now collected in zine archives. Some of those archives are organized around riot grrrl or girl authorship more generally. Others are not. Yet, like the Community Archives: Zines collection at DePaul University in Chicago (originally called the Midwest Zine Collection), they also include zine collections assembled by young women who were active in the punk scene and who saved not only riot grrrl titles and others attentive to various feminist issues, but also large numbers of zines referencing other questions and positions. Contained within Kim Nolan's collection, for instance, are zines focussing on anticapitalism and anticonsumerism, environmental politics, vegetarian and vegan food politics, animal rights, disability issues, and others. Indeed, even self-identified riot grrrl zines include extended references to such concerns and to forms of activism and organizations designed to pursue them, such as the group Food Not Bombs. In addition to exploring the complexities of identity formation, then, many zines also constitute themselves as issue-based and action-oriented.Footnote ⁶⁰

Although it seems essential to acknowledge and understand the complexities of gender-based critiques and their interventions within the punk underground, as well as the significance of riot grrrl in contributing to their emergence, it also seems important to ask what the foregrounding of identity questions might background or occlude altogether. Does the dominant narrative about riot grrrl, and even the intersectional critique of it, run the risk of rendering invisible the ways in which young punks and zine producers, girls among them, were participating in larger, even more inchoate struggles to move past the limitations of identity politics, to find ways to take up critical, collaborative, activist perspectives on the world only then emerging in the 1990s?Footnote ⁶¹

It is a complicated business, of course, to characterize the world of the 1990s and in some ways that effort has only just begun. Preliminary accounts focus on postindustrial capitalism; on the emergence of global markets and a full-blown neoliberalism; on fast-developing digital and nano technologies; on the almost total penetration of daily life by the mass media; and on the ever more rapid circulation of populations, products, information, and capital.Footnote ⁶² If one remembers that youth in the 1990s not only were seeking to comment on that world as emerging young intellectuals – a subject position they were consciously trying to inhabit as youth – but actually also were living some of that world's most important effects, its fluidities, its multiplicities, its hybridities, its conflicting interpellations, as well as the various forms of precarity it produced – then it seems worth trying to read their cultural performances and forms of activism in a way that would not smooth out the resulting contradictions or the conflicts they bodied forth. If the zines produced by girls and young women could be read not for their coherence but for their jagged, fractured, discontinuities and for their startling juxtapositions, contrasts, and contradictions – for the differences they pursued rather than for the things they shared – what might wheel into view that had heretofore been hidden?

I do not yet have a comprehensive account of what other “events,” “developments,” or “tendencies” might emerge from a decentering and de-reification of riot grrrl. My interviews and archival work have begun to suggest, however, that the zine underground of the 1990s, and especially that corner occupied by a diverse and fractious collection of girls calling each other out over their unrecognized privileges and political failures, might fruitfully be seen as a generative social space where they and their supporters struggled with the limitations of identity-based politics and debated, sometimes angrily, about what a politics organized around difference might look like. At the same time, the conflicts and contradictions that their pursuit of difference brought to the fore also seem to have attuned many of them to a sustained preoccupation with the exercise of power and the various modes of their own subjection to it.

In many ways, paper zines of the 1990s embodied vernacular efforts to understand hegemony, which is to say, how structures of power inhabit the finest textures of the personal and the everyday. Zines also enabled their creators and their readers to explore the question whether such power hierarchies and the forms of subjectivity they produced might be changed, and how. In some ways, their zines constituted the answer, which is to say that they functioned as forms of cultural activism, hopeful efforts to produce alternative media capable of ferreting out and addressing other like-minded misfits and dissidents who might together constitute new social forms and new ways of living otherwise. They engaged in what has been called prefigurative politics, which is to say a deliberate effort to constitute through their own cultural and aesthetic practices social relationships and cooperative forms of the kind that they believed ought to replace those commercial and commodity-based practices of the dominant social formation.Footnote ⁶³

In my efforts to reconstruct the complex scene of zine production by girls in the 1990s, as well as the afterlives of those involved, I have been struck by how many of these former zine producers recount post-zine lives as cultural workers and activists laboring on a number of different issues and at a range of different sites. They also detail intellectual lives profoundly influenced by an awareness of global capitalism and forms of neocolonialism, and the way both exploit race and gender differences in order to function. In response, they recount personal struggles to disentangle their lives from consumerism and commodities, and various efforts to live the principles of the punk DIY ethic. One of my interviewees, for instance, left a tenure-track job teaching writing and cultural studies to take up residence in rural Maine within a long-standing community of radical homesteaders, artists, and artisans and to write full-time as a feminist poet, mother, and radical homemaker. Several others are graduate students or young professors working on subjects such as postcolonial Asian studies, transgender subjectivities, and transnational American studies even as they contribute efforts to various activist organizations beyond the academic world. Others are librarians and archivists devoted to expanding their institution's ability to document the particulars of ordinary lives. Still others have worked as radical journalists, as filmmakers and artists, as writers, and as small-scale artisans.Footnote ⁶⁴

In effect, they have continued their lives as cultural workers, a specific form of labor and a more generalized habitus that many of them first took up in their teens as part of a larger DIY protest against an evermore globalized and intrusive capitalism. As adults, many of them have sought to transform that labor into forms of activism, into ways of engaging others in dissidence, in structural critique, and in the design of alternative modes of living. In many ways, their modes of action and forms of activism seem closer to those networked and issue-based activities associated with the Internet, the web, and digital cultures, forms of activism that have been variously treated as post-subcultures, as rhizomatic media, viral activism, anarcho-activism, culture jamming, and mediated mobilization.Footnote ⁶⁵ I have begun to wonder, finally, whether it might not be more useful and ultimately more respectful of the radical dissonances and dissent performed by girl zine producers to view their work less from within theoretical and analytical frameworks deriving from previous historical moments and cultural formations and more in relation to the emergent social, cultural, and political forms that consolidated rapidly as the 1990s waned and then exploded with full force with the widespread use of Internet communication, digital media, new media, and social media. Perhaps girls' zine production, circulation, and use was less about identity as a coherent social form and more about trying to imagine new kinds of fractal subjectivity and shape-shifting sociability, and even new ways of acting and organizing politically.Footnote ⁶⁶