By Emma Heagney
Two minutes and thirty-seven seconds of grit, confidence, and indignation characterise Bikini Kill’s 1993 classic Rebel Girl. But the unpolished vocals and fiery riffs perhaps stand in contrast to the song’s empowering lyrics, with the band proposing a new feminine ideal, that of the ‘Riot Grrrl’. They juxtapose the belligerent words of misogynistic naysayers with a desire to be Rebel Girl’s ‘best friend’, which proves to be even more subversive in its queer subtext:
When she walks, the revolution’s comin’
In her hips, there’s revolution
When she talks, I hear the revolution
In her kiss, I taste the revolution!
Rebel Girl is the defining song of Bikini Kill’s discography. Their biggest (and perhaps catchiest) hit, it represents all that the band stands for and is their manifesto for a punk, ‘pussy-whipped’ future. At the forefront of the group was Kathleen Hanna, an enduring symbol of defiance and alternative femininity. Her powerful screams come from deep within, recalling her past experiences of misogyny at university and in the music industry. Hanna says herself that ‘having the “bitch” label proceed me to nearly every club got really tiring’.
In many ways Hanna is Rebel Girl, a pioneer of the Riot Grrrl movement that emerged from Olympia, Washington in the early 1990s – her personal connection to the song and its principal character is demonstrated in the title of her 2024 memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk. Along with bands such as Bratmobile, Babes in Toyland, and The Gits, Bikini Kill intertwined their punk riffs with their calls for feminist political action, in response to both the hugely successful male bands hailing from Washington (most famously, Nirvana) and the systemic misogyny perpetuated by the rock scene. Hanna even founded the zine Riot Grrrl in 1991, alongside members of Bratmobile. One of the most striking quotes of her early writing, to me, reads: ‘I will never be what the world wants me to be or have sex right’. This seemingly stark comparison highlights the belief that an expectation of sex, whether done ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, is what defines women – precisely the belief which the Riot Grrrl movement aimed to deconstruct.
How successful were the Riot Grrrls? One could make the argument that the relative increase in female-fronted rock bands (including but not limited to Paramore, Evanescence, and so on) is proof of their lasting influence in music and pop culture more broadly. However, the ‘girlboss’ liberal feminism of the 2010s, I believe, was counterintuitive to the political message the Riot Grrrl movement promoted, centering individual success over collective deconstruction of the patriarchy. The commodification of Riot Grrrl aesthetics (see the apt lyric of Sleater-Kinney’s #1 Must Have: ‘but they took our ideas to their marketing stars, and now I’m spending all my days at girlpower.com’) diluted the anti-consumerist, mutual aid-based concerns of the original movement. I believe that the most egregious example of this is in the name of the movement itself, with the politicised word ‘girl’ being co-opted and simplified for the commercial masses. For instance, the ‘kinderwhore’ imagery of the band Hole, originally a “performance of nostalgia” (Wald 1998) and a reclamation of the innocence of girlhood, has been translated into the perfunctory horde of TikTok terms like ‘girl dinner’, ‘girl math’, and so on. Laden with pink bows and lace adornments, the dominant discourse of girlhood (and by extension womanhood, as these terms are used by and in reference to adults) appropriates traditional ideas of femininity, but shifts away from subversiveness and resistance and towards commercialised markers of identity. ‘Choice feminism’, the notion that any decision made by a woman is inherently empowering and ‘feminist’, belies the superficiality and conformity suggested by these symbols.
The Riot Grrrl movement occupied a small but firm place within third-wave feminism of the 90s. Avid fans of the music still exist, with Hole’s Live Through This (Hole’s inclusion within Riot Grrrl is debatable, but their aesthetics overlap significantly) experiencing vast popularity among teenage girls for decades after its 1994 release. However, the political, community-based movement consisting of zines, female-dominated gigs, and anti-capitalist D.I.Y. has been largely lost. Hanna’s work as part of Bikini Kill remains extremely influential for a certain subset of women and girls today, namely those who actively seek out their music, and much of me still hopes for a resurgence in the defiance she exhibited in her raw vocals and scathing lyrics. While perhaps a product of her time, Kathleen Hanna embodies the anti-capitalist ideals many Marxist-Feminists of the current era aim to employ. Most of all, she possesses an insurmountable boldness that allowed her to mobilise so many women in such an intolerant environment.
Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk by Kathleen Hanna is out now
References
Davies, H. (2001) ‘All Rock and Roll Is Homosocial: The Representation of Women in the British Rock Music Press’ in Popular Music, 20, 301-319.
Hanna, K. (2012) MY HERSTORY [available at https://web.archive.org/web/20120830195326/http://www.letigreworld.com/sweepstakes/html_site/fact/khfacts.html]
Rosenberg, J., and Garofalo, G. (1998) ‘Riot Grrrl: Revolutions from within’ in Signs, 23, 809-841
Wald, G. (1998) ‘Just a Girl? Rock Music, Feminism, and the Cultural Construction of Female Youth’ in Signs, 23, 585-610.
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