1) What is your name?
Lucretia Tye Jasmine aka Lucretia X
2) What does Riot Grrrl mean to you?
riot grrrl is activist friendship with girls and women.
riot grrrl is a third wave feminist, music, and art movement. It began in the mid 1980s, gaining national media attention in the early 1990s. riot grrrl’s do-it-yourself infrastructure allowed girls and women to create their own art and music scenes, unfettered by the institutionalized genderism that has long oppressed, exploited, and excluded girls and women. Making zines, forming bands, and holding meetings, benefits, rallies, and national conventions are legendary riot grrrl actions that have had lasting impact. As my mom has said, the impact of riot grrrl is herstorical, with art as overt action.
Legends!
First Wave Feminism: late 19th and early 20th c American and UK effort to equal rights de jure, e.g. suffrage and property ownership
Second Wave Feminism: 20th c effort in America to equal rights de facto as well as de jure in the ’60s and ’70s, including but not limited to family, workplace, and reproductive rights
Third Wave Feminism: 1980s effort to equal rights via art and sexual expression, emphasizing multiples (races, economics, philosophies and orgasms)
3) How has Riot Grrrl impacted your life or manifested in what you do now, professionally and otherwise?
I made my first zines at New York University in 1987. Zines are do-it-yourself mini-magazines of collage art and text. Rape, eating disorders, incest, domestic abuse, self-mutilation, reproductive rights, equal pay for equal work, veganism, feminist film and music theory, self-protection, and self-empowerment are issues fearlessly addressed. I was a senior in film school and I thought it would be cool to start a group dedicated to ending genderism. I made my first zines because of the group. I co-founded the group Support Against Sexism with an art student, and we applied for funds from the university that we excitedly won! We decided to spend the money on creating and distributing a monthly newsletter of art and social critique we then called newsletters. My co-founder and I fought so much she left the group, and at most meetings I was alone; no one showed up. I made the zines by myself.
Two years later and on my own in another big city, Los Angeles, making zines again helped me process experience and perception: Newly sober and abstinent from an eating disorder that had plagued me since my early teens, writing, drawing, and the physical act of cut and paste for the collage of each page of my zine helped me desconstruct literally what disturbed me emotionally and mentally. I called my next zine “The Meat Hook” when I made the connection that the treatment of women is like the treatment of animals, something I realized while reading author Margaret Atwood. Like the Dadaists who employed collage as social critique and catharsis, so too do we who make zines.
It wasn’t until I joined riot grrrl Los Angeles in 1992 that I learned the newsletters were called zines. And I like that name so much more!
I’ve made zines before, during, and after my direct involvement with riot grrrl. My zines artfully (hopefully!) express critical analyses of art forms from ancient to popular culture, including but not limited to the visual arts, music, and literature. My graduate school thesis took the form of a zine that later became a novel. And currently I’m co-creating a zine about the herstory of riot grrrl with Sisi, and creating another zine on my own about groupies and rock stars.
My art “A Grrrl’s Diary Oh God I’m A Grrrl” began as my contribution to the 1993 riot grrrl Los Angeles zine,“Sheela na Gig.” A Grrrl’s Diary evolved as I added more and more panels. My stepmother asked me to turn the panels into a poster, and so I did! A limited edition print of the poster was recently shown at the Punk Museum in Los Angeles.
riot grrrl’s social impact has been officially recognized. Barnard Library, The Fales Library & Special Collections at New York University, and the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University (where my zine “The Meat Hook” is currently archived) are just a few of the prestigious libraries collecting riot grrrl materials, especially zines. Tulane University’s Newcomb College Center for Research on Women will hold my entire collection of zines in my name. Diaries, flyers, stickers, news articles, photographs, and videos related to riot grrrl are also collected by these and other libraries. The collections provide primary resources for scholars studying feminism, gender theory, art and music history, and punk rock ideology.
Premier museums also recognize riot grrrl art: the Museum of Modern Art includes an essay devoted entirely to zines in a recent book on women in art! (Butler, Cornelia H., and Alexandra Schwartz. Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010. Print.)
And excerpts from my zine “The Meat Hook” have been published in:
Gender in the Music Industry: Rock Discourse and Girl Power by Marion Leonard. Vermont: Ashgate, 2007. Print.
Girls Make Media by Mary Celeste Kearney. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures under “The New Girl Geographies” by Tracey Skelton and Gill Valentine, eds. New York: Routledge, 1998. Print.
A Girl’s Guide To Taking Over the World: Writing from the Girl Zine Revolution by Tristan Taormino and Karen Green, eds. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Print.
Zines! Vol. I by V.Vale. San Francisco, CA: V. Vale, 1996. Print.
Sisi and I are conducting an oral history of riot grrrl called The riot grrrl Mixtapes. We are also organizing a riot grrrl art exhibition with our combined zines, stickers, flyers, posters, art, and oral histories.
Revolution Rising, the collective I co-founded with a few riot grrrls after we left riot grrrl, created zines that are in the collections at Fales and Barnard.
And in my work as an online art history instructor, I vigilantly include the names and art of women artists so that the overwhelmingly male-identified list given by the school is more inclusive, and actually representative. And I turn my students on to riot grrrl, feminism, manifestos, and zines.
4) Do you have other comments?
riot grrrl’s impact has been one of infiltration rather than usurpation, and one of revolution rising rather then revolution squashed. As has been our banner, waving for over 25 years now: REVOLUTION GRRRL STYLE NOW.
5) Are there people, groups, work, publications, websites, events, etc. that you found inspiring and would like to acknowledge and share with others?
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8208.Pamela_Des_Barres Pamela Des Barres, writer and groupie extraordinaire
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2009_07_014751.php Marilyn French, writer
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/04/15/130415fa_fact_faludiShulamith Firestone, writer and artist
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/5421.Carolyn_G_Heilbrun Carolyn Heilbrun, writer, scholar, professor
http://www.ima.org/home.html Institute for the Musical Arts – co-founder is June Millington of Fanny, one of the first all-female rock ‘n roll bands! Check it out, Fanny on Sonny and Cher! Phyllis Diller appearance, too!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTA0PHkZbt0&nofeather=True
http://youtu.be/jTA0PHkZbt0
http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/161375944/ann-powers Ann Powers, music journalist
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1694537/ Lillian Roxon, music journalist
http://www.lucretiax.com/ Lucretia Tye Jasmine
8:24 pm • 24 April 2013 • 1 note
Once a Riot Grrrl, Always a Riot Grrrl
1) What is your name?
Sisi
2) What does Riot Grrrl mean to you?
I was an anti-authoritary, kinda anarchist, angsty, artsy, ultra-feminist, rabble rousing type in my teens and young adulthood. I discovered riot grrrl and flew in head first. It was my life, my breath. I felt so fucking alive to be part of something that seemed so real. I was making shit happen. I was enough.
Riot Grrrl was an escape route from the lost and desperate feelings I had as a teenager and young woman. It was a movement of women that came together to help each other navigate the terribleness of feeling stuck in the social constraints of sexism, classism, and racism. The conditions of my home-work-school life and community left me alienated and grasping for a collective of people who could tell me I was okay and that there was work to be done.
For me at first it was the music that gave voice to my despair in an empowering way. Then I started getting zines made by and for women that cogently and artistically gave me images and words to help me get by in my everyday life. Eventually the meetings I sought out and attended allowed it to come together in 3-D salvation.
3) How has Riot Grrrl impacted your life or manifested in what you do now, professionally and otherwise?
Riot Grrrl opened up everything. What I mean is that I began to question everything and it helped me shape my ever changing lens.
I reluctantly became an elementary school teacher. I was unable to effectively become the radical educator that was going to do important work in the public school environment. I felt very constrained and compromised in the work. I decided it was the wrong place for me to be my full self. So the next part of my journey has begun.
4) Do you have other comments?
Riot Grrrl inspired me to start my own zine with my best friend. In it I wanted to share my experiences with growing up in a barrio, working poor, to immigrant parents, surrounded by physical and emotional abuse, alcoholism and drug dependency, body image insecurity, and generally feeling out of place on so many levels. I needed to get it out and not be embarrassed about who I was. Or continue to be embarrassed about who I was but to share with a community that maybe didn’t know what other people’s lives were like. It was a confessional zine and I did very little self-censoring or editing. I named it with my mom in mind. She was a homemaker and I wanted her to break free of that role that she’d been saddled with for so many years. Housewife Turned Assassin. Crazy name, I know. Dani and I made 4 issues. We traded with people all over the US and abroad. We sold and traded them at the punk shows we frequented weekly.
Today I have trouble reconciling how I feel about the content. Although I think it was an honest and earnest effort, it needs to be viewed in the context of my life at the time. The immaturity, anger, and angst is a bit much to stomach in the present day. HTA was my place to express my rage long suppressed to continue the tradition of being a nice polite girl who knows her place. Sometimes I miss giving myself permission to be so enraged and to express it unapologetically. Sometimes I feel like I’ve let the pressure off and I don’t have to be one that points out when a person is mean and uninformed. When you write a zine and you express yourself, there is a built in wall. You are not in front of someone stating your piece. You are safely away. Then you become the person everyone expects will always be courageous enough to stand up to the bullies.
Exactly 20 years later and I still have lots of love for Riot Grrrl. The experience was firecracker quick, just under a year. My friends and I decided to stop going to meetings. It was as if we’d gotten out of it what we needed and weren’t supposed to be there anymore. I was a bit hurt and let down by it. The reason that I stopped going was not feeling that the LA group was active enough. There was always trepidation with being too forceful with suggestions because hierarchy and leadership were ideas that we didn’t know how to negotiate. It also felt like class and race were off limit topics. That was a big problem because those were areas of great importance to me and I was still trying to figure how to reconcile that for myself.
My friends and I continued hanging out and creating. We felt moved to start a collective called Revolution Rising. We invited anyone interested in producing art and events that raised consciousness in a safe non-hierarchical space without fear of constraint or ridicule. That only came as a result of Riot Grrrl. It ran its course for a few years and assisted in creating a collection of zines, Tye’s glorious pixel film “Good Enough to Eat”, art shows, events and most importantly personal support and friendships.
11:55 am • 18 April 2013 • 1 note
1) What is your name?
I’m Renee G
2) What does Riot Grrrl mean to you?
To me, riot grrrl is a sisterhood between girls who are sick of being put down, shamed, or discriminated against because we’re girls!
3) How has Riot Grrrl impacted your life or manifested in what you do now, professionally and otherwise?
I haven’t been familiar with RG for long, but I’m extremely interested in it. I’m hopefully going to publish some zines soon! I love creating art and RG has definitely given me a great outlet.
4) Do you have other comments?
5) Are there people, groups, work, publications, websites, events, etc. that you found inspiring and would like to acknowledge and share with others?
Every riot grrrl should read Girls to the Front by Sara Marcus.
12:12 pm • 2 April 2013
1) What is your name?
My name is Noel.
2) What does Riot Grrrl mean to you?
To me, Riot Grrrl meant that I had a space in the front of the show that I was not constantly fighting for, and could share it with my smaller or shorter friends without concern. It meant seeing bands with mostly women play live music that was exciting and interesting to me for the first time.
3) How has Riot Grrrl impacted your life or manifested in what you do now, professionally and otherwise?
Riot Grrrl meant believing that it was and is okay for me to talk about being sexually abused and to be angry at the people responsible. Riot Grrrl opened my eyes to the fact that this violence is perpetuated by the way that people are taught to relate to and value each other. Riot Grrrl connected me to people who had had similar experiences, and illustrated to me I was, and am, not alone and I am in control of my own destiny.
I now work as a therapist with kids who have been sexually abused.
4) Do you have other comments?
I only hope that the kids I work with can find someone or something to save their lives the way punk overall, and Riot Grrrl in particular, saved mine.
5) Are there people, groups, work, publications, websites, events, etc. that you found inspiring and would like to acknowledge and share with others?
There are a thousand things that inspire me every day.
12:41 pm • 28 March 2013 • 5 notes
1) What is your name?
Brian Severns
2) What does Riot Grrrl mean to you?
Two things: That women can kick just as much ass at rock music (or anything) as men can; and, that they have in fact been kicking ass at it for a long time – they just never got credit for it.
3) How has Riot Grrrl impacted your life or manifested in what you do now?
I learned that if I wanted to be around girls, I was a teenager in the early nineties, I had to respect them. If you wouldn’t do or say it to a guy don’t do or say it to a woman. Now as an adult I try to give everybody that same respect and hold it up as a standard for other’s behavior as well.
4) Do you have other comments?
Zines, Art, Film, Music, Fashion, it was all so exciting and the product of so much crazy motivation. I fear the internet has leveled the playing field between the lazy and the inspired and this kind of movement won’t happen again. But, then I second-guess myself when I think how cool it is that teenage kids in remote countries may now be able to watch a Bikini Kill video on youtube.
5) Are there people, work, websites that you’d like to share with others or acknowledge?
Jen Angel wrote great articles and continues to but I especially loved reading her in Maximum RockNRoll. I also always thought Tracy and the Plastics was underrated – she was a drum machine with David Byrne’s sense of humor and it was great.
11:38 am • 27 March 2013
