By Katherine Kruger
“The revolution is about going to the playground with your best girlfriends. You are hanging upside down on the bars and all the blood is rushing to your head. It’s a euphoric feeling. The boys can see our underwear and we don’t really care.”
Quote: Kathleen Hanna. ‘Bikini Kill: A Color and Activity Book’ Kathleen Hanna Papers, Series 1, Box 1, Folder 10. Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries. 1991.
Photographs: Katherine Kruger, 2016, from the Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.
This rapturous call reclaims the adventure playground as a space in which girls can explore their desires. The image presented here is of children at play divorced from the inhibiting impulses of shame. This is not, however, because the girls are innocent of their actions. Rather they refuse to enter their bodies into the economy of shame at the centre of patriarchal culture. It is an image of “girlhood” turned upside-down, reversed: a mirror image of a girl the right-side-up who would embark on innocent play while paradoxically aware of those qualities and behaviours deemed shameful. Part of the fun of this play is to observe a world turned on its head, a world in which the power-dynamics of the playground have been reconfigured through a collective challenge to perceptions of “girlhood”. This is an image of girls aware of the lechery of the male gaze but unwilling to bend to its expectations – to change their behaviour either to placate or prevent it.
Riot Grrrl was a subcultural, feminist punk movement that emerged in the 1990s American West Coast in response to the hyper-masculinity of the punk scene, and soon spread to the UK and elsewhere. Ambitious in their aims, this intervention in an aggressive punk scene provided a platform through which to articulate a broader desire to reinvent the cultural roles available to girls. Keenly aware of “girlhood” as a concept entwined with anxieties about cultural change and burdened by the social desire for young women to act as a site which preserves cultural norms, Riot Grrrls wanted to tear up the scripts determining attitudes towards girls. We can see an example of this in the above quotation from one of the movement’s famous zines. The declaration begins by directly addressing the girl as ‘you’ before switching to the plural ‘our’ and ‘we’. This subtle move empowers the individual girl and brings her into the collective voice of the movement. By recontextualising revolution to the everyday setting of the playground, and directly addressing the girl child, Riot Grrrl involved her in their revolution. As well as reinventing the cultural roles available to girls, Riot Grrrl demonstrated that revolution does not have to be difficult, time-consuming or boring, but is in fact most effective when incorporated into ‘everyday play.’
This recovery of the ferocity of the girl child exploited the cultural fears that circulate around preserving the child’s innocence. The twentieth century saw a rapid change in the ways in which we conceptualise and delimit childhood. This shift was in part due to the positioning of the child as a consumer, a development met with panicked pronouncements about ‘the disappearance of childhood’ (we can still see this playing out in media coverage around childhood leisure activities today, but the debate between Postman and Giroux is one contemporary example of this). Indeed, the child consumer exists at odds with the easily consumable innocent child. Responding to this shift in perceptions of childhood, the Riot Grrrl movement attempted to exploit the public fear surrounding the child consumer to draw attention to the ways in which the body of the girl child is continually produced and consumed by culture. In so doing, they sought to encourage girls away from traditional modes of consumption into a network which produced its own version of cultural knowledge.
The Riot Grrrl movement parodied the consumption of child bodies whilst selling childhood back to their teenage fans. Riot Grrrl critiqued concepts of innocence and ‘girlish purity’ perceiving them as central components in the infantilization and pacification of the feminine, but the solution to subverting the pernicious ideal of innocence for the Riot Grrrls did not lie simply in changing habits of consumption. Instead they urged girls to harness the public fear of consumer children by becoming ferocious, active producers of culture, rather than passive consumers.
In order to circulate their calls for cultural action to reinvent “girlhood”, Riot Grrrl used anti-capitalist, anti-commodification, “DIY” modes of production to create vast amounts of counter-cultural material in the form of musical compositions and zines unabashed of their revolutionary feminist agenda to which all girls were invited to contribute. Zines provided an interactive forum for both political debate and experimental fiction. Through the creation and circulation of these zines, the Riot Grrrls encouraged a revolution against over-complicated or institutionalized relationships with modes of cultural production and consumption.
The distinct aesthetic of the zines produced by the movement is characterised by the chaotic bricolage of symbolic fragments of girlhood. Dolls, bows and hearts are used as political tools, recontextualised alongside experimental or confessional texts which emphasise their oppressive symbolic force. Exhibiting these familiar symbols in self-reflexive parody exposed the cultural mythification and fetishization of girlhood and challenged their symbolic significance.
These contorted symbols were appropriated to display the violence to the body caused by over-mythification. The movement used parody and pastiche to very explicitly and self-consciously sell childhood as a method for drawing attention to its position in a neoliberal marketplace. Crucially, while doing this they replaced the easily-consumable innocent child with an image of the ferocious child: at once active producer and insatiable consumer of culture. The ferocious child then is exposed as a product of the innocent child; the child who realises that her innocence is desirable. Exposing and exploiting the saleability of her image, the ferocious child transforms the fixed nostalgic figure of the child into a slippery disconcerting image of an uncertain, threatening future.
The Riot Grrrl aesthetic was eventually co-opted and commodified (we might think of Bratz dolls as one example of this distortion). Nonetheless, the movement continues to perform radical work in the form of its archive. In its original form Riot Grrrl engaged with models of consumption without succumbing to a version of ‘marketplace feminism’ identified and critiqued by Andi Zeisler. Radicalising modes of consumption by exploiting the fear of the child consumer, Riot Grrrl marked out a space in which girls could be active producers and consumers of a subcultural feminism that they themselves worked to define.
References
Henry Giroux. Stealing Innocence: Corporate Culture’s War on Children. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
Kathleen Hanna. “Bikini Kill: A Color and Activity Book,” Kathleen Hanna Papers, Series 1, Box 1, Folder 10. Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries. 1991.
Neil Postman. “The Disappearance of Childhood,” Childhood Education 61/4: 286-293, 1985.
“Riot Grrrl Press: Spring and Summer Catalog,” Kathleen Hanna Papers, Series 1, Box 2, Folder 23. Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries. 1998.
Lynne Valone. “Grrrls and Dolls: Feminism and Female Youth Culture,” in Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children’s Literature and Culture, edited by Beverly Lyon Clark and Margaret R. Higonnet. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2000.
Andi Zeisler. We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement. New York: PublicAffairs, 2016.
Further Reading
Feona Attwood. “Sluts and Riot Grrrls: Female Identity and Sexual Agency,” Journal of Gender Studies 16/3: 233-247, 2007.
Hugh Cunningham. Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500. London: Longman Group, 1995.
Lisa Darms. “Preserving Contradiction: The Riot Grrrl Collection at the Fales Library,” Woman and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 22/2-3: 335-341, 2012.
Catherine Driscoll. “Girl Culture, Revenge and Global Capitalism: Cyber Girls, Riot Grrls, Spice Girls,” Australian Feminist Studies 14/29: 173-193, 1999.
Kevin Dunn and May Summer Farnsworth. “‘We ARE the Revolution’: Riot Grrrl Press, Girl Empowerment, and DIY Self-Publishing,” Women’s Studies 41/2: 136-157, 2012.
Karina Eileraas. “Witches, Bitches and Fluids: Girl Bands Performing Ugliness as Resistance,” TDR 41/3: 122-139, 1997.
Kerry H. Robinson and Cristyn Davies. “‘She’s kickin’ ass, that’s what she’s doing!’: Deconstructing Childhood ‘Innocence’ in Media Representations,” Australian Feminist Studies 23/57: 343-358, 2008.
Jessica Rosenberg and Gitana Garofalo, “Riot Grrrl: Revolutions from within,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 23/3: 809-841, 1998.
Kristen Schilt. “‘A Little Too Ironic’: The Appropriation and Packaging of Riot Grrrl Politics by Mainstream Female Musicians,” Popular Music and Society 26/1: 5-16, 2003.
About the Author
Katherine Kruger teaches in the School of English at the University of Sussex. Her thesis made the case that notions of child’s play shape theories of reading embedded in the twentieth-century novel. She is currently working on a monograph on this topic, entitled ‘Innocence Run Amok: Reading Child’s Play in the Twentieth-Century Novel’.
Cite this article as: Katherine Kruger, “Selling the ferocious child: Riot Grrl’s radicalisation of consumption,” in Changing Childhoods, 21 July, 2020, https://changingchildhoods.com/selling-the-ferocious-child