Reading Riot Grrrl After Kathy Acker and Against the Anti-Feminist
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The Politics and Aesthetics of 1990s Punk Women’s Writing: Reading Riot Grrrl after Kathy Acker and against the anti-feminist backlash by Gemma Griffiths A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Liverpool John Moores University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy February 2020 2 The Politics and Aesthetics of 1990s Punk Women’s Writing: Reading Riot Grrrl after Kathy Acker and against the anti-feminist backlash by Gemma Griffiths Approved: Dr Fiona Tolan Director of Studies Dr Joanna Croft Supervisory Committee Member Dr Sian Lincoln Supervisory Committee Member 3 Contents Acknowledgements 6 Abstract 8 Preface 10 Introduction 13 Chapter One: Kathy Acker 62 1.1 Acker’s Anti-Work Narratives: Disidentifying with the Puritan Work Ethic and the Logics of Patriarchal Capitalism……………………………………………..…..64 1.2 Acker’s Anti-Work Literary Devices: Textual Bricolage, Tangential Drawings and the Amoral Text…………………………………………………………….…...84 1.3 Acker’s Anti-Work Aesthetic: Punk’s Aesthetics of Amateurism…………..….104 1.4 Acker’s Sex Narratives: Representing Autonomous Female Sexual Desire…....117 1.5 Acker’s Erotic Splicing and Écriture Féminine: The Text as the Place of Desire……………………………………………………………………………….131 4 Chapter Two: Kathleen Hanna Reads Kathy Acker 142 2.1 Hanna’s Anti-Work Confessionals: Disidentifying with the Puritan Work Ethic in Zines.……………………………………………………...……………………..146 2.2 Forging an Alternate ‘Work Sphere’ with Riot Grrrl Production……..........….166 2.3 Hanna’s Anti-Work Literary Devices: Textual Collage, Doodling, and the Unproductive Text………………………………………………………………….181 2.4 The Problem with Professionalism: Understanding Power with Foucault and Reclaiming Amateurism with Riot Grrrl…………………………………………..199 2.5 Representing Female Sexuality: Reading Hanna’s The Most Beautiful Girl is a Dead Girl in the ‘Postfeminist Age’………………………...…...………...………204 2.6 Grrrls on an Erotic Mission to Restore Female Sexuality: Hanna’s Erotic Splicing and ‘Feminine Writing’…………………………………………………………….217 Chapter Three: Riot Grrrl Zines 230 3.1 The Literary Avant-Garde and Écriture Féminine: Impossible Schizoid Girl and Pirate Jenny…………………….………………………………………..……231 3.2 Burroughsian Vignettes and the Problem with Postmodernism: Bedtime Stories for Trivial Teens #3-4 and Double Bill #1-2……………………...……….……..259 5 3.3 Aesthetics of Amateurism: I (Heart) Amy Carter #1-5……………..…..…….270 3.4 “Sitting in a cubicle for eight hours a day is not living”: A Punk-Feminist Critique of Work in Bulldozer #1…………………………………….……...…….276 3.5 Language, Self-Writing and Identity: Confessional Poetry #2 and I’m So Fucking Beautiful #1-2…………………………………………………….……...288 3.6 Black Identities and the Aesthetics of ‘Cute’ in Riot Grrrl Zines: Gunk #4………………………………………………………...……..…………....306 3.7 Sex Writing and Erotic Splicing: Riot Grrrl NYC #1, 3-6 and Luna………...315 Conclusion 336 Bibliography 347 6 Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to my Director of Studies, Dr Fiona Tolan, for the expertise you brought to this project and for your continuous support throughout the PhD process. Your supervision perfectly struck a balance between being critical and encouraging, and it was a pleasure to conduct this research with you as my mentor. I could not have wished for a better advisor. I would also like to thank Dr Jo Croft and Dr Sian Lincoln for their insightful comments on drafts, enlivening discussions in meetings and passion for this project. Jo, thank you for introducing me to Kathy Acker all those years ago and for taking me to see ‘The Godmother of Punk’ herself, Patti Smith. I gratefully acknowledge the funding granted by Professor Robin Leatherbarrow and provided by Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU PhD scholarship) in support of this research. I am also grateful to the librarians at Fales Library NYU for granting me access to their archives and assisting me with my research during visits. Thanks also go to my friends and fellow PhD candidates, Aimée Walsh and Ryan Coogan, for all the laughs and understanding you have provided over the last three years. To Bill and Nicola – my ‘road dogs’. Thank you for being beacons of light in moments of darkness and for ensuring that I still had plenty of fun whilst completing this thesis. 7 My sincerest thanks also goes to my family, my parents Christina and Alan, who have supported me in every endeavour throughout my life – I could not have done this without you. Thank you for everything. Finally, thank you to my James for putting up with me and for being the wonderful, supportive, and loving person you are. 8 Abstract Riot Grrrl, a hardcore feminist punk movement that emerged in the early 1990s in America, is often contemplated through a subcultural studies lens. As a result, its status as a political movement and social phenomenon still overshadows its status as an artistic movement in its scholarship. This thesis applies a literary studies lens to Riot Grrrl, examining specific devices employed in the movement’s literature and tracing these back to an experimental literary avant-garde, to fortify its status as an artistic movement. I argue that Riot Grrrl practitioners appropriate much of their artistic investments from American punk-feminist writer and postmodernist, Kathy Acker, who is frequently cited as a precursor to Riot Grrrl. Building on recent studies that have begun to demystify Acker’s influence as manifest in Riot Grrrl zine writing, I ask: to what ends do Riot Grrrls incorporate devices from Acker’s literary critique of patriarchal culture in the 1980s into their later critique of patriarchal culture in the 1990s? Following the successes of second wave feminism in gaining women’s liberation, their art responds to the media-driven backlash against feminism that emerged in the 1980s, which resulted in the concept of ‘post-feminism’ gaining traction in the 1990s. Two key manifestations of this backlash were the discrediting of working women, as well as attempts to reassert control over female sexuality, which mutated into postfeminist trends in the 1990s that similarly hinged upon the themes of work and sex: ‘New Traditionalism’ and ‘Do-Me’ feminism. I focus on Acker’s 1980s novels that influenced Riot Grrrl writing, such as Great Expectations (1983), Blood and Guts in High School (1978; published in 1984), and Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream (1986), tracing her ideological and aesthetic influence into Grrrl zines sourced from The Riot Grrrl Collection archive at New York University’s Fales Library and Special Collections. This 9 analysis reveals how the critical function of avant-garde literary devices, inherited from Acker by Riot Grrrl zinesters, shifts according to gender developments being made in the 1990s that posited a stratification of feminist definitions. 10 Preface One of the more frequent questions I get asked when presenting my research on Riot Grrrl is: how did you get into this material? In other words, what was my entry point into Riot Grrrl? This is probably because, now in my late twenties, I would have barely been two years old when ‘Revolution Girl Style Now!’ fully hit its stride in the early 1990s. Despite this fact, I still somehow feel a sort of perverse nostalgia for Riot Grrrl, and upon deeper introspection, I can come up with three credible reasons for this. Firstly, as a movement, Riot Grrrl bears all the hallmarks of a ‘pre-internet boom’ society – a time when the world would have arguably seemed like a much bigger place and, pending the emergence of sites like Facebook and Twitter, people’s lives were certainly lived more privately. Though I can see the many benefits of the Internet for advancing a feminist agenda (instant encyclopaedic access to feminist ideas and literature, as well as platforms that showcase a diverse range of female voices and provide easy access to online feminist communities), there is also a sense that something deeply personal and sentimental was lost with this shift to an online social realm. The intimacy cultivated through pre-digital self-published literary channels, such as the making and exchanging of zines, for example, is arguably drained of its potency when moved into the blogosphere. This is perhaps because zines, unlike blogs, constitute a highly embodied literature. They retain the hallmarks of human idiosyncrasy in a culture increasingly shaped by consumer capitalism and its requisite for slick production values and ‘the professional finish’. The second reason for my perverse nostalgia for Riot Grrrl is perhaps linked to its persistent aesthetic resonance in mainstream popular culture, hence the frequent flickering exposure I had to its messages of ‘girl-love’ and 11 self-acceptance as a pre-teen. Flickers that were always, for me, waiting to be traced back to their uncommodified, undiluted form. Kristen Schilt also identifies the residual presence of Riot Grrrl in mainstream popular culture and traces its manifestations. Schilt notes that a new group of mainstream female musicians emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s dubbed the “angry women in rock” by the popular music press (2003, 5). This group – which included the likes of Alanis Morissette, Meredith Brooks, and Fiona Apple, amongst others – appropriated key concepts from the Riot Grrrl movement in a commercial context and “turned them into a million-dollar enterprise” (Schilt 2003, 6). She attests to how even English pop-band the Spice Girls, a group I enjoyed as a pre-teen, co-opted Riot Grrrl’s ‘revolution girl-style now’ slogan to create their own popular slogan: ‘girl power’. Whilst I enjoyed these commodified flashes of Riot Grrrl as a pre-teen, and whilst I can still see the positive aspects of making girls feel empowered through popular music (even if it is just the brief three minutes it takes to listen to a song like ‘Wannabe’ by the Spice Girls), with age and an increasing awareness of feminist arguments, these mainstream nods to radical feminism no longer satisfied my budding feminist self.