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Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012

From to Girls Rock Camp: Gendered Spaces, Musicianship and the Culture of Girl Making

NYALA ALI, University of Winnipeg

ABSTRACT This paper explores constructs of rock musicianship and girlhood from the late ’80s/early ’90s Riot Grrrl movement, up until the 2001 formation of the Rock ‘N' Roll Camp for Girls in Portland, , which was subsequently documented in a 2007 film entitled Girls Rock! The Movie. Topics include (s) and girlhood in media (specifically Riot Grrrl in contrast to the “” movement of the late ’90s), girl-centred media franchises, and girlhood with respect to gender-related branding, all of which function as a means to explore the culture of girl- making and negotiations of girlhood, within a musical framework that is frequently still regarded as “male” by the mainstream media. The paper will point to the ways in which Girls Rock Camp reconfigures girl making by expanding its potential for youth empowerment through the practical application of both girlhood studies theory and popular music culture, in order to create a safe public space that fosters a sense of female agency and female identity.

KEYWORDS Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls, feminism, girlhood studies, pop-culture, popular music theory, cultural production

Revelation Girl Style Now!: Autokeny, Pop-Culture & Pedagogyi In a 1997 interview with Punk Planet magazine, musician , pioneer of the feminist punk movement and female-oriented subculture known as Riot Grrrl, outlines Sarah Hoagland’s concept of autokeny. First defined in Hoagland’s 1987 book Lesbian Ethics, Toward New Values, Hanna paraphrases autokeny as

The self in the community. In Western culture, there's this whole thing of how it's the individual versus the community… autokeny is about how your individuality can reinforce your sense of community and your sense of community can reinforce your sense of individuality. I think that's such a great concept (quoted in Sinker, 2001: 65-66).

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As highlighted by Hanna, autokeny as an ideological ideal is particularly relevant to . As rock music culture and industry is still largely associated with males, female musicians working within this field have been consistently struggling to establish a sense of community while negotiating their musicianship and their gender simultaneously. Hoagland’s autokeny, as practiced by Hanna and her band is that which has come to define the Riot Grrrl movement that emerged in the early 1990s, as a response to the largely male-gendered scene in , DC. Deploying ’s DIY ethos in order to deconstruct and redefine female identity politics, Riot Grrrl arguably marked the commencement of feminism’s third wave. Some fifteen years later, Riot Grrrl’s politics and practices have once again been brought to the fore by way of the recently developed Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girlsii. The week-long musically- geared camp for girls between the ages of seven and seventeen has since been documented in a 2007 film called Girls Rock! The Movie, The camp showcased in the film has since inspired over twenty affiliate camps in the US and Canada, all of which are part of the ‘Girls Rock Camp Alliance’. Directly addressing the question: ‘How can we deploy the concept of autokeny to teach young girls to play rock ‘n roll?’, Girls Rock Camp uses the creation and performance of music as a means for campers to assert an unapologetic sense of self, while simultaneously taking part in a strong community of collective female identities. By using active participation for girls as its most valuable educational tool, the camp is able to teach campers to play instruments by using Riot Grrrl values, while incorporating various practices that have come to represent the Riot Grrrl movement as a whole, the camp’s methods also consciously point to both why and how dominant cultural discourses of women in rock should be challenged. Poised at the crossroads between pop-culture and pedagogy, Girls Rock Camp provides an important space for girls to develop their emerging identities as both women and musicians. In order to consider the cultural implications of such a space, it is useful to retroactively examine both the Riot Grrrl philosophy that has laid the groundwork for the camp, as well as subsequent media constructs of female musicianship that the camp aims to dismantle. These origins form a solid cultural background from which to interrogate the ways in which Girls Rock! The Movie (and by extension, Girls Rock Camp function as a cultural tool that reflects Geraldine Bloustein’s (2003) concept of ‘girl making’, a term that considers adolescence as a period of ‘dark play’ during which different identities are tried on for size by young girls. For Bloustein, this process requires a fair amount of risk taking, as there are both limits to who girls can become, and serious social consequences for transgressing those limits. Bloustein is also acutely aware of the differences between who and what young girls are able to be in private versus public spaces (2003: 9). Girls Rock Camp therefore reconfigures girl making by expanding its potential for youth empowerment through the practical application of both girlhood studies

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Don't Need Your Protection, Don't Need No Kiss Goodnightiii: Gendered Spaces & ‘Bedroom Culture’ The dynamics of public and private spaces are often a topic of discussion in girlhood studies, and become even more important in relation to subcultures for girls. In the late 1980s, all-female subcultures were still very much restricted to the private spaces of the home, reflecting the notion of ’bedroom culture’. As Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh note, ‘the idea of girls’ bedroom culture as a distinct cultural form was conceived of by McRobbie and Garber in 1976, to address the invisibility of girls as subjects in youth-based subculture studies’ (2001: 175). According to McRobbie and Garber’s theory of ‘bedroom culture’, girls negotiate different spaces than boys, who are allowed to roam more freely into less controlled and less confined public spaces, instead of being relegated to the home. This issue is further complicated by the fact that girls also seem to negotiate spaces differently than boys do, especially with respect to girls’ subcultures which ‘consist of activities such as magazine reading [and] listening to music’ (Mitchell and Reid-Walsh, 2001: 175). As such, “female” activities that fall under the category of ’bedroom culture’ are very much structured so that those engaging in them are simply passive participants and consumers. Thus, the significance of the Riot Grrrl movement is largely bound up in its ability to deconstruct and transgress these aforementioned “female” activities, by consciously re-positioning and re- negotiating them as active; instead of simply listening to music and reading magazines, Riot Grrrls were uncompromisingly engaged in both the production and collaborative consumption of both of these things. What becomes important here is the agency resulting from such activities; by starting bands and making , Riot Grrrls were effectively engaged in taking ‘bedroom culture’ out of the bedroom and into the public spaces typically reserved for boysiv. As Stacey Singer astutely points out,

It is in [these] space[s] that clear connections can be drawn between the feminist support and networking that was a driving force behind the [R]iot [G]rrrl movement and the construction and agenda of Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls (Singer, 2006: 20).

And I Live In A Town Where The Boys Amputate Their Hearts v : Riot Grrrl Meets Hardcore

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The gendering of spaces that discourses of girlhood studies picks up on is precisely that which made Riot Grrrl doubly necessary and doubly remarkable. Functioning within spaces that were not only public, but generally reserved for males, the movement was a feminist response to the aggressive, testosterone-fueled hardcore punk scene in DC. Since the late 1970s, the punk rock movement as a whole had been largely conceived of as a bratty Neverland for naughty boysvi. If punk rock was constructed as child’s play for young men, then Riot Grrrl became (in Thomas Hine’s terms) punk’s ‘evil older [sister], bursting at the seams with unbridled sexuality and an innate disrespect for the rules and regulations’ (Hine, 2000: 18-19). Though one could argue that such ideas formed the very basis of the punk rock movement as a whole, they were not nearly as threatening or provocative when aligned solely with men, whose presence within public spaces had not been contested. Consequently, when both and the hardcore-influenced Bikini Kill relocated from Olympia to DC and had to contend with the actual hardcore punk scene of the early 1990s, things got interestingvii. By claiming not only a place in, but equal rights to, the largely male punk rock subculture, ‘the musicians in Riot Grrrl challenged the notion that was free from the discourse of patriarchy’ (Leonard, 1997: 233). Though bands like , (whose stalwart frontman Ian Mackaye had previously founded hardcore band ) appeared to be concerned with issues like abortion, street harassment and rape and thus aligned themselves with Riot Grrrl in theory, Mackaye in particular still seemed to some as though he was appropriating girls’ issues simply in order to appear more virtuousviii (Marcus, 2010: 116). Such an observation was given even more weight by some, when it became evident that Fugazi were actually unwilling to relinquish control over their largely heteronormative white male audience, some of whom ignorantly labeled Riot Grrrl as dogmatic, and even as misandristix. Evidently, the presence of Riot Grrrl posed more than a minor threat to this type of band and their fans, especially in a situation where the stage was shared between genders. Appearing with Bikini Kill at a 1992 Supreme Court protest, Fugazi even blamed the women in the audience for defending their right to place their bodies in the overtly “masculine” space of the mosh pit near the stage (Marcus, 2010: 154-155), as Riot Grrrl bands had since instituted a “Girls to the Front” policy encouraging girls and women to stand near the front of the stage, instead of towards the back (Leonard, 1997: 233)x. Thus, this politically charged re-negotiation of previously male homosocial spaces that Riot Grrrl bands provoked was, in large part, ‘a focused critique of the punk scene itself. Riot Grrrl may be understood then, as issuing a particular contestation of a specific male-dominated culture’ (Leonard, 1997: 241), a contestation that was largely and actively about deconstructing and re-configuring this culture to include young women within its parameters. Consequently, this first step towards autonomy within otherwise male-oriented musical spaces is what later allowed for a similarly functioning, solely female homosocial space, as per Girls Rock Camp.

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Jigsaw Youth & Puzzle Pieces: Zines, Body Writing & Grrrl Culturexi In addition to the re-negotiation of spaces that had previously excluded women, Riot Grrrl also gave female fans and performers a space to talk about issues that were not necessarily musically based, but still very much gender oriented. As evidenced through the aforementioned incident involving Fugazi and their engagement with feminist issues, ‘Riot Grrrls didn’t want any favours…To find their own voices, they felt, they couldn’t accept anyone else’s attempts to do it for them’ (Marcus, 2010: 117). The idea of finding one’s voice in this context is again aligned with Hoagland’s autokeny, and the configuration of a space in such a way that allows for a productive oscillation between the female self and the community. Through the creation of, and trading of zines, Riot Grrrl voices were actively expressed within a community of other women, without getting lost, or buried within it. Furthermore, zines were teen media made by teens, for teens; making essentially entailed creating one’s own media in order to self-represent, an act which granted zinesters autonomy over all aspects of production. Often co-opting images and text from many mainstream magazines that were specifically aimed at teenaged girls (such as Sassy and Seventeen), zine culture actively subverted the thoughtless consumption and unattainable body standards that images in these magazines encouraged. By embracing the deconstruction of these images, zinesters instead refigured them into cross-media narratives that demonstrated the construction of female adolescent identity; put another way, zines were pastiches which effectively reflected ‘third wave feminism’s investment in the fragmented female self’ (Vesey, 2010). Furthermore, the names of many zines circulating during the Riot Grrrl movement explicitly asserted sexual agency. Fuck Me Blind, Hit it or Quit it, and Goddess Juice, were direct responses to the culturally imposed limits on teenage female sexuality. These titles also served as a means to show that the notion of avoiding the topic of sex in order to protect girls’ vulnerability only reinforced the patriarchal status quo (Trites, 2000: 95)xii. Originating from punk-rock , feminist Riot Grrrl zines became a way for fans to actively engage with each other, even if they weren’t able to start bands of their own and perform onstage. However, Riot Grrrl zinesters still faced a fair amount of backlash from punk purists who felt as though the women had co-opted their medium; as Daniel Sinker notes

The vehemence of fanzines large and small reserved for Riot Grrrl - and Bikini Kill in particular - was shocking. The editors' use of ‘bitches’, ‘cunts’ , ‘man-haters’, and ‘dykes’ was proof-positive that was still strong in the punk scene (Sinker, 2000: 61)

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Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 a fact that arguably made the creation of Riot Grrrl zines both that much more difficult and that much more necessary. Physical zines have since been overshadowed first by gURL webpages, and later by blogs (which are notorious for intelligent critiques of mainstream media). However, zine making sessions are still taught at Girls Rock Camp, as a means to expose campers to both the DIY ethos and ideological ties to feminism that the process had originally allowed for. That zine culture is still relevant to some degree, reflects the lack of space still available for young women to express themselves; as noted by girlhood studies theorist Anita Harris, ‘the zine provides an excellent alternative to the artificial or external creation of a physical space for young people to “get together”, where they can in fact be watched and monitored’ (Harris, 2001:128). The type of ‘artificial’ space Harris mentions is of course harmful because it may in fact cause girls to adhere to behaviour that they believe is “right”, as opposed to behaviour that they may genuinely want to engage in. In relation to Harris’ notion of being monitored in public spaces, feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s (1975) concept of the male gaze is also pertinent. For Mulvey, the gaze is that which is able to reduce a woman to an image, while the man retains power as the ‘bearer of the look’ (1975: 11). Though Mulvey’s notion was actively subverted through zine-making, the gaze was also actively embraced by Riot Grrrls and used as a political strategy. Riot Grrrls engaged in the act of “body writing”, in which women and young girls in the movement would write visibly on their arms and stomachs with thick black markers. Initiated at Bikini Kill shows, Kathleen Hanna would appear onstage with words like ‘slut’, ‘bitch’ or ‘whore’ inscribed onto her body as a conscious manipulation of both the male gaze and the

traditional exhibitionist role [in which] women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness (Mulvey, 1975: 11)

Hanna was thus able to flip the male gaze back at audience members by ‘confronting audiences with what they might want to see and what they might think of such a woman, all in one fell semiotic swoop’ (Marcus, 2010: 75). Such an act was effectively counter-hegemonic, inverting the notion that women, especially young women, should be denied their sexuality or their assertiveness (or both). Furthermore, body writing ran counter to the notion that female sexuality should be above all, seductive to men instead of confrontational or flat-out threatening, while also pointing to the ways in which those women who actively embraced these things might appear. For the Riot Grrrls who followed suit, body writing became another form of autokeny, a collective means of asserting one’s individuality by denouncing the cultural scripts of both the “real” woman and the “ideal” woman.

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As (2010) notes, ‘a girl’s body was contested territory; this was a way to rewrite its meaning’ (2010: 147), or to re-negotiate one’s own female body in a manner that was both politically and erotically charged. Thus, body writing can be seen as act which directly engages with Susan Bordo’s (1993) notion that the female body is inscribed with the textual meaning of patriarchal culture (1993: 142). As Hanna was twenty-three at the time, it was through her teenaged fans that the act of body writing became even more politically charged. Instead of being perceived as adolescents who could still veer towards childhood, Riot Grrrl body writers instead defaced the teenaged body and its “ideal” standard of beauty, by literally inscribing it with traits of the “real”, sexually charged woman. In following their idol’s lead, teenaged Riot Grrrls were thus able to critique the teenage mystique (Hine, 2000: 12) and feminine mystique simultaneously, pointing to the ways in which both constructs are equally destructive and essentialist, and also highlighting adolescence as the stage in which girls may well encounter all the toxic messages of femininity. By exposing the link between constructions of adolescence and constructions of gender, body writing actively engaged with the limits that were inscribed, so to speak, onto female sexualities. In doing so, such an act allowed for the reclamation of the female body as a ‘direct locus of social control’ (Bordo, 1993: 165) by actively performing (through text) otherwise harmful expectations of gender and sexuality as a self-aware spectacle. Harnessing music culture as the means through which to achieve such a spectacle, Riot Grrrl shows functioned as both a venue and a source of solidarity for body writers exhibiting the type of non-normative feminine display that was arguably as significant as playing instruments onstage. Transgressing the culturally imposed limits of female sexuality and feminine display was indeed a large part of Riot Grrrl culture; Hanna, a former stripper, sang (in a little-girl voice, no less): ‘I can sell my body if I wanna!’xiii Though the act of stripping for money has long been a point of contention for many feminists, Hanna’s antics were a productive allusion to the ways in which women’s bodies and sexualities are frequently commodified by men, for men. In contrast, if a woman chose to do this herself, she was obviously an object of failed femininity who deserved the criticism and possibly even the physical harm that she might befall as a result.

Bad Reputationxiv – Female Guitar Players & Failed Femininity The accusation of failed femininity was also thrown at women who not only performed rock music onstage in a manner that displayed “excessive” (read: any) female sexuality, but did so while playing instruments that were (and are still) defined in male terms. As Monique Bourdage (2010) writes: ‘in terms of rock ‘n’ roll performance, the electric guitar takes on a role that Steve Waksman (1999) has termed “techophallus”’(2010: 3), which might in part explain the masturbatory connotations that classic rock guitar solos are especially prone to. As such, female

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Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 musicians were positioned as doubly threatening, by directly asserting their own sexuality onstage, and doing so by using symbols of sexuality that had been traditionally aligned with males. As feminist proto-punk pioneer and Runaways guitarist remarks: ‘You know why girls “can’t play guitar” and “can’t play rock ‘n’ roll?” Because rock ‘n’ roll is sex. You’re saying women can’t have sex? You don’t tell me that girls don’t get horny and don’t wanna fuck!’ (quoted in Marcus, 2010: 166). Thus, the “ideal” woman as someone who is both silent and consciously suppresses her libido is directly challenged by female musicians who not only subvert this stereotype, but arguably even transgress the parameters of gender by deploying phallocentric instruments in conjunction with their own female bodies. That a notable portion of musicians who aligned themselves with Riot Grrrl were in fact queer women further complicated these gender parametersxv. These queer female musicians thus reinforced the notion that, as Judith Butler (1990) remarks: ‘There is no “proper” gender, a gender proper to one sex rather than another, which is in some sense that sex’s cultural property’ (1990: 127). Very much in line with Butler’s claim, Girls Rock Camp explicitly encourages and teaches girls to play traditionally “male” instruments without even mentioning the potential for sexism associated with doing so, a move that might, by extension, even teach young girls not to be ashamed of their gender. Furthermore, the Oregon camp depicted in Girls Rock! The Movie, is noticeably devoid of cute, pink, explicitly “girly” guitars, basses and drum kits. As such, the all-female music teachers at the camp consciously defy the idea that, as many guitar manufacturers would have us believe, ‘the way to eliminate barriers between women and electric guitars is through some glitter and a pastel paint-job’ (Bourdage, 2010: 7). Thus, the staff of Girls Rock Camp both play, and teach on, “regular” instruments, an act that arguably “de- essentialises” girls by teaching them to be less traditionally feminine. As a result, the campers who will ideally come to represent a new generation of performers may perhaps be able to escape the fact that female musicians are ‘still by and large defined in that order —as women first, and as rock performers second’ (Gaar quoted in Bourdage, 2010: 7). As Sleater-Kinney guitarist (who teaches at the camp) makes a point of saying, album and concert reviewers still describe her band as ‘not just another girl group’ or ‘so good that gender isn’t an issue at all’ (quoted in Sinker, 2000: 99), even though such a claim only serves to reinforce that gender is still an issue. Clearly, the idea of gender functions as a form of what Pierre Bourdieu (1979) refers to as cultural capital – culturally based resources such as knowledge or awareness, educational credentials, or aesthetic preferences which can be exchanged for acceptance, recognition, inclusion or social mobility (Winkle-Wagner, 2010: 5). As such, cultural capital is constantly deployed by media sources, especially in relation to women who are present in otherwise male- dominated fields, likely because of its vast potential for profit. For this reason, all-girl rock

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Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 bands are frequently regarded as a type of “novelty act” instead of a legitimate group of working musicians.

Revolution Come & Gone: the Blandly Spicy Residue of Riot Grrrlxvi Unfortunately, gender as cultural capital is that which, in large part, ultimately led to the downfall and commodification of Riot Grrrl. According to Anita Harris (2001), ‘the issue [was] not so much who [spoke] “for” this political music culture, but who [sold] it, along with its message of social justice driven by angry young women, in palatable form for profit’ (2001: 128). As such, Riot Grrrl was co-opted by the mainstream media and repackaged as two different, but equally watered-down offshoots, the first of which involved so-called “angry women in rock” such as Alanis Morissette, Fiona Apple, Meredith Brooks, Tracy Bonham, all of whom were white, straight, middle-class and above all, radio-friendly. Furthermore, these were ‘attractive young women armed with a softer, cleaner, feminist bent that tidied up Riot Grrrl’s grit’ (Bourdage, 2010: 7), by downplaying the movement’s active and unabashed presentation of unconventional (and thus otherwise marginalised) images of both girlhood and womanhood. Granted, if any of these women have in fact inspired a young girl to pick up a guitar of her own, then all is not lost. Even more damaging, however was the term “women’s music” and the all-female Lillith Fair festival that heavily showcased not fierce all-female rock bands, but siren-voiced singer- songwriters playing acoustic guitar-pop and lilting piano ballads. Still adhering to patriarchal representations of modestly dressed, mild-mannered women, this second genre either failed to realise, or even worse, flat out ignored that

the very concept of “women’s music” [bought] into the notion that there [was] an essentially feminine aspect of music created by women, which [prevented] the music from sharing critical space with that created by men (Bourdage, 2010: 7).

Thus “women’s music” even somewhat undid the work of Riot Grrrl with respect to carving out such a critical space for women in otherwise public, male homosocial environments. Even later in the 1990s came the cartoonish , who preached an ostensibly feminist message of “Girl Power”, but were not actively engaged in acts of DIY culture that fostered hands-on creativity, or the challenging of patriarchal constructions of women’s bodies and identities that encouraged young women to think critically. The problem was not simply that the Spice Girls were manufactured, or a pop group, or both (as is frequently argued by punks and Riot Grrrl purists alike), but that the group existed in a totally different realm from the predominantly male space out of which Riot Grrrl had emerged.xvii Instead, the band were positioned within a largely white, middle-class (or even upper- class, as per ‘Posh’ Spice)

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Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 heteronormative space that did no real work in depicting, let alone creating a space for alternate representations of girlhood. As such, the Spice Girls were very much reflective of the late ’90s trend of commodifying girlhood for profit and entertainment at the expense of feminist ideology, by constructing ‘girlhood as a space of consumption at the expense of girlhood as an active space of cultural production’ (Kearney, 2004: 75). Thus, the popularity of the Spice Girls’ music was largely dependent on its fan demographic’s buying power, as opposed to the productive exchange fostered by the tape-trading, zine trading, and live shows that Riot Grrrl had relied on in order to build a community between fans. The pop group’s widespread merchandising not only furthered passive consumption, but also worked to reinforce unattainable body images, by adhering to the standards upheld by the types of adolescent magazines that Riot Grrrl zine culture had reveled in deconstructing. Clearly, media-friendly depictions of supposedly empowered female musicians had ‘less to do with being asked to show a little leg than with being forbidden to show [their] fangs’ (Mifflin, 1995: 78). As such, the Spice Girls became the definitive ’90s example of what Robert Goldman, Deborah Heath & Sharon L. Smith (1991) termed as ‘commodity feminism’ – an advertising strategy which co-opts and reconfigures feminist icons and ideals for commercial purposes, in an attempt to secure a media-savvy female demographic (1991: 333-51). Such a strategy was evident through the Spice Girls’ marketability as infantilised women who preached “Girl Power!”, but did not even have real names (eg: ‘Baby’ Spice), let alone real instruments to play.

I Have To Rock, I Have To, Please, I Am So Begging You To Let Me Rockxviii : TV Girl Lane Kim – from Rock Aficionado to Rebel-Girl Drummer Largely due to this type of ‘commodity feminism’ (Goldstein et al., 1991: 333) in music culture, the end of the 1990s saw ‘the current retreat of Riot Grrrl and other Grrrl-powered music back to the underground, [as] a sign that young women [sought] to reclaim their expressions for themselves’ (Harris, 2004: 128). However, it also became clear that not all young girls had been seduced by the spicy pleasures of “Girl Power.” Perhaps in an attempt to bridge the gap between the celebrity culture of the Spice Girls and the reality of being a female musician, depictions of “real” teenage girls who were also dedicated to playing real instruments began to slowly emerge on mainstream TV shows specifically targeted at adolescents. Interestingly, Misty McElroy’s foundation of Girls Rock Camp (as part of her undergraduate requirement in Cultural Studies) also coincided with the 2000 release of the television comedy-drama Gilmore Girls, centered around Lorelai and Rory Gilmore, a quirky mother and daughter duo who resided in a small town. Critically acclaimed for its witty self-aware dialogue and penchant for pop-culture references, Gilmore Girls was a unique feminist presence on prime-time TV that indeed

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Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 showcased unconventional depictions of adolescent girls who might serve as an alternative role model for the show’s viewers. While sixteen-year-old Rory Gilmore was a self-professed bookworm and dedicated private-school student, her best friend Lane Kim was an unabashedly enthusiastic music nerd with eclectic taste. Armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of bands that could give the pretentious record-store dudes in High Fidelity a run for their money (or their record collections), Lane was forced to hide her favorite pastime from her strict, religious, Korean mother.xix Lane’s room thus functioned as a quintessential example of the type of ‘bedroom culture’ that was arguably reflective of Riot Grrrl’s recession back into the underground. Literally hiding her stereo in her closet, and her vast, meticulously organised record collection underneath the floorboards of her room, Lane represented a new generation of music-loving girls who were ostensibly unsure how to negotiate both their fandom and their potential musicianship within the spaces allotted to them. Interestingly, Lane’s lack of brothers and glaringly absent father also granted her, in a sense, even more female agency over her eclectic musical taste, as these absent male family members could not have been the ones to turn her onto male-oriented classic rock bands like Led Zeppelinxx. Similarly, Lane’s constant discussion of the bands she loved was also providing young female audience members with exposure to indie-rock music that was largely still underground, thus encouraging them to seek out similar music in the hopes that they might discover a new favorite band (and maybe even one that the boys they knew hadn’t heard of yet). Interestingly, Lane’s elaborate plots and schemes to hide her love of music from ‘Mama Kim’ transgressed any notion of simple rebellion, which would have instead arisen from engaging with music non-secretly, despite her mother’s objections. More importantly, Lane’s obsession as secret was not only due to issues of gender, but equally due to issues of race and ethnic identity (the latter of which personally interested me, as a similar-aged adolescent, non-white, female music nerd with strict parents, who indeed found some solidarity in Lane.) Representations of other races and ethnicities were (unfortunately) largely absent from Riot Grrrl culture, and thus a point of contention for academic feminist scholars of the movement.xxi As a character who was obviously influenced by Riot Grrrl, the link between Lane’s Korean heritage and her musical passion served as another progressive and productive example of issues surrounding the spaces available for young girls to productively engage with rock music. Incidentally Girls Rock Camp seems to be even more diverse and inclusive than both Riot Grrrl and Gilmore Girls, as Girls Rock! The Movie contains many campers of different ethnicities, and interestingly, highlights a fifteen-year-old heavy-metal loving Korean camper named Laura throughout the film, perhaps even doing so with Lane in mind.

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That Lane’s ethnic identity frequently conflicted with her love of music was further complicated by the fact that she desperately wanted to learn an instrument and play in a rock band, and thus, in the vein of Riot Grrrl, aspired to take her music-related ‘bedroom culture’ out of the bedroom, and into the public realm. As such, Lane harnessed her resources in order to secure drum lessons (an instrument that is still played even less by women than the electric guitar is) from the local music shop owner, while going to great lengths to hide the evidence from ‘Mama Kim’. Resorting to bartering, as well as the borrowing of both practice space and a drum kit on which to learn to play, Lane’s efforts in the name of rock ‘n roll also subverted the buying-power privilege and blind consumption of ‘commodity feminism’ (Goldstein et al., 1991: 333) that was tied to young women’s music culture in the late 1990s. Furthermore, once Lane was able to learn her instrument, she actively sought out a band needing a drummer, interestingly enough, by way of a handmade collage-type flyer that was arguably a direct nod to zine culture. Though an all-female band for Lane would have been the ideal situation, in the small town of Stars Hollow, she instead ended up as the lone female, lone visible minority, and also as the band leader of Hep Alien.xxii Like the Riot Grrrls before her, Lane was able to carve out a positive, active space for herself, albeit within a much more flexible (though still largely white and male-dominated) rock ‘n’ roll culture, in order to play the music that she loved. The writers’ awareness of the plight of many female rock musicians became particularly evident through their casting choice for Gil, the middle-aged burnout guitarist in Lane’s band. Hilariously played by musician Sebastian Bach, former frontman of ’80s hair-metal group Skid Row, Gil was very much Lane’s ally throughout the show, and was sometimes even subordinate to her. As such, he provided much of the comic relief, especially for viewers who knew that Skid Row was emblematic of a musical genre that had been almost exclusively white, male, and not only heterosexist, but that consistently and consciously objectified and subordinated women. As the undisputed decision-maker of her band, Lane, during a pivotal episode of the series, sneaks out of the house to play a Hep Alien show at the now-defunct but still-legendary CBGB’s club in New York. Upon her return home, Lane finds out that her mother has in fact discovered her records, her stereo, her music magazines and her ‘secret rock ‘n’ roll life’. Ousted from the Kim household as a result, the show’s writers chose not to portray Lane in a way that upheld ‘negative myths about contemporary teens’ (Males quoted in Baxter, 2008: 2). Instead, Lane remained a responsible person as well as a driven musician with DIY convictions, eventually reconciling with her mother in the next season of the show. Thus, Lane’s personal development from an adolescent into an accountable young woman very much paralleled her development from an avid music fan into a successful musician. Although Lane is merely a fictional television character, she still holds the potential to provide some inspiration for viewers who are also would-be female musicians. At the very least, she serves as a window through which real

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Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 adolescent girls can both witness and relate to some of the very accurate complexities surrounding cultures of girlhood, music consumption and music production,.

Why Don’t You Start Your Own Band, Super-Genius?xxiii : Girls Rock! The Movie

In this respect, one could regard Girls Rock Camp as a condensed, real-life documentary version of Lane’s musical journey, in a space free of judgment, sneaking around, and terrifyingly militant ‘Mama Kims’. However, instead of progressing from consumers of music to producers of it within the span of a few years, participants occupy an interesting critical space by simultaneously acting as consumers and producers of music-based culture as soon as they enter the camp: they have a week to learn an instrument, form a band with fellow campers, write an original song, and perform it for a live audience, while adhering to the DIY methods that have consistently been a part of underground music cultures. Broken down into different sessions involving musical instruction as well as collective band development and performance depending on the genre of music that campers choose to explore during ‘band formation’, the camp’s vocal workshops are taught by self-professed ‘fat chick’ Beth Ditto (Nault, 2009), ferocious queer frontwoman of electro-punk outfit Gossip. During her session, Ditto engages campers in the type of community-building call-and-response vocals that derive from spiritual/work songs and folk, and are most recently found in hip-hop. In this particular case, Ditto encouraging the campers to answer her cry of ‘GIRLS!’ with ‘ROCK!’ Though it may appear that nothing significant is happening in this moment, I would argue that such a militant exercise promotes an empowering assertion of girlhood in the face of socially ingrained sexism (in that girls could not possibly rock, so how dare they even try?). If the girls in the camp operate, according to Rosalind Wiseman (2009), as ‘a platoon of soldiers who have banded together to survive adolescence’ (2009: 79), then Ditto’s vocal workshop is indeed effective in rallying the troops, so to speak. The stylish, outspoken Ditto is also a known activist for the fat acceptance movement, which aims to secure a positive space for fat bodies (and fat women in particular) within dominant culture (Nault, 2009). Though this aspect of Ditto’s personal politics is not explicitly addressed in the film, it is hinted at by juxtaposing her music with statistics about adolescent dieting, eating disorders and the trappings of body-image that are frequently experienced by young girls. As camp counselor Winner remarks: ‘We’ve been taught, or socialized to think that it’s normal to be this perfect idea of what a woman is supposed to be – that’s what everyone is supposed to want to be’ (Girls Rock! The Movie). Thus, Ditto’s presence at the camp as a confident musician and female mentor is an undeniably positive thing for the droves of young girls otherwise assaulted with images of “perfect” bodies from all sides of the media and for some, even in real life.

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Tacee, the mother of seven-year-old camper Palace, for example, notes in an onscreen interview that she runs a women’s clothing boutique and that consequently, her young daughter has indeed grown up around other women asking her mother things like ‘does my butt look fat in these pants?’ (Girls Rock! The Movie). Such comments about body insecurities are definitely picked up on by Palace and other young girls like her, who may consequently become dangerously body-conscious before they are even conscious of their own bodies. Aware of this fact, Ditto (whom curvy camper Laura gleefully refers to as her hero), explicitly tells the campers:

As women, we’re not supposed to look dirty; we are not supposed to sweat. We are supposed to look clean, prim, proper, like pop stars at all times. But you know what? We sweat! We pant, we pound, we cry when we sing, it’s powerful, and this is really important to know (Girls Rock! The Movie).

Interestingly enough, a couple of scenes later, Palace is filmed while talking about the anxiety she feels, and how she often ‘keeps things inside’. She is then interrupted by her mother Tacee, who reaches in and roughly pulls Palace’s coat closed, remarking in horror: ‘You have a stain on your shirt!’ Though it would be easy to simply criticise Tacee for actively upholding the stereotypes that Ditto had recently broken down for the campers, the scene more importantly reflects the anxieties that mothers may consistently feel about their daughters. This is because mothers are the ones most likely to be blamed by society for a less than perfect-looking child, or for any personal problems that child may have, especially if that child is female. Tacee later admits that even she still struggles with appearance-based constructs of female identity. In contrast, the one father interviewed in the movie (Dad to eight-year-old camper Amelia, who had written fourteen atonal one-minute songs about her pet Chihuahua) did not speak to any issues surrounding young girls (or his daughter in particular). Instead, Amelia’s father spoke solely about musical influences, attributing his daughter’s love of noise and feedback to the records he frequently played, quite obviously feeling some need to assert his own expertise about music. Though supportive parents who seek to expose their daughters to music are an undeniably positive thing, it is nonetheless puzzling to me that the connection between rock music and femaleness that runs through the film was completely left out of this scene. However, such a scene might also be strategic in pointing to the ways in which the all-female presence at the camp might be even more necessary, as a means to bring both the concepts of girlhood and musicianship into productive dialogue by people who have experienced both of these things. Some of the campers, especially the adolescent ones, are indeed aware of both the oppression of women in rock, and the overall lack of space for adolescent girls to address instances of gender-

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Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 related oppression as a whole. This becomes evident through the girls songwriting; as camper Laura remarks: ‘I have thoughts and feelings about music, and I should just put them forward, you know? We call [this song] “Counter-Attack” because people have been attacking forever and saying we can’t do it’ (Girls Rock! The Movie). Interestingly, Winner talks about having been flat-out denied an opportunity to play with boys because ‘they didn’t want a girl in their band’ (Girls Rock! The Movie), and both Laura and two other campers share negative experiences of previously having been in otherwise all-male bands, a situation which made them shy about expressing their ideas. The girls felt that they would be either ignored, or even worse, seen as a threat; Sam, another camper who is also an accomplished guitarist, notes that she had written all of the guitar parts for the boys in her band, and was subsequently ousted for ‘playing too loud’ (Girls Rock! The Movie) or perhaps for showing them up on an instrument they still felt was “theirs”. That girls are frequently still socialised to exist quietly in the background and to be apologetic for any talents they have that may in fact make them stand out, is also addressed by many of the camp counselors, one of whom explicitly notes that ‘boys are not ever trained to apologize for the amount of space they’re taking up, intellectually, emotionally, physically’ (Girls Rock! The Movie). Such gendered cultural scripts might well relate back to the gendering of public and private spaces, and the concept that boys do indeed navigate such spaces differently, by being perhaps less aware of (or more entitled to) their existence in public spheres. Thus, the young girls in the film, though placed in a space that is ostensibly safe for them, are still very tentative; it is as though, as another counselor remarks, they are trained to respond to a new situation by being ‘small’ (Girls Rock! The Movie) and innocuous until they can perfectly accomplish whatever task they are given. Band practice at the camp, therefore, was made that much harder by the fact that a lot of the girls did not want to play loudly (or at all) until they felt they had perfected their respective parts; one camper even requested that everyone else turn away from her until she had figured out her drum part. That girls still feel as though they do not want to do something in public until they can do it right reflects the rampant self-doubt and need to be seen as perfect that many girls feel. That boys are generally much more willing to be vocal in classrooms than girls are (as becomes evident during the theory workshops at camp), may also be tied to girls’ fear of being wrong, and even worse yet, the potential shame that can result from being wrong in public. This type of shame is perhaps also transferable to some of the girls’ unwillingness to talk about their personal selves. Both the bottling up of one’s feelings and the constant worry caused by this type of self-censorship was addressed by many of the girls and women interviewed throughout the film. One counselor remarks that: ‘It really broke stereotypes for me of what little girls are; I couldn’t believe how much was going on for these little girls’ (Girls Rock! The Movie). Thus, the toxicity resulting from both constantly worrying about other people’s

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Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 expectations and opinions, and consequently keeping one’s feelings inside is counteracted, to some degree by allowing the girls to express themselves emotionally, through something tangible like music. As camp counselor Winner notes: ‘I feel like there is a connection between giving the girls a space to talk about their feelings and giving them a space to play their feelings’ (Girls Rock! The Movie). The opportunity to ‘play’ one’s feelings allows girls to channel their frustrations and anxieties into something physical, a technique that is still more associated with young boys (specifically those engaging in contact sports) than with young girls, but is likely as beneficial for both genders. As an example to the campers, counselors stage a mini version of , involving both themselves and other all-women bands, in order to provide the girls with a sense of how powerful women can be onstage.xxiv One especially enthusiastic camper declared that ‘the best thing about rock camp was meeting all those lady rockers, and seeing their bands, they’re amazing. They’re crazy! They sing, they snarl, they growl, they’re total role models!’ (Girls Rock! The Movie). Indeed the girls were able to witness the vast benefits of unabashedly rocking out, or ‘playing their feelings’, and the positive impact that they themselves could grant to potential audiences by doing the same. Additionally, that the girls are able to observe the dynamics of other women working together in a fully-formed band also becomes an important learning experience, especially since minor skirmishes over band names and who got which solos did indeed erupt throughout the course of camp. Even though this type of thing could happen in any band setting, the communication aspect of being in a band is still explicitly highlighted by the counselors. As Winner astutely points out (after a frustrated Palace ends up acting out by punching another camper in the face), ‘sometimes girls can punish each other for feeling disempowered’ (Girls Rock! The Movie). In other words, instances of girl-on-girl aggression may well be a way (albeit an unproductive one) of negotiating harmful images and unattainable standards of femininity that society imposes onto girls. As a matter of fact, infighting between bands, and even between individual members of the same bands, is actually the secondary (and much less talked about) reason why the original Riot Grrrl movement eventually fell apartxxv. The notion of girl-band rivalries even drove the plot of Jem and the Holograms, a cartoon about two all-girl rival bands that I loved as a child; had the devious bad-girl Misfits simply stopped trying to steal the Holograms’ fan base through repeated acts of attempted sabotage, the two bands could have perhaps toured together and maybe even become friends. Perhaps with both of these examples (or at least the former) in mind, the ladies at Girls Rock Camp make a valiant effort to teach their campers how to treat other girls within a female homosocial space, clearly one of the most valuable lessons to be learned at camp, even if a girl never picks up an instrument again. Having once been girls themselves, the counselors know very well that female bullying, and especially the ostracisation of individual girls by others in a clique (who are very much aware of what they are doing), is a serious problem that the

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‘group cohesion’ (Wiseman, 2009: 79) of a band could very much invite. The counselors not only address this fact, but make a point of advising those campers who would fall under the category of ‘torn bystander’ (Wiseman, 2009: 95) not to tolerate any such thing, should they see it happen. Ultimately, counselors stress that even though being in a band can be difficult and certainly requires hard work and commitment, it can also be very rewarding, as the camp culminates in live performances by all the camper bands in front of a 600-person crowd. During the camp’s showcase, many of the surprisingly articulate lyrics sang by girls in the young bands were in fact very personal and politically charged, articulating a feminism that speaks to the political, economic, technical, and cultural circumstances that are unique to the current era (Taft, 2004: 124). Thus, Girls Rock Camp is indeed unique in its efforts to offer girls a much-needed self- empowerment through the DIY creation and production of media (both of which, incidentally, were the main objectives of the Riot Grrrl movement). Although the camp’s potential for positive social change may be somewhat disrupted by the organisation’s widely-held belief that a shy, or quiet woman is necessarily negative, that the camp does provide many tools with which young women may actively challenge both the gendered spaces and patriarchal discourses of girlhood and adolescence. More importantly, Girls Rock Camp provides a safe female homosocial space to make girls voices not only heard, but amplified in solidarity, perhaps as a corporeal expression of the autokeny that Kathleen Hanna, the camp’s Riot Grrrl predecessor, has previously championed. Mindful of the societal constraints under which women, especially young women, are given space to operate, Girls Rock Camp challenges girls to take risks with their identities both as women and as musicians. The camp is thus able to widen the parameters available for positive, productive girl-making by not only welcoming transgressions of the patriarchal status quo, but also by exposing and resisting patriarchal constructions that are arbitrary and outright harmful. By teaching young girls to explore their own creativity and potential as women, the camp effectively functions as a pedagogic example of doing girlhood studies, in a valiant effort to not only create and circulate an uncontested cultural space for women in rock, but also to deconstruct and re-present dominant pop-culture images of female musicians for a new generation of would-be lady rockers.

References Baxter, K. (2008) The Modern Age: turn-of-the-century American Culture and the Invention of Adolescence. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press Bloustein, G. (2003) Girl Making: A Cross Cultural Ethnography on the Processes of Growing Up Female. Australia: Berghahn Books

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Bordo, S. (1993) Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture & the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press Bourdage, M. (2010) ‘A Young Girl’s Dream: Examining the Barriers Facing Female Electric Guitarists’, Journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, l (1). Available from: http://www.iaspmjournal.net/index.php/IASPM_Journal/article/view/334/503 [accessed 01.05 11] Butler, J. (1990) ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, In: S. Salih (ed.) with Judith Butler, The Judith Butler Reader. : Blackwell Publishing, 2004, pp. 119-137 Girls Rock! The Movie (2007) Dir. Shane King. Perf. Carrie Brownstein. Available from: http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/girls_rock/ [accessed 01.05 11] Goldman, R., D. Heath & S. L. Smith (1991) ‘Commodity Feminism’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 8 (3): 333-351 Harris, A. (ed.) (2004) All About the Girl. New York: Routledge Harris, A. (2001) ‘Revisiting “bedroom culture”: Spaces for young women’s politics’, Hecate, 27 (1): 128-138. Hine, T. (2000) The Rise &Fall of the American Teenager: a new history of the adolescent experience. New York: Harper Perennial Leonard, M. (1997) ‘Rebel Girl, You Are the Queen of My World: feminism, ‘subculture’ and Grrrl power’, In: S. Whiteley (ed.) Sexing the Groove: Popular Music & Gender. New York: Routledge Marcus, S. (2010) Girls To The Front: The True Story Of The Riot Grrrl Revolution. New York: Harper Perennial Mifflin, M. (1993) ‘The Fallacy of Feminism in Rock’, In: E. McDonnell (ed.) Rock, She Wrote: Women Write About Rap, Pop & Rock. New Jersey: Plexus, 1995, pp. 76-79 Mitchell, C. & J. Reid-Walsh (2004) ‘Girls’ Web Sites: A Virtual ‘Room of One’s Own’?’, In: A. Harris (ed.) All About the Girl. New York: Routledge, pp. 173-182 Mulvey, L. (1975) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16 (3): 6-18 Nault, C. (2009) ‘Punk Will Never Diet: Beth Ditto and the (Queer) Revaluation of Fat’, NeoAmericanist, An Inter-Disciplinary Online Journal for the Study of America, 4 (2). Available from http://www.neoamericanist.org/paper/punk-will-never-diet [Accessed 01.05 11] Singer, S. L. (2006) ‘I’m Not Loud Enough To Be Heard: Rock ‘n’ roll Camp For Girls & Feminist Quests For Equity, Community & Cultural Production’, Georgia State University

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Women’s Studies Theses. July (2006). Available from: http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/wsi_theses/2 [accessed 01.05 11] Sinker, D., (ed.) (2001) We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet – the collected interviews. New York: Akashic Books Taft, J. (2004) ‘Girl Power Politics: Pop-Culture Barriers & Organizational Resistance’, In: A. Harris (ed.) All About the Girl. New York: Routledge, pp. 69-78 Trites, R. S. (2000) Disturbing the Universe: power and repression in adolescent literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press Vesey, A. (2010) ‘Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution’ [Book Review], Elevate Difference, Available from http://elevatedifference.com/review/girls-front- true-story-riot-grrrl-revolution [accessed 01.05 11] Wiseman, R. (2009) Queen Bees and Wannabes: helping your daughter survive cliques, gossip, boyfriends and the new realities of girl world. New York: Three Rivers Press i A pun on Revolution Girl-Style Now, the title of Hanna’s band, Bikini Kill’s eight-song demo cassette, and also functioned as a type of catch-phrase for the movement. ii Known as Girls Rock Camp, by many of those affiliated with the organisation and which I will use to refer to the camp in this article. iii Line from Bikini Kill song ‘Don’t Need You’. iv DIY, often collage-type mini-magazines that were photocopied and circulated at shows. Riot Grrrl zines specifically included both fan-related articles, and musings on many feminist issues. v Title of a song by Bratmobile, from their 1994 EP The Real Janelle. vi Though a small number of remarkable women did perform in punk bands in the late 1970’s (see Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex, Exene Cervenka from X, Blondie’s Debbie Harry, the Banshees’ Siouxie Sioux, as well as ferocious Plasmatics frontwoman Wendy O’Williams), few actually played instruments. Of notable exception is the all- female band , active from 1976-1982. vii 1980s subgenre of punk rock that was harder, faster, and more aggressive than its arguably more melodic predecessors. Also involved with the rise of underground/independent record labels such as Ian Mackaye’s Dischord Records. viii To Mackaye’s credit, he did introduce Bikini Kill to musician Joan Jett, who played guitar in one of the first teenage all-girl bands in the mid-1970’s, and whose song ‘Cherry Bomb’ was famously covered by Bratmobile. See the song ‘Suggestion’ from Fugazi’s 1989 collection of EP’s entitled 13 Songs, and ‘Reclamation’ from their 1991 album Steady Diet of Nothing. ix Even though Bikini Kill drummer famously dated in the late ’80s, and was in with frontman Calvin Johnson. x Mosh-pits at hardcore shows are exceptionally prone to aggressive body-contact. Girls to the Front is also the apt title of Sara Marcus’ 2010 book on the Riot Grrrl Revolution. xi ‘Jigsaw Youth’ is 1992 Song by Bikini Kill. xii Fuck Me Blind was Hanna’s first zine. Hit It or Quit It was the zine of controversial Riot Grrrl Jessica Hopper, who was subsequently accused of “selling out” the movement and culture to Newsweek magazine. xiii Line from Bikini Kill song ‘Jigsaw Youth’. xivName of Runaways guitarist Joan Jett’s first solo album.

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xv In addition to Jett herself, see self-professed ’dyke-punk’ band Tribe 8, Riot Grrrl band , , and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein and , who famously dated each other and wrote songs about their relationship for their band’s albums. xvi ‘Revolution Come and Gone’ is a 1991 song by Beat Happening , whose frontman Calvin Johnson collaborated with many Riot Grrrl musicians. xvii Not unlike The Spice Girls, The Runaways, one of the first all-girl rock groups, was also a manufactured band, put together by impresario Kim Fowley (also a man) in Los Angeles. However, the girls in The Runaways played their own instruments, and Runaways guitarist Joan Jett is still a hero for many young girls today. xviii Reaction of Gilmore Girls character Lane Kim upon laying eyes on a shiny new drum kit in her local music store. xix High Fidelity is Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel about am obsessive record-store clerk and his romantic entaglements, later made into a film starring John Cusack and Jack Black. xx An aspiring drummer, Lane frequently referenced the legendary John Bonham’s technique. xxi Riot Grrrl conferences that were organised to challenge feminism’s inherent white privilege, as well as issues of racism, were frequently met with defensiveness from within the movement (Marcus, 2010: 166). xxiiLane as the lone female in a band follows in the tradition of Kim Deal of the Pixies and of Sonic Youth, two “badass” female bassists who played in otherwise male rock bands that existed pre Riot Grrrl, and whom Girls Rock The Movie position alongside Hanna as musical heroines for young girls. xxiii Remark by aforementioned Girls Rock Camp participant Laura, as a response to friends of hers who constantly bragged about their boyfriends’ bands. xxiv Ladyfest is a community-based, not for profit music festival spearheaded by many members of the Riot Grrrl movement in Olympia, WA, circa 2000. xxv Bratmobile even famously broke up onstage, calling each other terrible names in the middle of what ended up being their last show (Marcus, 2010: 311-12).

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