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

Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 From Riot Grrrl 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, Oregon, which was subsequently documented in a 2007 film entitled Girls Rock! The Movie. Topics include feminism(s) and girlhood in media (specifically Riot Grrrl in contrast to the “Girl Power” 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 Kathleen Hanna, 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). 141 Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 As highlighted by Hanna, autokeny as an ideological ideal is particularly relevant to women in rock. 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 Bikini Kill 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 Hardcore punk scene in Washington, DC. Deploying punk rock’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 142 Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 theory and popular music culture, in order to create a safe public space that fosters a sense of female agency and female identity for its campers. 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 zines, 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 143 Volume 5, Issue 1 February 2012 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 Bratmobile 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 independent music was free from the discourse of patriarchy’ (Leonard, 1997: 233). Though bands like Fugazi, (whose stalwart frontman Ian Mackaye had previously founded hardcore band Minor Threat) 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.

Load more