The Birth of Bitch King: Riot Grrrls & Zines

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While working on a project on Riot Grrrl culture, I ran across some information about how feminists had studied the idea of public space as the “male sphere”; and I surmised that part of the reason why Riot Grrrl was considered so transgressive was because they were “taking over” the public sphere on their own (feminist) terms. Riot Grrrl reminded women performers that their art is often misperceived by the male gaze: women are expected to act, look, and sing “pretty.” When women purposefully break that role, audiences sometimes feel uncomfortable and therefore justified in name-calling and sexually harassing the performer. I started connecting these instances with my own experiences, and realized that the lack of participation by women in our scene was a sign that as “liberal” or even “radical” a scene is, patriarchal thinking is still firmly rooted in our ideology, thus making public spaces, well, “male.” Because the ideals of masculine behavior are the context often times in an art show, women many times aren’t comfortable “competing” on these terms. For this reason, women many times don’t feel “safe” presenting in a male-created (dubbed “neutral” or “community”) space. Our artistic contributions and our very selves are vulnerable to prejudice and verbal attack because the very act of being ourselves in public is rebellious. I am respected in the community that I write in, no doubt about that, but I know some things need to change here. So I decided I needed to use that respect and authority to effect change within our scene. Because I was doing research on Riot Grrrl, I started thinking about making a zine as a forum to publicize my private musings about sexism and patriarchy. Discussion of Grrrl zines (as evidenced by the Grrrl Zine Network) center on empowerment, networking, and creating a community, and all of these facets contribute to forming an alternative space for women to create. The principles of Riot Grrrl are founded in the DIY ethic made popular by the Punk movement, much like my darling Riverside, and I see these characteristics as symbiotic to creating change in my community. Zines are a way for a grrrl to make public her private thoughts by controlling most of the context on her own terms. If I wanted to get people rethinking the way they perceived women and their place in the art community, I had to use a means where someone could contemplate my words, theories, and art for long periods of time — something they could read repeatedly if they desired. I wanted to get women talking about these issues among themselves, and I wanted everyone else to listen to what we were saying. So, I picked the space I thought would work the best for the kind of change I want to take place: a militantly feminist zine that contained rants and dissection of the patriarchal attitudes that confine women juxtaposed alongside my real, mushy, messy, private ideas about being one woman shaped by my sexuality, my politics and my community.