rhizomes.04 spring 2002

Congregating Women: Reading 3rd Wave Feminist Practices in Subcultural Production
Doreen Piano

[1] In her article, "Second-Hand Dresses and the Role of the Ragmarket," Angela McRobbie points to the lack of attention that early subcultural theorists gave to the role of economics in their studies of British subcultures. "Sociologists of the time perhaps ignored this social dimension because to them the very idea that style could be purchased over the counter went against the grain of those analyses which saw the adoption...of punk style as an act of creative defiance far removed from the mundane act of buying" (136). That young women played important roles as "subcultural entrepreneurs," often buying and selling secondhand clothes at stalls in Camden Lock, McRobbie suggests, may have contributed to this exclusion. As she explains, "...the more modest practices of buying and selling have remained women's work and have been of little interest to those concerned with youth cultural resistance" (137). This oversight, McRobbie argues in a later essay, "Shut Up and Dance: Youth Culture and Changing Modes of Femininity," has resulted in a lack of analyses that consider the social and political role that consumerism can play in post World War Two subcultures in Great Britain especially its resistant aspects such as the recycling of 'retro' clothes that acts among other things "a counterpoint to overpriced high street fashion" (162).

[2] In a similar spirit, I would like to investigate several sites of current Third Wave feminist subcultural production that illustrate how subcultural entrepreneurs utilize the language and technological practices of the market in ways that counter dominant values often associated with selling and distributing goods such as profit, efficiency, and marketability. To do this, I will first analyze how DIY, or do it yourself, practices contribute to the establishment of an alternative economy and then reveal how contemporary feminist thought is communicated through the production and distribution of women-oriented goods, particularly zines. Most often this economy is based on the buying, trading, and distributing of print zines, but it also includes music production such as compilation tapes and CDs as well as patches, stickers, T-shirts, soaps, washable menstrual pads, chapbooks by women of color, and informational brochures. Many of these items are found at women-run web sites like Pisces Catalog, Frida Loves Diego, and Grrrl Style Distro. Some cater to specific niches such as Noemi Martinez's La Tiendita, a web site that distributes products by women of color, while others are geared towards women's health and body issues such as the web site Blood Sisters Project, whose aim is "generating more creative projects to raise awareness surrounding menstrual girl-body politics."

[3] These sites convey a dual function: they sell and distribute 'goods' that are produced and consumed by women which may not be readily available at Rite-Aid or Barnes and Noble, and they act as congregating spaces for women who produce and consume these goods, electronically at message boards, zine distros, and listservs, geographically at zine conventions, and textually in compilation zines, catalogs, and reviews. Thus, these spaces are not solely limited to electronic environments but instead provide a variety of technologies and formats to communicate in. In fact, it is only recently that zine distribution has become part of 'e-commerce.' As Celia Perez, a zine editor who produces I Dreamed I was Assertive and Picaflor and who runs Frida Loves Diego distro, points out, "While I think that a lot of the business of zine distribution goes on through the Web, for the most part it's very much a word-of-mouth type of thing--you read reviews of zines in other zines, you trade with people, you make and receive printed ads /fliers, and this is all supplemented by the Internet" (e-mail correspondence 5/25/02).

[4] As a concept DIY means taking cultural production into one's own hands
and has most often been used by groups who have been historically excluded from or misrepresented by the culture industries. For example, South Asian filmmaker Vivek Bald, in an interview with Alondra Nelson and Thuy Linh Tu, discusses the importance of DIY among disenfranchised groups such as immigrant populations, people of color, poor and working-class, and Third World communities. "With limited resources and limited access, people have been using whatever technology they can get their hands on--secondhand, outdated, busted down, whatever--and have been pushing it, stretching it, redefining it, and usually getting it to do much more than it was ever meant to do" (89). For many communities existing on the peripheries of the public sphere, reinvesting technologies to suit a particular use, whether it is using CB radios among South Asian taxi drivers as a private, informal communication system, or in the case of the subculture I study, utilizing print and electronic technologies as a method of creating an informal economy with a feminist bent, can be a mode of resistance to mainstream culture as well as a form of creative and political expression.

[5] Thus, although zine production has traditionally been associated with print technologies that have often emphasized a raw, in your face style, with quite small distribution levels, greater accessibility has facilitated a growth of DIY practices on the Internet that include not just personal web sites but distributor sites for a range of DIY products. In discussing the flexibility and expansiveness of the Internet as a communicative medium, Manuel Castells argues in The Internet Galaxy that the Internet "lays the foundation for self-directed networking as a tool for organization, collective action, and the construction of meaning" (55). Therefore, the recent movement onto the Internet for subcultural activity facilitates a more dynamic and immediate "entrepreneurial infrastructure within youth cultures" (McRobbie 135) by contributing to the expansion of women-operated sites in electronic subcultural publics and in a sense de-colonizing the more commercial aspects of the Internet by using trade practices that do not rely on profit.

[6] However, zines' increasing reliance on electronic technologies is clearly problematic for many class- and global-conscious zine editors despite their use of it to buy and distribute their zines. Limited access for those who cannot afford computers as well as concerns about aesthetics and mobility seem to reveal that the shift from print to on-line zines is one that few zine editors are willing to make. Instead, electronic technologies are used to advertise new zines and/or to keep on-line journals as Ciara Xyerra, zine editor of A Renegade's Handbook to Love & Sabotage, prefers (email correspondence). Thus, for many zine editors even though the Internet is used as a method of delivery that encourages quick service and wider distribution, it does not provide full access to print zines that are only made available through ordering either directly from the editor or through a distro. Print zines also have the mobility of being exchanged with other zine editors rather than sold and they can be transported. As Aelicia, zine editor of Alabama Grrrl, claims "You can't stick an e-zine in your pocket" (email correspondence). This keeps zine readership relatively low but also constantly expanding as more zine readers gain access by coming into contact with zines through different forms of publicity.

[7] As a group these subcultural entrepreneurs are linked to each other through their production and distribution techniques that adhere to multiple uses of technology--communicating, distributing, and consuming information and goods--and in doing so, they create a different kind of producer/consumer relationship. In this way, consumerism can become a method of activism when, as Mica Nava argues, one is able "to exercise some control over production itself, over what gets produced and the political conditions in which production takes place" (59). In feminist studies, the concept of DIY has become instrumental for scholars of girls' studies (see Comstock, Kearney, Leonard, Sutton) to describe the specific ways in which young women produce culture through the appropriation of technologies and/or dominant discourse to create alternative feminine identities and media that resist mainstream representations; however, what has not yet been analyzed in these studies is how DIY helps develop a feminist-run economy through the use of various technological and marketing practices. In other words, what would otherwise be seen as a commercial venture, a setting up shop on the Internet or the production of a magazine, can instead be viewed as a communal desire for women to participate in an economy where a variety of roles not just that of producer and consumer can be taken up. Being an editor, a distributor, and advertiser, and a publisher are also possible.

[8] Through the activities of writing, editing, distributing, and consuming texts and other goods, participants in this subculture build their own economic practices and in the process become better technologically equipped as well as more informed about issues pertinent to women. Not surprisingly, consumption plays an active role in sustaining this women-run economy. Although I agree that the role of women as consumers in feminist studies has been, as Mary Kearney notes, "over-privileged...as a form of political resistance (289)," within this subculture, women consumers challenge the binary that equates adults as primarily producers and women/girls as consumers (Kearney 291) by choosing to buy individually produced products made by their peers. Thus, in an oddly uncomfortable coupling, consumerism is linked to a feminist praxis which relies on the consumption of good such as zines, buttons, and tapes to get its message out. Although not all women who read zines or buy other women-related products are also producers, their contribution as consumers is pertinent to the creation of a community that privileges women as cultural producers and that often acts as a learning environment not only in terms of circulating feminist thought but also in teaching DIY practices. The trading of information has always been a part of subcultural production where, as Dumcombe notes, "...doing-it-yourself entails helping others to do-it-themselves--if for no other reason than you have someone to trade your zine with. The result is that competitive individualism is replaced by an ideal of cooperative individuality" (180).

[9] The subcultural production that I discuss here has a number of cultural influences that stem from both punk and feminist movement's need to create spaces outside of the mainstream for cultural production. Thus, for punk subcultures, the pub or warehouse turned informal music venue, fan zines, and the market stalls at places like Camden Lock in North London became sites of cultural production that also had an economic bent. As mentioned earlier, the buying and selling of second-hand clothes by British punks resulted in an informal fashion industry instigated by young women that dovetailed with other informal punk industries such as the production of music and fan zines that contributed to a particular punk style. More recently, the Riot Grrrl movement has spawned a multitude of subcultural spaces that have fuelled gender-specific cultural production and economies such as the one this study details.

[10] Although women had been part of the punk movement from its inception in England and New York during the 1970s, they often did not play key roles in the scene and were often subjected to physical and verbal harassment, particularly in the North American punk variant known as hardcore. Thus, Riot Grrrl began as a series of feminist interventions by young women into various local hardcore punk scenes in Olympia, Washington and Washington, D.C. in the late 1980s. As former Riot Grrrl Mimi Nguyen describes it in her on-line journal Slanderous, Riot Grrrl "practiced an unabashedly embodied polemic, exercising an opposition body politic that ruptured the foundation myth of punk egalitarianism." Forming girl-only bands, producing and distributing grrrl-zines, and organizing 'grrrl only' conventions flew in the face of what women were supposed to be in this scene--groupies, onlookers, eye candy. [1]

[11] Despite its flawed politics that often erased race and class differences to achieve an all-grrrl all-the-same utopia and its quick co-optation by media and commercial forces, Riot Grrrl signified an important attempt to use women's subcultural production as a tool for political intervention. Riot Grrrl's message spread through the development of its own media system, specifically sending and receiving zines, that made critical connections among those who were not geographically or subculturally linked to cultural epicenters such as Olympia, Washington and Washington, D.C.. In A Renegade's Handbook to Love & Sabotage #4, Ciara Xyerra, who was living in "a tiny village on the coast of lake erie" explains how she started making zines.

i first learned about zines...right before i started junior high. the idea seemed marvelous, especially because i knew i lived to write, & had already sent three fiction manuscripts to presses by the time i was twelve years old. the idea that i could have kept those manuscripts & self-published...was powerful. within a year, i was introduced to riot grrrl, which shook me out of my fear that i was too young, too inexperienced, too female, too stupid for people to want to hear my voice.

However, at the same time that informal distribution was in place, as Gottlieb and Wald note, mainstream media, particularly in magazines like Sassy, also contributed to the proliferation of 'grrrl culture' in the 1990s. "While it [Sassy] appropriates riot grrrl subculture as a marketing strategy, the magazine also enables riot grrrl culture to infiltrate the domestic spaces to which girls...are typically confined" (266). Thus, through these two very different kinds of media outlets, Riot Grrrl movement emerged as a complex feminist cultural movement that had both mainstream and subcultural appeal. As the Riot Grrrl retrospective web site notes, "In moving from a musical event to a national movement, the power and close-knit community aspects of a small music scene was transmitted to a larger group of women who did not have to be submersed in the music subculture before they heard the message" (http://www.columbia.edu/~kw139/music. html). Therefore, even as some of the pioneers of the movement receded from the spotlight, the informal economy of zine distributing, conference organizing, and musical producing continued.

[12] It is the movement's complex cultural positioning within these different spheres that has informed such a variety of post-Riot Grrrl cultural forms ranging musically from the commercially hyperpop Spice Girls to the subterranean sounds of Huggy Bear and Le Tigre. In addition, the emergence of quarterly magazines such as Bust and Bitch has opened up new territories for more mainstream forms of feminist writing that are situated in a semi-counter public that has some ties to zine subcultural production in terms of advertising zines and starting as zines, but whose economic ties have become more closely aligned with mainstream publishing and distributing. For example, whereas Bust and Bitch offer subscriptions, are sold at Borders and Barnes & Noble, and pay their writers, zine subcultural production relies on collaborative ventures that are often ideologically driven, where labor is most often voluntary, and where producers often lose money rather than make it.

[13] Although the labor may be one 'of love', DIY production provides editorial, political, and artistic control. As Emi Koyama, who produces both print and electronic zines, puts it, "I like having the freedom to put whatever I want in a zine. Also, it's a good activist tool" (personal correspondence). On another note, Celia Perez reveals how zine production provides flexibility and freedom in terms of both time and content compared to mainstream publishing. "The sweet thing about zines is you do it when you want to and how you want to" (e-mail correspondence 1/23/02).

[14] Although this study concentrates on a particular DIY cultural formation of Third Wave feminism, the desire to "take back the media" has been a relevant aspect of North American feminist movement. With the onset of affordable printing technologies and the need to get the message out, second wave feminists published a wide variety of independently produced publications for political purposes. [2] "[S]econd-wave print production served multiple functions, including developing and spreading organizational and technical skills, educating women about themselves, helping to develop coalitions for the purpose of political action and serving as a 'forum for community debate and development' "(McDermott 26, quoted in Flannery 114). However, whereas second and third wave women's cultural production regarding independent publishing appears to have similar aims, their position within the feminist movement differs.

[15] As second wave feminism began to establish more formal economies and institutions, the need for grass-roots communication in the form of zines or pamphlets dropped. However, the need for publishing venues outside mainstream and academic feminism became apparent as small presses such as Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, Aunt Lute Books, South End and Firebrand acted as influential channels for voices of dissent within the feminist movement (Young 31). Both bell hooks' Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center and This Bridge Called Our Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color would not have been published without the help and support of small presses. The publication of these texts reveals how small press publishing can be political through its challenging of mainstream feminist publishing that was primarily the domain of white, heterosexual, middle-class women in the 1970s (Young 35). Their publication testifies to the dissatisfaction of feminists who did not align themselves with mainstream liberal feminism. Thus, as noted by Garrison and Heywood and Drake, those feminists overlooked or excluded by the second wave feminist movement, specifically feminists of color, became the vanguard for what is now considered a tenet of third wave feminism: the commitment to anti-exclusionary practices through the practice of self-reflexivity, political intervention, and anti-essentialist practices.

[16] On a similar but different note, the women's subcultural production I study is subcultural precisely because it works within the interstices of mainstream and academic feminist publishing, maintaining close, yet somewhat fractious, ties to both. In fact, the establishment of feminist institutions such as Women's Studies departments and organizations such as NOW and the Feminist Majority Foundation may act in some ways as regulating mechanisms themselves, excluding certain kinds of discourses deemed inappropriate or dismissed because they are not intellectually challenging or do not have political power. [3] Because of its peripheral status, feminist DIY production has resulted in specific rhetorical practices that appropriate academic discourse for its own ends, interpreting and critiquing theories, and often putting them into praxis in their zines. This street theorizing acts to foster an exchange of ideas and debates among zine editors through their own discourse production. This exchange works in multiple ways: it interrupts the often homogenizing voice of white, middle-class women zine editors who often tend to privilege gender issues, ignoring intersecting forms of oppression, and it challenges the assumed lack of power that Third Wave feminists have who are working both in and outside of mainstream and academic institutions. Although the recent rise of Third Wave feminist writing, most notably found in anthologies published by Seal Press, indicates that feminism continues to be challenged from within the academy and publishing industry, DIY practices are a central tool in facilitating new forms of knowledge as they encourage others to critique traditional forms of knowledge-making and to create methods of delivery that are more accessible, cheaper, and participatory. Thus, in many ways, feminist subcultural production works in similar ways to small presses in providing a space for creative and political interventions.

[17] Some of the genres which zine editors use to disseminate their ideas, such as the zine distro, the compilation zine, and the zine catalog, reveal how utilizing different mediums of communication can be used to disrupt the conventional results that distributing, publishing, and advertising goods presume, namely making a profit. In fact, many zine editors lose money on their zine production, and thus their production is an investment in which financial gain is rarely an aim. By taking this stance, zine editors circumvent what Manuel Castells calls "the Net-economy" which "is a composite of persons and organizations, made up of inventors, technologists, and venture capitalists [who] come together in a process...that ultimately creates companies, makes money, and as a byproduct, delivers technology, goods, and services" (58). Instead, DIY feminist cultural production provides individually produced products that focus on delivery of goods. In the following examination of three sites, I will show how feminist theory is enacted specifically through the use of various mainstream marketing genres and practices. Specifically, I focus on how zine editors' use of technology, textual multivocality, and self-representational practices formulate a Third Wave feminist praxis.

The Distro

[18] As mentioned earlier, all of the women zine editors I have interviewed produce individual print zines, yet their use of electronic technologies facilitates an alternative Net-economy by galvanizing the subculture in ways that traditional distribution methods could not, and also by making the distribution and consumption of feminist goods accessible to a broader market, thus helping to create feminist pockets or zones in cyberspace. For example, 'zine distros,' besides providing a catalog of zines to choose from, quite often feature message boards where editors can advertise new zines, discuss how to make and distribute zines, and engage in informal zine reviewing. Many of these distros are run as a service to zine editors and are kept running through minimal profits or investment. Distributors often act as publishers, deciding what zines and products to carry, and imbuing their site with a particular political message. For example, Jenny who runs Grrrl Style makes clear on her mission page that "i started it because I am constantly inspired by the diy revolution, and ....I wanted to help others, too," while both Celia Perez who runs Frida Loves Diego and Noemi Martinez of La Tiendita mention that being Latina in a predominantly white subculture is a motivating aspect behind both producing zines and running distros that focus on distributing zines by women of color. In addition, many zine distros announce that they will not carry sexist, homophobic, and racist products and may make a point of not using corporate sponsorship. By creating a distribution site that is also commercial-free, zine distros claim electronic space in an environment that is widely male- and corporate-dominated. Many of these sites lack the incessant distracting windows and moving advertisements that often signal corporate sponsorship. In addition, links pages guide consumers to other women-run distros. Therefore, once a distro is accessed, others distros and DIY sites are easy to find through citation practices such as links. These citation practices act to unify disparate feminist sites in cyberspace, and can also be found in print form where zine reviews and advertisements are a standard genre.

[19] In addition, the accessibility of electronic technology in many parts of the world has engendered a wide base of support for these micro women-based economies, specifically in English-speaking countries. For example, women who run zine distros in New Zealand and Australia are often found discussing business in North American message boards and visa versa. However, many zine distributors are aware that computer access is not available to all zine producers and consumers, and thus printing paper catalogs continues to be a common practice to reach those outside the electronic loop. In addition, who accesses these sites is often predicated on prior knowledge of zines and zine editors. Distros are not necessarily exclusive but access to them requires a bit of insider knowledge. Their advertising tends to reach those already within the zine community, often crossing different groups to get the word out. These multiple uses of technologies, both low- and high-end, as a means of communication and cultural production among this subculture is a defining feature of Third Wave feminism as noted by Ednie Garrison in "U.S. Feminism-Grrrl Style! Youth (Sub)Cultures and the Technologics of the Third Wave." The intimate interfacing that many women with access to technology engage in results in what she calls "oppositional technologics," "the political praxis of resistance being woven into low-tech, amateur, hybrid, alternative subcultural feminist networks that register below the mainstream" (151). In having distros go electronic, women's subcultural production broadens its sphere, making geographic location less pertinent to sustaining the community.

The Compilation Zine.

[20] Questions of access and inclusion within this post-riot grrrl subculture are being addressed by various participants, particularly by women of color, transgender, queer, working-class women, and race-conscious anglos. For example, zine editors of color such as Helen Luu, Mimi Nguyen, and Lauren Martin have documented punk and Riot Grrrl's race- and class-exclusions not only in their own zines but also in compilation zines that are meant to disrupt the utopian, conflict-free zones that the discourse of Riot Grrrl often promoted. In fact, it is these sites of cultural production where critical feminist interventions take place and where the work of second wave women of color such as bell hooks, Cherrie Moraga, Chela Sandoval, and Patricia Hill Collins is being continued.

[21] For example, compilation, or comp, zines, which are special topic zines that have a variety of contributors similar to an anthology, reveal how DIY practices can be used to fight race, gender, and class exclusions within a number of subcultural publics, particularly ones that claim to be progressive, feminist, and anti-racist. Two comp zines Evolution of A Race Riot edited by Mimi Nguyen and How to Stage A Coup edited by Helen Luu address both punk and Riot Grrrl movement's lack of racial and class awareness and assume an interrogative position within subcultural feminism much as Anzaldua and Moraga's This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color did when it was published in 1981. As Mimi Nguyen states in her intro to Evolution, "The race riot has lagged years behind the grrrl one for reasons that should be obvious by now: white boy mentality became a legitimate target but whitegirls' racial privilege and discourse went unmarked...."

[22] Within this community that is predominantly middle-class, white, and quite often well-educated, editing and publishing compilation zines by women of color, working class, and queer women works to attract more women who fall outside the dominant subcultural paradigm to produce their own zines. In this way, these editors contribute to the growth of this informal economy by broadening its appeal to new members. At the same time, their production and distribution creates necessary dialogue among the subculture's participants. With the publication of these two compilation zines, an array of comp. zines have made their way into distros that address specific issues that have to do with representation, identity politics, and feminism. Often comp zines raise unexamined issues that address sexuality, race, and class and that often intersect at the body. For example, Lauren Martin's Hard as Nails: the tough girl compilation zine works to unravel and problematize notions of being tough. "When we do our tough girl posturing, what kind of stereotypes are we falling for and perpetuating, and which are we shattering and reconfiguring?" (3). Personal essays by contributors are interspersed with "tough girl profiles" that ask respondents to consider whether they are tough girls and who their tough girl role models are. The individually designed contributions, their wide-ranging definitions of what it means to be tough, the diverse subject positions that contributors occupy in terms of race, class, gender, age, and sexuality indicate, what Deborah Siegel sees as an emphasis in Third Wave feminism on "how to practice feminism differently, to broaden and deepen the analysis of gender in relation to a multiplicity of issues that affect women's lives" (69). Thus, the comp zine's multivocality both visually and verbally can be seen as an articulation of women's differences that are also focused in engaging with a particular position that many women have been denied historically--our ability to be tough.

The Catalog

[23] Lastly, I want to examine a print zine catalog Cherry Cherry Red compiled by Ciara Xyerra, which is an 8 1/2 x 11 stapled catalog made up of broad sheets advertising a variety of women's subcultural production from zines to mixed tapes and buttons. What is unique about this zine catalog is that rather than represent each zine and/or distro by reviewing each one, Ciara has compiled a series of pages that are designed by the zine editors themselves. Thus, the catalog provides space for each woman to represent her wares by using her own verbal and visual style, thus creating her own form of self- advertising.

[24] On the back of Cherry Cherry Red #6, Ciara writes about the aims of the project. Rather than call the individual submissions advertisements, Ciara calls them "expansive pages that seek to explain the various underground, d.i.y. projects created and enacted by women." The sensitivity displayed by Ciara in providing spaces for self-representation attests to the spirit in which she planned the project. As she states on the back page,

I usually prefer to have some kind of established relationship with the women who contribute because i view the goal of the sourcebook as being a forum with which to build a community of women taking their experiences, their expressions, & their perspectives into their hands & creating a new kind of media out of it all.

Recognizing her role as editor of Cherry Cherry Red as being political, Ciara uses a conventional advertising method--the catalog--to provide a service to zine editors and disrtibutors to get the word out to other potential d-i-y consumers. Making not only her zine but other DIY producers' goods available reveals that she values collaboration and community over individual success and profit. In addition, the catalog is easily accessible as found in both its print production and its sliding scale price $2/$2 & 2stamps/trade/contribution.

[25] By engaging in these specific roles as editors and distributors, the zine editors and distributors I've mentioned intervene in corporate consumerism by promoting subcultural production that distinguishes itself from mainstream marketing through stylistic, political, and economic deviations. In this way, as Jeanne Brady and Adriana Hernandez argue, in "Feminist Literacies: Toward Emancipatory Possibilities of Solidarity," they are creating the conditions for feminist practices that "challenge a hierarchically ordered sexist, classist, and racist worldview by restructuring the relations of power in a way that enables women to speak and act as historical subjects within democratic social relations" (332).

[26] Whereas some feminist studies scholars see the rise of corporate sponsorship found at many women- and grrrl-related web sites as signs of Riot Grrrl's fading authenticity and inability to resist corporate forces (see Comstock), in this article I have attempted to look beyond the more commercial electronic sites that invoke the term 'grrrl' and recognize the incredible proliferation of commercial-free sites that promote women-oriented goods which are available in a variety of forms. Within this subculture, the zine editors that I have discussed view production and consumption as ethical acts of resistance to contemporary global forces that have driven a deep wedge between First and Third World, independent and dependent, and producer and consumer roles. As found in DIY cultural practices from the early days of punk and rap to the present zine scene, the alternative economy established by this subculture comments on and challenges the gate-keeping that occurs in various culture industries from mainstream academic feminist publishing to the style and music industries that deem only certain kinds of voices, narratives, and consumer good fashionable and profitable enough to be marketed and sold.

 

Notes

[1] For a comprehensive history of Riot Grrrl, replete with video interviews, articles, and chronologies, see Riot Grrrl Retro Retrospective at: http://www.emplive.com/explore/riot_grrrl/index.asp.

[2] See Martha Leslie Allen's comprehensive study of Second Wave women's periodicals, The Development of Communication Networks Among Women, 1963-1983, published online at http://www.wifp.org.

[3] I am thinking here of Gloria Steinem's dismissal of Riot Grrrl movement as a legitimate form of activism (although her original comments were later retracted in an interview in Bust, Winter 2000) as well as the antagonistic reception of some Third Wave panels at NWSA in recent years.

 

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