riot grrrl movement

Years before she would become a published author . . . years before she would find a voice and a home in the Riot Grrrl movement and emerging zine community, Stephanie Kuehnert struggled to find her place. Told in varied narrative styles, including journal entries, original illustration, and pages torn from her actual teenage diaries and zines, this is the story of Stephanie Kuehnert's life as a struggling outsider who survived substance and relationship abuse to become a strong and powerful young woman after years trapped in a cycle that sometimes seemed to have no escape. From the author of Ballads of Suburbia and former Rookie contributor Stephanie Kuehnert, this bold and bare memoir about a life shaped by music and writing is unflinching and devastatingly honest.

An electric, searing memoir by the original rebel girl and legendary front woman of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre. Hey girlfriend I got a proposition, goes something like this: Dare ya to do what you want. Kathleen Hanna's rallying cry to feminists echoed far and wide through the punk scene of the '90s and beyond. Her band Bikini Kill embodies this iconic time, and today her personal yet feminist lyrics on anthems like "Rebel Girl" and "Double Dare Ya" are more powerful than ever. But where did this transformative voice come from? In Rebel Girl, Hanna's raw and insightful new memoir, she takes us from her tumultuous childhood home to her formative college years in Olympia, Washington, and on to her first years on tour, fighting hard for gigs and for her band. As Hanna makes clear, being in a "girl band," especially a punk girl band, in those years was not a simple or safe prospect. Male violence and antagonism threatened at every turn, and surviving as a singer who was a lightning rod for controversy took limitless amounts of determination. But the relationships she developed during those years buoyed her-including with her bandmates, Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox, and Johanna Fateman; her friendships with Kurt Cobain and Ian MacKaye; and her introduction to Joan Jett- were all a testament to how the punk world could nurture and care for its own. Hanna opens up about falling in love with Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys and her debilitating battle with Lyme disease, and she brings us behind the scenes of her musical growth in her bands Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin. She also writes candidly about the Riot Grrrl movement, documenting with love its grassroots origins but critiquing its later exclusivity. In an uncut voice all her own, Hanna reveals the hardest times along with the most joyful-and how it continues to fuel her revolutionary art and music.

"The year is 1994, and alternative is in. But not for alternative girl Tabitha Denton; she hates her life. She is uninterested in boys, lonely, and sidelined by former friends at her suburban high school. When she picks up a zine at a punk concert, she finds an escape--an advertisement for a Riot Grrrl meetup. At the meeting, Tabitha finds girls who are more like her and a place to belong. But just as Tabitha is settling in with her new friends and beginning to think she understands herself, eighteen-year-old Jackie Hardwick walks into a meeting and changes her world forever. The out-and-proud Jackie is unlike anyone Tabitha has ever known. As her feelings for Jackie grow, Tabitha begins to learn more about herself and the racial injustices of the punk scene, but to be with Jackie, she must also come to grips with her own privilege and stand up for what's right"--Provided by publisher.

Provides information on the origins and spread of the Riot Grrrl movement, a philosophy of feminism and punk that flourished in the early 1990s, and looks at where the movement is headed as its founders reach adulthood.