Deploying Aesthetics: Riot Grrrl Feminists by Chelsea Starr, Ph.D. The sociology of culture and punk aesthetics In giving a background to the sociology of culture literature, Crane (1992) points out that cultures were seen to express different types of values and different aesthetic standards, and tended to be divided between culture produced for elites and culture produced for mass dissemination (see also Bensman & Gerver 1958; Gans 1974). This type of analysis led to distinctions between "high" and "popular" or "low" culture in the literature (e.g. Angus & Jhally 1989; DiMaggio 1982). The view of cultural consumption as something defined in relation to social class is continued in the work of Gans (1974), who said that each social class constitutes a different "taste public" who are generally similar in their cultural preferences. Bourdieu (1984) subjected this idea to empirical test by doing survey research in France, and noting the correlation between cultural consumption preferences and social class. Whatever else it does, they correctly noted, cultural participation and consumption connote one’s place, or desired place, in the social order. This idea can certainly be applied to punk rock, which emphasized its participants’ subjectivities as outside of the economy, and as opposed to the middle and ruling classes. Following Foucault (1971), Bourdieu talks about consumption as a way to insert social class into the bodies of the public and naturalize it (in a process similar to that described by Barthes in his 1979 "Mythologies"), resulting in a hegemony where people associate a complex of naturalized cultural signifiers as signaling one’s appropriate place in the order of things; the collection of these assemblages is termed "habitus." Knowledge about these assemblages is termed "cultural capital", and the transmission of cultural capital is seen as a way of reinforcing social class status across generations. In the late 1970s, much of the Cultural Studies literature followed along these lines, concerned with social class, aesthetics, and hegemony. Turning Bourdieu on its head, punk rockers used their bodies to signify, and to draw attention to, their low social and economic position by piercing their cheeks with safety pins and wearing Mohawks and other unconventional hairstyles. Raymond Williams (1977) saw culture as more than consumption, and more than an abstract agent of hegemony. He complicated traditional Marxism's isolation of aesthetics into the categories of ideology or superstructure, finding that definitions of art and aesthetics differ with changes in the social relations of production. He concludes that what had been theorized as the separate relations of production and ideology are really mutually constitutive human material practices. In other words, art is really a part of Marx's “base” because it has material components and consequences; it is not separate from, or an epiphenomenon of, the economy, production, nor inequality. Williams gives an account of how the fields of sociology, linguistics, and literary theory have unnecessarily abstracted and universalized art and the aesthetic as way from keeping it separate, non-examined, and therefore defining them outside of consideration as subject matter for political sociology. Punk rock, reggae, hip hop, folk, and Riot Grrrl then, demonstrate political aesthetics, worthy of full sociological examination.

These ideas are echoed by Terry Eagleton, who shows the links between political ideology and the aesthetic, maintaining that the aesthetic cannot claim to be an apolitical category (1990). One’s preference for music, often considered a “matter of taste”, is then fair game for political analysis. Like Williams, Eagleton recognizes that the apparent absence or lack of an aesthetic is political. Like Bourdieu and Williams, Eagleton uses Gramsci's and Foucault’s concept of dominant ideologies being inserted into the body. Where Williams talks about hegemony being naturalized as the 'essence' of one's physical being, and where Bourdieu talks about the body as the location of habitus, which is a component of social class and its reproduction, Eagleton talks about how power is aestheticized and inserted into the bodies of the people. Eagleton sees art and the aesthetic as central to the relations of social class and power. The aesthetic is given to the middle classes by the upper, but also contains within it the tools for resistance. The aesthetics of punk, which served as a building block for the aesthetics of the Riot Grrrl movement, demonstrate a conscious use of the body as a site to challenge the ideological hegemonies of social class, gender, and sexuality. It is from this perspective that I will examine the aesthetics of Riot Grrrl as transgressive, as political, and as indicative of feminist movement in the 1990s; I will then discuss the inclusion of these aesthetics into the pre-existing feminist cultural space of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, and the resulting effects. In doing so I hope to establish that Riot Grrrl art worlds exist as simultaneous feminist movements, characterized by identifiable oppositional aesthetics. These aesthetics are in part achieved by “writing on the body” in a way that makes the hegemonic processes described by cultural theorists as nearinvisible stark, explicit, and glaringly visible. Punk rock: the aesthetic predecessor of Riot Grrrl Punk rock’s earliest origins were in 1976 New York and London simultaneously as a reaction to high youth unemployment, economic hopelessness, disenchantment with the excesses of mainstream rock and roll, protests against an increasingly repressive state and entrenched power that had forgotten the activist spirit of the 60s, which punks saw as failed. Punk rock emphasized a “do it yourself” ethos of cultural production and consumption that loathed slick consumerism. In the punk community, every audience member was also a musician, and technical ability on one’s instrument didn’t matter; it was the honesty and feeling that mattered. What mattered most was that you spoke the truth. And as opined by Joe Strummer of punk band The Clash “the truth is only known by…gutter snipes”, thereby staking out the social class position of punk as representative of groups not in power, not considered respectable by the middle classes and their betters, and especially viewed with suspicion by the police and other authorities. Punk was loud, raw, guitar-based rock that stood in stark opposition to the slick, impeccably produced rock of the day, which included Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, Kansas, Pink Floyd, The Eagles to name a few. Founding punk bands can be spotted by their sometimes nonsensical or aggressive names: Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Ramones, The Buzzcocks and all-female punk supergroup The Slits. The lyrics were equally raw and subject-matter ranged from police abuse, drug busts, sniffling glue (as opposed to the expensive powder cocaine of mainstream rockers), racism, lack of economic opportunities, criticism of existing government figures, the politics of the middle and upper classes, anti-war songs,

 

2  

and songs about working class life. Punk was in full bloom from 1977-1982, developing several sub-genres after that which exist today. As the musical predecessor of Riot Grrrl, the punk movement of the 1970s and early 1980s gave young women who were inspired by punk rock a taste of what it might be like to speak your mind about women's issues in a band without having to conform to the sexualized image normally expected of female performers (see Lewis 1990). As early as 1976, X-Ray Spex's Poly Styrene set the tone that would become the hallmark of the Riot Grrrl aesthetic with the opening lyrics to their popular punk single Ok Bondage, Up Yours! where the first lines are done in a soft little girl voice, and the last line is done in a scream: “some people say that little girls should be seen and not heard but i say oh bondage, UP YOURS!!!”. The importance of using one's voice to express anger, negation, and self-defense would become central to Riot Grrrl aesthetics. Other early bands and performers associated with punk or associated underground genres that featured strong women who wrote and performed their own material outside of prevalent sex-kitten conventions were X, The Slits, The Raincoats, Toyah Wilcox, and the early Pretenders led by Chrissie Hynde. The musical aesthetics of punk emphasized participation and emotion over technical virtuosity, and "loud fast rules" was a rallying cry of punk culture. The visual aesthetics of women in the early punk scene involved disrupting gender codes, prevailing standards of beauty, and the absolute refusal to comply with a defining, objectifying gaze (Hebdige 1981). Punk women of the 1977-era from which Riot Grrrl drew part of its aesthetic repertoire defied standards of beauty with shaved heads, Mohawks, spiked, and colorfully dyed hair; with facial piercing such as safety pins through the cheeks, ears, and nose. They did not look like Stevie Nicks, the symbol of 1977 female rock beauty. The female punk rockers were just as aggressive as their male counterparts, and defied gender expectations of the working class as well as of mainstream rock and roll. The use of safety pins in cheeks, and on clothing was semiotically tied to an ironic commentary on gender roles, idealized femininity, and the protected status of women in traditional ideology, confronted with the contrast to the reality of working class punk women's lives. The pins were at once ironic commentaries on of the innocence of childhood, the defenselessness of babies, societal expectations of motherhood, and of poverty by virtue of their common use in holding together ripped clothing. Punk made a connection between childhood and and powerlessness, playing on social reformers' notion of youth as "victim" (see Hebdige 1979). Young women’s clothing as symbolic disruption of social control Punk women also violated the traditional gender divide concerning the use of public space in English subcultures (McRobbie 1981). They appeared in traditionally male spaces: streets, bars, and clubs. They refused to adhere to norms of feminine behavior in public. Their exaggerated use of makeup was both a parody of carefully made-up working class faces, and a semiotic connection between makeup as a signifier of the prostitute, who also used public space and refused traditional gender roles with her uncontrolled sexuality. Punk women projected “I am uncontrollable”. Bras and underwear were worn as outerwear, and clothing associated with street prostitutes such as fishnet stockings and miniskirts shared the same closet with Catholic school uniforms:

 

3  

both are symbolic of the refusal to accept the label of "slut" in connection with clothing. The clothing was worn defiantly, ironically, and as a statement of opposition to the culture that had defined the meaning of women's clothes, roles, and sexuality. Punk aesthetics, for young women as well as young men, were steeped in the aesthetics of confrontation. The rise of Riot Grrrl By 1989, punk scenes had splintered and given rise to a masculinist genre called “hardcore” that reproduced the gender oppression of the larger society by excluding young women from bands, creating hostile and sexist climates in clubs (the often violent “mosh pit” was often a place for sexual assault in the form of pinching, disrobing, and groping women), and an overall atmosphere of hostility towards women. Riot Grrrl emerged as a genre in 1989 when self-referred “grrrls” from punk scenes “made something of what was made of them” by issuing “girl” manifestoes reclaiming the cultural space using a commonly heard pejorative: “girl”, as in “girls can’t play guitar”. The aesthetics of girlhood were reclaimed in clothing: “baby doll” dresses, hair barrettes with combat boots, and Hello Kitty lunchboxes-as-purses were common sights. Ridiculed to this day by many male punk musicians, these Riot Grrrl signifiers were nonetheless a powerful personal and public oppositional and feminist statement. In clothing, manifestoes, music, and festivals that explicitly talked about feminism at the height of the “feminist backlash” of the early 1990s, Riot Grrrl aesthetics disrupted the category of "girl" as passive and combined "passive" clothing with "active" clothing, like combat boots or Doc Martins. Riot Grrrl took the aesthetics of punk and added feminist consciousness to the mix. In addition, Riot Grrrls, like punks before them, were aware that the media would use images as spectacle, and to frame the movement for the general public. In order to confound any easy interpretation, Riot Grrrls tried to insure they would be taken in their own terms and context by writing messages on their bodies in ink. In terms of cultural theory, this practice makes the hegemony of patriarchal culture explicit. A news photographer can't misinterpret the confrontation inherent in the practice of writing "Rape", "Slut" or "Whore" with magic marker on the bare midriff, as Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna appeared in People magazine in 1993, with a bored look on her face. She wasn’t looking at the camera, wasn’t posing, wasn’t smiling. There was no fancy backdrop. The photograph was the antithesis of “Madonna glamor”, which seemed more collaborative with patriarchy than transgressive in comparison. The viewer is made to actively interpret what is being viewed, echoing the punk insistence on participation between audience and performer, between spectacle and spectator. The semiotics of the situation were lost on the press and the general public, however. Riot Grrrl and its message were mischaracterized, trivialized, derided, and discussed dismissively inside the music business and out. In reaction, a prominent band called a press blackout for the rest of 1993, and Riot Grrrl scenes turned inward towards their own feminist activist communities. They may have disappeared from the press, but those inspired by Riot Grrrl didn’t disappear as part of the feminist movement, the cultural activist arm of which continues to this day in the form of GirlFests, Ladyfest, rock camps for girls, and a bonanza of empowered female musicians.

 

4  

Revolution Girl-Style Now!: Zine aesthetics Prefiguring Touraine and Melucci's ideas of social movements as symbolic challenges to society, Dick Hebdige characterized punk as an apolitical subculture (as opposed to more traditional forms of political resistance) where opposition is displaced into symbolic forms of resistance. He goes further to distinguish this working class movement from middle class revolt, which is more articulate and 'readable' to the dominant culture (1979). Hebdige looks at the stylistic elements of subculture as the efforts of subordinate classes to rise above the meanings that have been imposed upon them by virtue of their social position. His view is as nihilistic as that of the punks themselves, as he leaves no room for actual political organizing, recognition of cultural activism, or for the possibility of viewing punk as a working-class/poverty class social movement. And in the strict sense, while punk bands in England gave benefits for such organizations as Rock Against Racism, and certainly engaged in consciousness-raising in its lyrics, it was only the anarchist-punk collective Crass that connected punk rock with a larger critique of capitalism. The strength of looking at Riot Grrrl feminist cultural activism with this perspective in mind is that the co-existence of a Riot Grrrl punk art world and a Riot Grrrl feminist movement becomes clearer. Neither feminism nor punk can be subtracted from Riot Grrrl aesthetics and activities; they are mutually constituent. Networks used to organize artistic/cultural activity described by Becker as “art worlds” (1982), in Riot Grrrl are the same networks used to organize simultaneous and embedded political activism. Riot Grrrl is a social movement unto itself, part of the larger feminist movement. It aimed for consciousness-raising and direct-action with regards to gender inequality and stereotypes, social silence surrounding rape and sexual abuse, the silencing of girls and women, sexuality issues, patriarchy, women’s rights, cultural participation, and more. Riot Grrrl insisted that the circumstances of girls’ and women’s everyday lives were connected to larger systems of oppression, including racism, classism, heterosexism, and patriarchy. All of these things are evident in Riot Grrrl events, song lyrics, and most clearly in their zines. To establish the feminist nature of the Riot Grrrl movement, one needs go no farther than the Riot Grrrl zines, which were traded through the mail, distributed at events and concerts, and formed a pre-internet communication network for organizing and dialogue. Riot Grrrl music and zines aesthetics reinforced one another. Riot Grrrl zines and music gained press attention primarily because of their confrontational style. Some of the early visual clues were taken from their punk predecessors, from feminist performance artists, and from the radical feminist movements of the 1970s. At the time Riot Grrrl was forming in the late 1980s, the stylistic referents for girls were from punk rock subculture and from pop sensation Madonna, who exploited her sexuality aggressively rather than passively. Riot Grrrls were not interested in being Boy Toys, however. They were interested in Revolution, and a good revolution must have powerful iconography. One place this iconography was shared was in Riot Grrrl zines, which were handmade, photocopied material culture associated with the music and feminist activism of the movement. Examining the mixing of signifiers that occurs in these zines can reveal the symbolic meaning underlying mix of political and

 

5  

social messages used by Riot Grrrl. A mixing of signifiers from different social milieu is a "pastiche", or "bricolage", and is used extensively in zines (Hebdige 1979). The particular elements of bricolage they chose shows that the aesthetics of Riot Grrrl zines were explicitly political, and concerned with feminist issues. The data used for this analysis were from 80 zines gathered from zine distributors covering the years 1989-1998. They were coded for content, using grounded theory to identify mutually exclusive aesthetic categories (Glaser & Strauss 1967; Charmaz 2007). I deal with this zine dataset in more detail elsewhere (Starr 1999). Four main aesthetic categories emerged from the data, each showing how culture and feminist politics interwine in the material culture of Riot Grrrl. The first aesthetic in Riot Grrrl zines involves acknowledging continuity with the larger history of the women's movement. This is done in bricolage, by including images of suffragettes from the 1920s, images of powerful women in ancient history, and images of women from the 1970s-era feminist movement. These are shown alongside pictures of Riot Grrrl bands, or show reviews, or calls for direct action. Images from the 1980s are conspicuously absent. The Riot Grrrl zinewriters acknowledge themselves as participants in the feminist struggle, and the zines often detail struggles within themselves and within the Riot Grrrl community in defining feminisms that relate to their experiences. Over time, changes in feminist consciousness become apparent, a result of the dialog between zinewriters and their audiences. The two-way communication between cultural producer and consumer continues the punk ideology of egalitarianism in cultural production. Every reader is encouraged to also become a zinewriter, or to participate in the movement in some way other than simple consumption. Dialog and struggle are valued, showing strands of radical feminist values. The second aesthetic uses images of women from the 1930's, 40's and 50's to parody traditional gender roles, compulsory heterosexuality, and dominant social attitudes towards lesbianism. Reproduced covers of pulp novels appear, drawing the reader’s attention to the possibility that mainstream culture today is just as ripe for parody. The “perfect housewife” images were used often. Images from the 60's reflected the then-called liberated woman in showing images of women dating, being overlyconcerned with makeup and its proper application, and showing articles and article titles on “how to be the new woman”. These are used ironically. The symbolic contradiction between past images of "liberation" containing images and text that at the same time show women’s excessive concern with pleasing men, echoes the frame of contradiction found in many Riot Grrrl zines. In zines, these images are placed in juxtaposed "contradiction"; the older exemplars of “women’s liberation” are placed next to Riot Grrrl revolutionary slogans or writing, or are textually deconstructed in an accompanying essay. Sometimes the essays link the oppression that the zinewriter has experienced in her everyday life to the oppression represented by the photo. Both practices show a simultaneous awareness of the history, and limitations, of, the women’s movement at that time, and in the 1990s. Stereotypes of gender and sexuality predominate, and the differences between 1990s cultural expectations for young women vs. the reality of young women’s lives are a central point of discussion in the zines. Even in zines that are concerned primarily with ethnicity, like Bamboo Girl (Filipina zine-writer) to give one example, questioning of cultural and ethnic gender/sexuality expectations play a central part in zine content.

 

6  

A third aesthetic involved reclaiming elements of traditional representations of girlhood like the Holly Hobbie character, Hello Kitty, or other passive, cute doll or fairy tale characters, placing them near a feminist/revolutionary slogan in powerful oppositional juxtaposition. It is a simultaneous critique and cultural reclaiming. In using juxtaposed symbols of girlhood and power (a girl screaming into a microphone, for example), zinewriters redefine the powerless (girls) as powerful (Riot Grrrls) . Zinewriters place these images in the context of "girl power" and "revolution girl style", combined with the punk ideology of "resisting labels and limits." They are defining their own aesthetic, using their own referents. The referents are a direct result of growing up in a media society. Their challenge to society is symbolic when they change the meanings of "girl" from powerless to powerful. Their challenge to society is traditionally political when they call for political action as part of the zine text, which occurs with regularity. Riot Grrrl, then, unlike punk, is not a purely symbolic challenge to hegemony or patriarchy. It used and then transcended punk’s oppositional aesthetic and connected it to feminist movement, activist organizing, and the political use of culture. A fourth type of zine content is primarily discursive, but includes the same kinds of visual juxtapositions already discussed. This is the self-conscious textual deconstruction of mass culture is seen with the zine TVI. The zine consists of a pastedup transcript of a 1995 AOL chat room session where women/grrrls in different parts of southern California commented on the stereotypes and oppressive characteristics of the videos on MTV. Much of the early conversation on the AOL Riot Grrrl mailing list concerned the culture industries and their responsibility to artists, artistic freedom, sexist marketing, and artist control over their own music. On the message board, traditional barriers to accessing cultural elites were broken down, and high school girls, Courtney Love, female musicians, journalists and activists joined in conversations about the music business (to give one example) with Danny Goldberg, then-president of Warner Bros. Records. These exchanges were made into zines like TVI and circulated through the zine network to those who didn’t yet have internet access (which only became available to the general public in 1994 using dial-up modems). Zine aesthetics reveal Riot Grrrl culture as a sophisticated pre-internet dialog between young feminists who identified with the Riot Grrrl movement, where cultural production assumed not an “audience” but a group of fellow cultural producers engaged in feminist activism broadly conceived and ranging a span from consciousness-raising dialogs, event organization, participation in any aspect of the art world, attending protests and direct actions announced in zines or through other Riot Grrrl channels, letter-writing, petition-circulation, and feminist cultural production. Riot Grrrl took its punk origins and added the entire spectrum of feminist activism to create a movement that still has impact today. By 1997, the organizing frame of punk rock no longer resonated for all the girls who wished to participate in the Riot Grrrl movement. One of the issues that came up in the late 1990s was that the punk rock music origin of Riot Grrrl was causing girls who couldn't relate to that style of musical and symbolic expression uncomfortable. Many young women still wanted the political feminist and activist elements of the movement, and many created cooperating subworlds, coming together to put on "inclusive"girl conventions and feminist conferences using already-established Riot Grrrl art world-activist networks. The common thread to academic views on culture is that

 

7  

aesthetics is in some way a political category. Aesthetics have a power dimension, and the discourse of aesthetics is largely determined by those who have the power to frame and distribute their message. The cultural studies literature establishes grounds for looking at Riot Grrrl aesthetics as more than purely symbolic. The meanings of Riot Grrrl material cultural, here discussed in terms of zines, can have material consequences, economic consequences, and political consequences as interpretive frames which contest the predominant discourses that frame feminist issues for the general public both in 1990s and in the present day. The male body, patriarchy, and the invisible hegemonies of feminist music cultures In the separate art world of Womyn's Music, festival organizers held benefits for feminist causes, provided venues for feminist consciousness-raising, struggle, and dialog, produced and distributed music and started their own magazines, and used little magazines and papers for communication, and carried all of this out in a hostile social environment. The Womyn’s Music Movement was started in the early 1970s by radical lesbian separatist feminists, but involved a wide array of feminists in festival, workshop, and concert attendance. The Michigan’s Womyn’s Music Festival is the most well-known of these festivals, starting in 1975 and continues to this day. Some of the artists that were associated with Womyn’s Music in its formative years were Holly Near, Meg Christiansen, all-female rock group Fanny, and Sweet Honey in the Rock. The genre of music associated with the Womyn’s Music Festivals was predominately singersongwriter ballads and soft rock, blues/gospel, and to a lesser extent, mainstream rock, and later, world-music. The analysis in this section is based on face-to-face interviews conducted at the Michigan’s Womyn’s Music Festival in 1995, together with written and published accounts of the incidents described. By the mid-1990s, younger members of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival were asking that bands associated with the Riot Grrrl movement be included in the lineup. In the “queercore” scene that happened simultaneously with Riot Grrrl, and overlapped venues, zines, activism, and audiences, one all-lesbian band had enormous popularity. This band was Tribe 8, the name a play on an old word describing lesbians as “tribate”. Tribe 8 reclaimed the word “dyke” in the same way that “girl” had been reclaimed. Their performances were confrontational in their style to both the mainstream media and to members of the radical lesbian womyn's music community who didn’t understand the genre, or who didn’t agree that the band’s theatrics were conducive to feminist goals. Tribe 8 is best known for incorporating campy theatrics into their performances that make men, women, and many lesbians, very nervous. The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, widely regarded as the "Lesbian Woodstock", has been a bastion of cultural feminism since the early 70s (McDonnell 1994). The intense political scrutiny of every action of festival organizers, performers. and "festi-goers" gives "Michigan" as it is called, a reputation of super-feminist proving ground, a place where feminists try to "live" theory for a week while camping in the woods. Part of the Michigan mythos is due to the fact that it is constructed from scratch each year; because the land is federally protected wetland, no permanent structures may be built. Each year, volunteer workers raise huge tents, lay bark and cloth paths through the woods, supervise the placement of the porta-janes, build stages, rig temporary

 

8  

showers, and prepare for the crowd of 6,000 to 8,000 women who annually make the "lesbian pilgrimage." Concern with feminist theories is paramount at Michigan, and one issue has remained salient over the twenty-one years of the festival's operation: sexual identity. Arguments about who is welcome on “the land” have ranged from debates about whether it should be renamed a "lesbian festival", about how non-lesbian feminists feel excluded, a suggested ban on male children over the age of three, whether a heterosexual woman can be a "political lesbian" and claim lesbian identity while remaining celibate or sleeping with men, and more recently, a ban on transsexuals attending the festival. Other identity problems have arisen around ethnicity, with women of color expressing concern about whether white mothers of black children should be allowed into the Womyn of Color Tent, and particular problems like the white woman who wanted to attend the separate-space Native American Sweat Lodge on the basis of her “past life” experience. The question of who is included in this radical feminist community raises a basic question: ''Who is one of us? And why?" The festival has answered the question broadly by stating that it is open to "womyn-born womyn", using an implicit biological criteria that equates gender with chromosomal sex, and ignores sexuality. The festival does not conduct "gender checks" at the gate, and there are male-to-female transsexuals who have covertly attended; transsexual lesbians camp on the edge of the land and protest their exclusion. Women have heavily protested and criticized S&M (sado-masochistic) practices by festi-goers as reinscriptions of patriarchy and heterosexuality, and have suggested that such sexual practices promote violence against women and children. In many women's minds, the transsexuals and the self-described S&M dykes should be included in the festival by virtue of their marginality. The discomfort with these groups at the festival touches on the core issue of identity. Both groups practice transgender fluidity, and both link gender to actual sexual practices. What is queer about the transsexuals and S&M dykes who camp at the edge of the land is that they throw consensus about "lesbian space" into disarray. The very queer moment where sex, sexuality. identity, and politics exploded at Michigan was the result of the queerpunk band Tribe 8's appearance on the Night Stage. What resulted was a queering of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, in which a Riot Grrrl-associated band played to a feminist audience of thousands and the cohesiveness of lesbian identity was profoundly troubled. The aesthetics of Riot Grrrl, and of punk informed the queercore movement; and Tribe 8’s performance used the symbolism of the body in a very provocative way. Part of the impact that Tribe 8’s performance had on the audience at the festival was due to the separate and distinct aesthetics of the Womyn’s Music and Riot Grrrl art worlds. Since the 1970s, Womyn’s Music-associated artists used symbols in personal presentation, on album covers, and in festival programs that are ''traditionally lesbian": the color lavender, the butterfly axe, symbols of cultural feminism and allusions to "the goddess." Lyrics typically focus on personal experiences and relationships, and only occasionally use the "L" word. The music itself wouldn’t be out of place on any soft-rock station. This is the aesthetic climate that Tribe 8 entered in 1994. The womyn’s music festival climate is raced (mostly white), classed (mostly middle), and musically genrespecific (mostly soft sounds). Tribe 8 is multi-racial, working class, tattooed, and play

 

9  

very loud punk rock. Trouble began brewing early as women who had never heard of the band read the description in the festival program: Tribe 8, who describe themselves as San Francisco's own all-dyke, all-out, in-your-face, blade brandishing, gangcastrating, dildo-swingin', bullshit detecting, aurally pornographic, Neanderthal-pervert band ofpatriarchysmashing snatchlickers. Tribe 8 used the same aggressive irony as Riot Grrrl punk, and pointed it at issues of sexual identity. Like the Riot Grrrl movement in general, they self-describe with a pejoriative, “dyke”, seeking to reclaim it. In rejecting the fear that lesbians have lived with for years, fears of being beat up for their sexuality, they adopt an aggressive, working-class stance as “blade brandishing, dildo-swingin’, bullshit-detecting”. They anticipate the insults by labeling themselves “aurally pornographic Neanderthalperverts”, much as Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna anticipated the insulted by writing “SLUT” on her midriff in markers in the 1993 People magazine photo. Their feminism is made explicit by their self-description as “patriarchy-smashing”. Their use of the pejorative “snatchlicker” is a discursive strategy inherited from punk—label yourself and show mainstream culture what it has made of you, adopt it, revere it, display it. The “gangcastrating” is a reference to their stage show, and it is this that caused the most consternation at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. In the case of Tribe 8, the aesthetics of performance, seen out of their usual context (a Riot Grrrl or punk show), proved the “issue” of the decade at Michigan. Their performance aesthetics continue the use of the body to mark and to disrupt cultural hegemony. The Queer Moment: Performance aesthetics and feminist identity Tribe 8's appearance spoke for them before they even plugged in their guitars. Every item of their wardrobes, from tattoos to leather, raised theoretical eyebrows at the festival. The Night Stage is a privileged spot, and the women standing on it looked just like the woman who were camping on the edge of the land, the excluded S&M dykes (who came in for Tribe 8's performance). The band, their symbolism, slogans, and lyrics are aggressively political and sexual. Tribe 8's views on the importance of identity are clearly addressed in their logo/slogans "Assimilate My Fist" and "Fuck Shit Up: Dykes Rule." They self-identify as dyke and queer and articulate a radical queer-identified feminism. The queering of Michigan began with their presence on the Night Stage, and their outspoken support for the S&M dykes. According to Alexander Doty, queerness manifests itself in multiple subject positions, and can be found by looking at the "[audience] reception strategies that are shared by otherwise disparate groups" (1995). The presence of Tribe 8 troubled the uneasy consensus about who was a lesbian in the same way that presence of transsexuals at the festival troubled the notion of who was a woman. To apply the most obvious criteria, these women were definitely lesbians because they engaged in sexual activities with women. But the second criteria of Michigan, the one meant to be the most all inclusive, the "womyn-identified womyn" didn't work in the case of Tribe 8. They could be more accurately termed "dyke-identified queer." In terms of broader feminist concerns, Tribe 8 was not the "right kind" of lesbian feminist because they were reproducing the patriarchy by role playing and promoting

 

10  

violence through S&M, in one popular view. Their performance evoked a queer feminist discourse, and was most appreciated by the S&M women, who had queer readings of their own about the Michigan based on their queer positioning at the festival. In addition, they were focused on sexual practices and everyday life; their art arose from that. Everything else at Michigan had been painstakingly constructed to conform to feminist theory, an opposite process. Tribe 8's appearance, lyrics, and focus on actual sexual practices injected lower and working class aesthetics and ways of speaking into a middle class cultural environment. Doty also talks about how heterocentrist culture can experience queer moments; I would add to this that lesbian-centered culture can also experience queer moments (1995). Doty also notes the tendency to regard these queer moments as "sinful lapses in judgment or taste" even within gay and lesbian discourses, and this is exactly what happened at Michigan. Tribe 8's direct speech and loud punk rock contrasted sharply to the flowery metaphors and soft music usually heard on the Night Stage. Their use of camp suggested the transsexuals (through the trope of drag) excluded from attending. They presented a pro-sex, urban, working class perspective to an audience that included a good number of middle class feminist utopians. They were loud, talked aggressively about sex, and used camp-like parody in their performances. All of these characteristics are not traditionally thought of as "woman-identified." By posing a challenge by existing, Tribe 8 posed the question "ain't I a lesbian?" and if not, why not? Tribe 8’s performance aesthetics had disrupted the notion of womyn's culture. SNIP Once Tribe 8 started to play, they performed a song (“Frat Pig”) about gang rape, in which the "frat pig" perpetrator is symbolically "gang-castrated" by the band applying scissors to a dildo. The symbolism is obvious; the dildo is being used as the phallus, the embodiment of patriarchy. The band’s action represents the victim turning the tables on her rapist, and disrupting patriarchy. The “queerness” of this act lies both in the intent of the performers and in the audience's reception of the performance. Gender and sexuality are simultaneously critiqued, enacted, and disrupted in the course of the Tribe 8's performance. The appearance of the dildo in ''frat pig", understood from the performative aesthetic and genre conventions of the performers, is a simple (if campy) revenge tale that expresses women's anger, outrage, and retribution. The words are simple, straightforward, and powerful. The dildo in "frat pig" is representative of all rapists, of the patriarchy, and perhaps of all men. It represents gender and sexuality as fully embodied in the physical organ of sex and violence, the penis. The dildo is a constructed, man-made object. As such, it can be de-constructed and Tribe 8 does so by using scissors. For their usual audience, this is an empowering, not threatening, moment. The reception of this act by the feminist audience at Michigan was complex. The younger women and S&M women, marginal at the festival, and who shared Tribe 8's interpretive frame, appreciated the performance as an opportunity to express anger, to transcend essentialist categories of sexuality by including the dildo, and to take pleasure in smashing the patriarchy (rather then focusing on womyn's culture). The queering of the festival was a transformative moment for them, a time when an uncomfortable lesbian

 

11  

space, from their perspective as marginal, was briefly made over into a queer space; a space in which they belonged. They shifted subject positions with Tribe 8 easily from ''Frat Pig" to the next song, "Tranny Chaser", a playful ode to Ru Paul which ends "Silly faggot, dicks are for dykes.""Tranny Chaser" glorifies the dildo, and the singer urges her partner to "strap it on; let's pretend you're a drag queen." The sexual act is approached in a campy, playful way. In a single performance, the dildo has changed from a heavy symbol to a sex toy, a tool for dykes having fun. In addition, the structure of the song forces a queering of the subject position and of desire by the audience. The singer changes the gender position from which she speaks from "male" to “dyke” in the course of the song. In putting on the voice of the male homosexual early in the song and switching to the position of dyke later in the song, the listener is encouraged to identify across both gender and sexuality, but in the end is brought around to conclude that desire is lesbian. As Doty observes, gender identities that have little to do with straight gender codes are acted out, and this is where the queer performance and the curiously "straight" reception of the performance collided. ''Fist City" warns that signifiers do not necessarily conceal the truth about what they signify. The song recounts a long list of butch attributes that are "performed", in Judith Butler's (1991) sense of gender, by the protagonist of the song. These symbols are not accurate predictors of what they are commonly held to predict however, as we learn that the song’s protagonist is "butch in the streets and femme in the sheets." This is a queerness, where sexual activity does not correspond to the roles suggested by outward markers. The song suggests that role-playing is not as definitive, as defining, of a person as popularly believed. This is not to say that lesbianism has been reduced to style, as Arlene Stein (1995a) argues, but to show the queerness that occurs when signifiers don't ''float'' but challenge assumptions about sexuality. Tribe 8's performance is marked by an insistence on moving easily between subject positions, objects of desire, and enactments of desire. A separation is made between the erotic, or what arouses (such as drag queens, or dildos) and actual sexual activity. The singer doesn't really want to do RuPaul, but she's not above using his image to get aroused, and as impetus for sex play with her partner. This separation is not made very well in lesbian feminist theory, where every aspect of the personal is scrutinized as intensely political, and where role playing inspired by a drag queen may be seen as evidence of internalized homophobia or latent heterosexuality. A large part of the queerness of Tribe 8 has to do with the band's bawdy insistence on disrupting signifiers of sex, of the sexual act, and of sexual performance and play. Lesbian culture has not (with the exception of on our backs) been sophisticated in its depiction or analysis of desire and sexual acts. Multiple and excluded subject positions, desires, and sexual practices that were given voice by Tribe 8's performance. In terms of media communication theory, there was a disruption between the symbolic code of the band and the receptive frame of most of the audience. Tribe 8, and by extension, Riot Grrrl, introduced a frame dispute into a radical lesbian feminist cultural space. Doty's sense of queer as "militant different and erotic marginality" resonates with the band's emphasis on out-ness, sexual practice, and multiplicity of subject positions. Elements of the audience were disturbed by Tribe 8's less-thanseamless political orthodoxy, and the band was shocked at the disparity of interpretations surrounding their performance. Tribe 8's Leslie Mah commented "everything you

 

12  

say....gets analyzed and taken literally by people that don't know your culture" (Thomas 1994). This comment underlines the queer moment when both sides realized that they did not share a culture as feminists or as lesbians. At that moment, the basis of cultural feminism was shaken. When a similar question about cultural difference was brought up earlier in the festival's history by various ethnic groups, common ground was found by making an appeal to lesbian culture, or womyn's culture. But what does it mean when the White, Black, and Asian dykes of Tribe 8 don't share the culture of most of the womyn at Michigan? The queer moment is to ponder whether queer dykes can be lesbians. Processing Whenever an "issue" comes up at Michigan, tradition is to "process" it by having workshops and other public discussions about the issue. The Tribe 8 incident required several workshops, including one where the band confronted critics. Lesbian reaction to that queer moment, when leather dykes joyfully roughhoused in Michigan's first-ever mosh pit blessed by cultural feminist icon and crowd-surfer Alix Dobkin, was mixed. The most vocal protesters insisted that the dildo-snipping performance promoted violence against women. The theory behind this objection is that to even allow a dildo to appear in all-woman space is a violation, as it is a reminder of male things. It is also an instrument that some women believe to be inherently violent and heterosexual, and therefore inappropriate at a woman-identified gathering. The queerness of this logic is that Tribe 8 are definitely woman-identified, but just not with middle class white lesbian feminist women at Michigan. This is an indirect threat to the legitimacy of the festival in claiming to represent radical lesbian feminism, and a revelation of the social class basis of the cultural feminist claim to lesbian identity. A related objection was that the use of the dildo in a sexual way, and the band's S&M regalia, introduced an element of "threat" into the "safe space" of Michigan. The queerness revealed in those arguments concern the discomfort with boundary crossing among the protesters, and a discomfort with constructions of lesbian sexuality that were constructed along lines other than "nurturing." To those who objected, Tribe 8 was not about sexuality, or sexual practices. Queerness was written on the bodies of Tribe 8, with their tattoos, role-specific clothing, and piercings. The S&M women who came in to watch the performance shared their interpretive frame, and knew that it was all about sexuality. To others, the queerness of the moment manifested as a blankness, an untheorized category. Some festi-goers weren't insulted by the performance, but they just didn't "get it." All of the processing resulted in a greater attention at the festival to the marginal position of SIM dykes and transsexuals. Another, less radical all dyke punk band, Team Dresch, was invited to play the following year (1995). The festival will continue to challenge audiences with dyke punk until the queer spaces of lesbian identity have been fully explored.

The power of aesthetics

 

13  

The queering of Womyn's Music due to the influx of queerpunk/dykepunk raises issues with previous analyses of womyn's music as "commodity lesbianism" and with Riot Grrrl and punk as "apolitical." Arlene Stein (1995a) characterizes the contemporary lesbian community in a class-bound way, stating that "In 1970, the Radicalesbians declared that 'A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion'. Now we've lightened up." This effectively removes Riot Grrrls and Tribe 8, who both include anger as a central element in their performance aesthetics and iconography. Tribe 8 came out of a punk rock subculture and a dyke subculture. They occupied multiple, overlapping subject positions and self-identified as queer. Punk rock itself always has been a political form. Its primary focus is a class focus, and its feminist history has been downplayed in rock history. From the 1977 feminist punk classic by XRay-Spex "Oh Bondage Up Yours" to "Frat Pig", there is a continuous and largely unwritten history of feminist women in punk. Punk served to queer the mainstream by demanding a recognition of fun, anger, and social critique in the same song, a practice that is basic to the genre. Because many feminists at Michigan were not familiar with the aesthetic conventions of punk, it was doubly challenging for them to react to a queer punk intervention. In the case of Womyn's Music, the middle class, white base of the movement is emphasized by contrast with the working class and poverty-class conventions and language of punk. Not only was Womyn's Music completely un-like punk in sound and style, it did not have the critical tools to understand it. The aesthetics of punk, Riot Grrrl, and dykecore, on the other hand, are related by history and mutual influence, and are mutually comprehensible by those audiences. The queer moment at Michigan serves to show that aesthetics are not only structured, recognizable, and given meaning within the context of a musical genre, they also signify different ways of engaging in cultural activism. The womyn’s music genre developed its aesthetics and conventions in a more or less self-contained system based on separatism. There is no need to influence dominant culture in the logic of a separatist system. Riot Grrrl aesthetics, on the other hand, developed from the oppositional classconsciousness of the punk scene, and remained in dialog with the larger music scene, music business, and new developments in dominant culture. As a result, the Riot Grrrl movement had a large impact on mainstream music; we see this today in popular rock camps for girls, and in the explosion of female rock musicians in the mid-90s and beyond. In terms of feminist activism, zine archives are now housed in university libraries; feminist music festivals continue to thrive; and young women’s interest in Riot Grrrl history is seen in the recent increase of books and films on the topic. Lesbian activists involved in Riot Grrrl and punk are profoundly political, on both the grassroots and national organizational level. Free to Fight, a group which includes all kinds of performers, but most centrally lesbian punk band Team Dresch, traveled the country in the mid 90s giving self-defense demonstrations to teenage girls, and selling an accompanying instructional, informational, and musical CD and booklet. This inspired a major-label mainstream effort "Home Safe" which imparted the same information in the form of a compilation CD made by well known female artists of all popular genres. By examining two aspects of the aesthetics of music, we can see that both reveal and encode feminist activism, as in the case of Riot Grrrl; and operate to challenge feminist theory concerning marginalized sexual identities and practices, as shown by Tribe 8’s

 

14  

performance at the Michigan’s Womyn’s Music Festival. Aesthetics were central to revealing the hegemony of womyn’s music and of punk rock, and also were central in serving as vehicles for consciousness-raising and further feminist movement. Bibliography Becker, Howard S. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. [1979]. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Butler, Judith and Joan W. Scott, eds. 1992. Feminists Theorize the Political. New York: Routledge. Crane, Diana. 1992. The Production of Culture: Media and the Urban Arts. Newbury Park: Sage. Doty, Alexander and Corey K. Creekmur. 1995. Out In Culture: Gay Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Eagleton, Terry. 1990. The Ideology ofthe Aesthetic. Cambridge. MA: Blackwell. Foucault. Michele. 1980. The History of Sexuality: Voll, An Introduction. New York: Vintage. Gans, Herbert. 1974. Popular Culture and High Culture .New York: Basic. Gramsci. Antonio. 1971. [1932]. Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Gilmore, Samuel. 1990. “Art Worlds: Developing an Interactionist Approach to Social Organization." in Symbolic Interaction and Cultural Studies~ edited by Howard S. Becker and Michel McCall. Glaser, Barney G. and Anselm Strauss. 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. New York: Aldine. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture:The Meaning of Style. London and New York: Methuen. --1988. Hiding in the Light. New York: Routledge. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. 1987 [1944] Dialectic of Enlightenment trans. John Willett. New York: Continuum. Johnston, Hank, and Bert Klandermans, eds. Social Movements and Culture. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Melucci, Alberto. 1980. "The New Social Movements." Social Science Information. Vol. 19(2). pp. 199-226. Melucci, Alberto. 1985. ''The Symbolic Challenge of Contemporary Movements." Social Research. 52. pp. 789-816. Stein, Arlene. 1995. "All Dressed Up But No Place To Go? Style Wars and the New Lesbianism." pp. 476-483 in Out In Culture: Gay Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture. Alexander Doty and Corey K. Creekmur, eels.. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

 

15