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U.S. Feminism-Grrrl Style!
Youth (Sub)Cultures and the Technologics of the Third Wave

Author(s): Ednie Kaeh Garrison
Source: Feminist Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring, 2000), pp. 141-170
Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.
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U.S. FEMINISM-GRRRLSTYLE!
YOUTH (SUB)CULTURESAND THE
TECHNOLOGICSOF THE THIRD WAVE
EDNIE KAEH GARRISON
"Grrrl," a word coined by BikiniKill singer and activistKathleen

Hanna, is a spontaneousyoung-feministreclamationof the word
"girl."It has proud analogies among many groups of women; in
fact, "grrrl"was at least partiallyderived from a phrase of encour-
agementpopularizedby young Americanblack women in the late
1980s:"Yougo, guuuurlll!"As we all know, when it is not being
used to describe a woman under sixteen, the word "girl"often
takes on pejorative, infantilizing overtones, suggesting silliness,
weakness or insubstantiality.
"Grrrl"puts the growl back in our pussycat throats. "Grrrl"is
intended to recallthe naughty,confidentand curiousten-year-olds
we were before society made it clearit was time to stop being loud
and playing with boys and concentrateon learning "to girl"....
Riot Grrrlis a loosely affiliatedgroup of young, generallypunkish,
take-no-prisoners feminists who publish zines, play in bands,
make art, produce radio shows, maintain mailing lists, create
Websitesand sometimesjust get togetherand talk about our lives
and being women in contemporarysociety....
We chose the title Surfergrrrls as a counterto the "nicegirls don't
hack around with computers"message that society (still!) sends
out, despite the educationalsystem's extensive lip service to get-
ting girls involved with math and science. Surfergrrrlsalso
acknowledges the great grrrl/girl presence already on the Net,
from Stephanie Brail's Digital Amazons and Aliza Sherman's
CybergrrlWebsiteto the searchablefeminist database Feminaand
the Web zines Foxy and Fat Girl.
-From Surfergrrrls:LookEthel!An Internet Guidefor Us,
by Laurel Gilbert and Crystal Kile, 1996.
I've opened with this lengthy passage from Laurel Gilbert and
Crystal Kile's book because it suggests something of the contem-
porary milieu that creates the cultural geography of the Third
Wave.By culturalgeographyI mean the material,political,social,
Feminist Studies 26, no. 1 (spring 2000). ? 2000 by Feminist Studies, Inc.
141
142 EdnieKaehGarrison
ideological,and discursivelandscapesthat constitutethe context,

base, or environment of Third Wave feminism. Young women
who come to feminist consciousness in the United States in the
late twentiethcentury(fromthe mid-1980sto the present)haven't
gone through Second Wave feminism themselves. Rather,they
experience and are affected by it in historicized, narrativized
form.1As something other than "Second Wave,"the "ThirdWave"
can be defined by a different set of historical events and ideologi-
cal movements, especially the (fundamentalist, Moral Majority,
neoconservative, Focus on the Family, antifeminist) backlash that
emerged in response to the women's movement in the 1970s and
so-called postfeminist feminism. As part of a larger project ex-
plaining why the name "ThirdWave feminism" is so attractive to
myself and others, this article considers specifically the role of
democratized technologies, the media, subcultural movements
and networks, and differential oppositional consciousness in the
formation of feminist consciousness among young women in the
historical/cultural milieu of the United States in the 1990s.
Like Gilbert and Kile, I am compelled by the many different
invocations possible with the word "grrrl"and appreciate their
spirited appropriation and contextualization of the term. Yet my
purpose is not to extend their elaborations so much as to note the
rhetorical play of signified and signifier as a discursive device in
young women's cultural tool kits. I then turn my attention to the
subject of the third paragraph: Riot Grrrl. Riot Grrrl is a recent
young feminist (sub)cultural movement that combines feminist
consciousness and punk aesthetics, politics, and style.2 Recogniz-
ing youth (sub)cultures as political spaces and refusing to sepa-
rate political consciousness from subcultural formations, I argue
that the convergence of music, print, and information technolo-
gies, the historical specificities of backlash and post-civil rights
movements, and feminist consciousness raising multiplies the
cultural locations where political activities can occur in the Third
Wave. I focus here on Riot Grrrl because it has been viewed by
many who study U.S. girls'/young women's cultures as exem-
plary of what's being called "youth feminism." And, although I do
not think Riot Grrrl is the quintessential example of "youth femi-
nism," or "Third Wave feminism," or that the two are synony-
mous, I do believe there is a lot of value in studying them.3
Riot Grrrl is an alternative subculture built around opposition
EdnieKaehGarrison 143
to presuppositions that young (usually white) U.S. girls and

women are too preoccupiedwith themselves and boys to be inter-
ested in being political,creative,and loud. The tensions between
this expectation and the political desires of members offers a
powerful opportunityto learn differentways of resistingin a con-
sumer-orientedculture.Formore and more subcultures(youth or
otherwise), the ability to intertwine politics and style is a risky
and necessarytacticin a cultural-historical period markedby "the
logic of late capitalism"in which the commodificationof resis-
tance is a hegemonic strategy.4The hybrid politicaltexts and dis-
tributionnetworks producedby feministslike Riot Grrrlsare sig-
nificantin the formationof ThirdWave movement cultures;they
are both "popular"and subcultural, they provide spaces for
youth-controlledconversations,and they can operate as an inter-
face between different Third Wave cohorts (they connect Riot
Grrrlsto one another but also to other feminists and women).
How do young women in the United Statesclaim feministagency
for themselves and each other by making use of a historicallysit-
uated repertoireof culturalobjectsand images, codes, and signs
in self-consciouslypoliticalways?
Some of the tools that constitute this repertoireinclude print
and visual media; music genres, technologies,and cultures;girl-
positive and woman-positive expressions; revolutionary and
social justicediscourses;shock tactics;nonviolent actions;and the
Intemrnet.I use the word "repertoire"following Ruth Frankenberg,
to recognizeall these objectsand practicesas partsof the "toolkit"
availableto culturalsubjectsas instrumentsand objectsthat pro-
vide a context and space for analysis and reflection.5"Toolkit"is
also the image invoked by Ann Swidler to describe "culture"as
the "habits,skills, and styles from which people construct'strate-
gies of action,'"as an alternativeto traditionalsociological and
anthropological understandings of "culture"as providing "the
ultimate values"that motivate action.6This repertoireis utilized
by Third Wave feminists to raise consciousness about, provide
political commentaryon, and resist and educate against racism,
child abuse, rape, domestic violence, homophobiaand heterosex-
ism, ablism,fatism,environmentaldegradation,classism,the pro-
tection of healthcarerights,reproductiverights,and equity.It is a
tool kit designed for providing access to and transformationsof
traditionallymasculinist cultural institutions. The larger project
from which this article is drawn attempts to examine, theorize,

and provide some practicalsuggestions for comprehendingand
developing this kind of transformativetool kit.7
In this article,I concentrateon some of the ways young, mostly
white, and middle-class women in the United States use and
manipulate the repertoireof cultural-technologicalspaces and
activitiessuch as feminism and punk so they can voice their dis-
sonances and participatein making change. I considerhow these
young women make use of low-end-or "democratized"-technolo-
gies and alternativemedia to produce hybrid political texts such
as zines and music through which they disseminate knowledge
and informationabout subjectssuch as (but not limited to) femi-
nism in local-nationaldistributionnetworks.I do not assume that
activists in the Second Wave didn't also use grassrootsforms of
communications technologies but, rather, argue here that the
Third Wave has a differentrelationshipwith these technologies.
Not only is there a differencein quality (copiersare not quitethe
same as mimeograph machines), but we also have a distinctly
symbiotic-an interfaced-connection to technology. As Donna
Harawayhas suggested:"Themachineis us, our processes,an as-
pect of our embodiment."This blurring of the boundaries be-
tween humans and machines constructsa technologics through
which we shuttleback and forthconstantly,disrupting"themaze
of dualisms [through]which we have explained our bodies and
our tools to ourselves."s
A NOTE ON THE PRESUMPTION THAT 'THIRD WAVE"

DESIGNATES AN AGE-GENERATION COHORT
This articledoes focus on young women in the ThirdWave;how-
ever, I have specific reasons for not believing it is restricted to an
age cohort. As a product of a particular cultural moment, "Third
Wave feminism" is historically situated or bound. The name
"ThirdWave" acknowledges that feminism has changed substan-
tially in the late-capitalist and postmodemrnworld but still refer-
ences a longer movement history.9 Although frequently used to
categorize a generational cohort-those who "came of age" during
or after the height of the Second Wave-I believe the question of
who counts as the Third Wave is much more complicated and
layered; there are important differences between historical speci-
ficity and generationalspecificity.The "third"is the mark of his-

torical specificity, and like the marker "second"in the Second
Wave, it is not simply a sign of generational descendence. When
we automaticallyassume "third"refersto a specificgeneration,we
actuallyerase the significantpresenceand contributionsof many
overlapping and multiple cohorts who count as feminists, and
more particularly,of those who can count as Third Wave fem-
inists.10Further,"ThirdWave feminism" resonates in different
ways for differentpeople; for young women the resonancesmay
be particularlystrongbecause our historicalconsciousnessis very
much attached to the same historical conditions out of which
Third Wave feminism surfaces and takes shape. And because
many generationaland age cohorts share this historicalmoment,
to limit a ThirdWave to "youngwomen" alone suggests that no
other feminists can claim ThirdWave politics. Even more impor-
tantly,the emergenceof a "ThirdWave"owes a great deal to cri-
tiques of the homogenizationof the category"women"articulated
most directly in the political and intellectual work by radical
women of color,poor women, and lesbiansdatingfromat least the
Second Wave. Their opposition to the perceived dominance of
white feminism in the Second Wave is linked to critiques of
racism, classism, and heterosexism within the 1960s and 1970s
women's movement as well as in other groups, movements, and
social formations.1It is clear now that feminist critiquesof femi-
nism are part of the very origins of ThirdWave feminism rather
than trailingbehind an alreadyunitarymodel of the movement.
The shift from speakingabout"women"as a unified subjectto a
recognitionthat women are not all the same, nor should they be,
is something most feminists, young and not as young, take for
granted in the 1990s. This isn't to say the issue of differencehas
been solved, but differenceis a core component of Third Wave
consciousness. Chela Sandoval-theorizing what she calls "U.S.
Third World Feminism"-reminds us that there are still racial
divides but also new possible racial coalitions within contempo-
rary women's movements.12 I am not suggesting an easy or
homologous correlation between "U.S. Third World Feminism"
and "Third Wave feminism." Sandoval uses the former term to
refer to feminists of color who problematize the gender category
"women" and the binary "male/female," and for whom race, cul-
ture, class, and sexuality are not social categories separable from
146 Ednie Kaeh Garrison
or less significant than gender. She names a particular constituen-

cy as well as a hoped-for coalition. Although I have encountered
repeated slippages between "U.S. Third World," "Third World,"
and "ThirdWave"in many conversations about Third Wave femi-
nism, the distinctions are important and at no time do I want to
either collapse or confuse these terms.
POSTMODERNITY, OPPOSITIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS,

AND FEMINIST NETWORKING
I prefer a network ideological image, suggesting the profusion of
spaces and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the
personal body and in the body politic. "Networking" is both a fem-
inist practice and a multinational corporate strategy-weaving is
for oppositional cyborgs.
-Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto," 1991.
The praxis of U.S. third world feminism represented by the differ-
ential form of oppositional consciousness is threaded throughout
the experience of social marginality. As such it is also being woven
into the fabric of experiences belonging to more and more citizens
who are caught in the crisis of late capitalist conditions and
expressed in the cultural angst most often referred to as the post-
modern dilemma. The juncture I am proposing, therefore, is ex-
treme. It is a location wherein the praxis of U.S. third world femi-
nism links with the aims of white feminism, studies of race, ethnic-
ity, and marginality, and with postmodern theories of culture as
they crosscut and join together in new relationships through a
shared comprehension of an emerging theory and method of
oppositional consciousness.
-Chela Sandoval, "U.S.Third World Feminism," 1991.
Images of weaving or threading together apparently disparate

modes of consciousness, constituencies, ideologies, and practices
tie these two passages to one another and suggest a relationship
between the concept of networking advocated by Haraway and
the kind of junctures Sandoval advocates as a mode of resistance
necessary in our particular historical and political moment. To see
and recognize such forms of resistance we often have to look "into
the fabric of experiences" outside, beyond, and maybe even un-
derneath the places that we are told have mattered. Kathleen
Hanna, lead singer of Bikini Kill, intimately familiar with domes-
tic violence, and an ex-stripper, writes: "Resistance is everywhere,
it always has been and always will be. Just because someone is
Ednie Kaeh Garrison 147
not resistingin the same way you are (being a vegan, an 'out'les-
bian, a political organizer)does not mean they are not resisting.
Being told you are a worthless piece of shit and not believing it is
a form of resistance."'3Hanna goes on to list some other examples
that challenge conventional (and hence "recognizable")forms of
resistance. Media spectacles in particular offer new opportunities
for the creation of oppositional consciousness. One of the most
powerful examples of this phenomenon was the televised pro-
ceedings of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas sexual harassment
hearings in October 1991. They had a major impact on young
people in the United States, forcing many young women to
"acknowledge that we live under siege." But it also encouraged
them to fight back. RebeccaWalker,a young African American
woman, asserted:"Iintend to fight back. I have uncovered and
unleashed more repressedanger than I thought possible. For the
umpteenthtime in my twenty-two years, I have been radicalized,
politicized, shaken awake. I have come to voice again, and this
time my voice is not conciliatory."14
This way of conceptionalizingresistanceis centralto Sandoval's
theory of consciousness. According to Sandoval, differential
oppositionalconsciousnessis a mode of "ideology-praxis" rooted
in the experiencesof U.S. ThirdWorldfeminists.Modernistcon-
ceptions of oppositionalpolitics centeron mutuallyexclusive and
essentializedidentities. This ideology is perpetuated,she argues,
by white feministswho constructhistoriesof the Second Wave as
consistingof four distinctcategories:liberal,Marxist,radical,and
socialist.In contrast,the differentialmode of consciousnessoffers
a strategic politics wherein modernist oppositional identities
become tacticalposes. In other words, a differentialoppositional
ideology-praxismakes possible a "tacticalsubjectivity"in which
multiple oppressionscan be confrontedby shiftingmodes of con-
sciousness as variousforms of oppressionareexperienced.15
Crucialto Sandoval'sprojectis an understandingof the differ-
ential mode of oppositional consciousness as a "survivalskill"
that U.S. ThirdWorldwomen have been enacting,even though it
has not been recognized as a legitimate ideology of political activ-
ity. This "survival skill" is, for Sandoval, a form of affinity politics,
something quite different from more conventional notions of
"identity politics."16As Sandoval explains:
Differential consciousness requires grace, flexibility, and strength: enough
strengthto confidentlycommit to a well-defined structureof identity for one

hour, day, week, month, year; enough flexibilityto self-consciouslytransform
that identity accordingto the requisitesof anotheroppositionalideologicaltac-
tic if readings of power's formation require it; enough grace to recognize
alliancewith others committedto egalitariansocial relationsand race, gender,
and classjustice,when theirreadingsof power call for alternativeoppositional
stands.Withinthe realm of differentialconsciousness,oppositionalideological
positions, unlike their incarnationsunder hegemonicfeminist comprehension,
are tactics-notstrategies.'7
Distinguishingwhat Sandoval means by tactics and strategies
is crucialto understandingthe kind of move she is suggesting in
her rearticulationof oppositional consciousness. To be tactical
means to be in service as necessary;but tactics can be changed,
altered, shifted. Strategy is an informing ideology brought to
one's engagement with an oppressoror opposing power; tactics
are the moves one makes while engaged with the opposition.
"Identitypolitics,"as a modernist mode of oppositionality,has
essentialist requisiteswhich result in the productionof unprob-
lematic essentialized identities as the basis of oppositional con-
sciousness. In Sandoval'sframework,however, identity politics
becomes a tacticalmaneuverratherthan a single informingstrat-
egy; this move allows for the possibility of constructing social
movement coalitions built on less-essentialized or strategically
essentialized affinities.'8Recognizing U.S. Third World feminist
praxis makes possible anotherkind of gender,race, class, sexual,
cultural,political,and historicalconsciousness-a differentialcon-
sciousness which multiplies what counts as feminist politics and
consciousness. Sandoval claims this mode of oppositional con-
sciousness as a praxis grounded in the experiencesof women of
color,lesbians,and poor women inside the United States,but she
argues as well that it is becoming a form of consciousness
"threaded throughout the experience of social marginality." Be-
cause of "an historically unique democratization of oppression,"
this form of consciousness "is also being woven into the fabric of
experiences belonging to more and more citizens who are caught
in the crisis of late capitalist conditions and expressed in the cul-
tural angst most often referred to as the postmodem dilemma."19
I think what can be seen in many of the sites of the formations
of a Third Wave of feminism is precisely what Sandoval suggests.
This Third Wave is as much a product of "postmodern cultural
conditions"as it is a productof the Firstand SecondWaves,or of
women's studies, or the media backlash, or violence. Perhaps it is

more appropriate to say it is a product of postmodern cultural
conditionsbecause it is a product of the Firstand Second Waves;
the media backlash; violence; and other kinds of historical rem-
nants, products and monsters. Therefore, the theories of culture
that are useful to analyzing the Third Wave are those that help us
to comprehend how young women are claiming feminist identi-
ties for themselves in spite of the backlash and the discomfort
many feel about popular conceptions of what "feminism" con-
notes. This discomfort arises in part from the way many Second
Wave white feminists (and later the media) defined feminism to
suit their particular historical-cultural circumstances, definitions
which are frequently at odds with the behaviors, politics, criti-
cisms, and apparent irreverences of younger women. This may
help us to understand how a historical moment called "postmod-
ern" contributes to distinctions between the Third Wave and the
First and Second Wave women's movements. For instance, the
simultaneous confidence and uncertainty about what constitutes
feminism doesn't have to be conceptualized as a "problem."
Rather, it is a consequence of the proliferation of feminisms.
Hence, an anthology like Listen Up: Voicesfrom the Next Feminist
Generationinsists upon a wide range of voices talking about dif-
ferences through the object/subject feminism.20
Another indicator of the "postmodern" nature of the Third
Wave is its reliance on networking among different cohorts of
women who compose a movement culture that is disparate, un-
likely, multiple, polymorphous. These are cohorts who remain
indebted to their predecessors but who are simultaneously irrev-
erent. They all share an interestin exploringwhat it means to be
"women"in the United Statesand the world in the 1990s,as well
as how to resist identificationwith the object "Woman."Unlike
many white feministsin the early years of the Second Wavewho
sought to createthe resistantsubject"women,"in the ThirdWave,
this figure "women"is rarely a unitary subject.As JeeYeunLee
writes at the end of her essay,"BeyondBeanCounting":
These days, whenever someone says the word "women" to me, my mind goes
blank. What "women"? What is this "women" thing you're talking about? Does
that mean me? Does that mean my mother, my roommates, the white woman
next door, the checkout clerk at the supermarket, my aunts in Korea, half the
world's population? I ask people to specify and specify, until I can figure out
exactly what they're talking about, and I try to remember to apply the same
standards to myself, to deny myself the slightest possibility of romanticization.

Sisterhood may be global, but who is in that sisterhood? None of us can afford
to assume anything about anybody else. This thing called "feminism" takes a
great deal of hard work, and I think this is one of the primary hallmarks of
young feminists' activism today: We realize that coming together and working
together are by no means natural or easy.21
Lee, like other young feminists, has learned from the Second
Wave, from critiques made by women of color, lesbians, and poor
women, from the backlash of the 1980s, her own experiences, and
the neo-, post-, and anti-feministrhetoricsthat proliferatein the
media today.And the lesson she emphasizes is that gender is not
a mutuallyexclusive category;2a feministpoliticshas to take into
accountthe many differencesthat make up the category"women"
and to recognize that these differencesare all part of a feminist
politics.
Networking is a criticalconcept in describingthe movement,
epistemology, and geography of Third Wave feminism. Besides
incorporating Sandoval's important theorizing of oppositional
praxis, this usage also draws upon Donna Haraway'stheorizing
of cyborgfeminismand feministnetworksand on BrunoLatour's
use of this concept to describe "anew topology that makes it pos-
sible to go almost everywhere, yet without occupying anything
except narrow lines of force and a continuous hybridizationbe-
tween socialized objects and societies rendered more durable
throughthe proliferationof nonhumans."23 Networking as I con-
ceptualize it involves a a
"technologic," particularpracticeof com-
municatinginformationover space and time, a creationof tempo-
rary "unified"politicalgroups made up of unlikely combinations
and collectivities (i.e., affinity groups or even anthologies), the
combiningof diverse technologiesto constructpowerful cultural
expressions of oppositional consciousness (i.e., music, lyrics,
zines, musical instruments, videos, production technology, CD
booklets,the Internet),and the constructionof feministpolitics of
location (weaving between and among the spaces of race, class,
sexuality,gender,etc., thatwe inhabit).
"Technologics"also involves a particularway of articulating
one's awarenessof the ways informationtravelsand the ways our
cultural repertoire of discourses, objects, ideas, and modes of
resistancemerge and regroupin a culturalmilieu that is prolifera-
tively technologicallysaturatedand mediated. Not only are we
comprised of and surroundedby technologicalnetworks of the
kind Haraway and Latour describe, but the feminist praxis we

comprehend increasingly references technological rhetorics as
well. I find this to be especially true among younger folks who
have grown up in the webs of computers and the Internet.One
trace of this technologics is the rhetoricalword games used by
young women and feminists that merge identity, politics, and
technology (rememberGilbertand Kile's term "cybergrrrl"). The
term "lesbionic,"used by Jody Bleyle at Candy-Ass Records,in-
vokes for me a half-machine,half-lesbian(or perhapsa les-bi) fig-
ure-maybe a lesbian six million dollar woman-one who makes
lesbian-positive music through, from, and for her body/instru-
ment as a form of survivaland resistance.Bleyle is also a member
of an all-lesbianqueerpunkband called TeamDresch,named for
Donna Dresch, the groups' leader and inspiration.24The group
marksits various changes and transformationsby employing the
rhetoricof software companieswho mark advancementsin their
productsby using numericaldesignationssuch as 3, 3.1, 3.3. The
group has also fondly referredto itself as TeamDresch Version2
and TeamDreschVersion6.2 Beta.I would also situatewithin this
notion of technologic rhetorics my own efforts to theorize the
"wave"in "ThirdWave"as radio waves ratherthan ocean waves-
a move that my motherfinds counter-intuitivefor a water sign.25
"Oppositionaltechnologics"arethe politicalpraxisof resistance
being woven into low-tech, amateur,hybrid, alternativesubcul-
tural feminist networks that registerbelow the mainstream.The
term "oppositionaltechnologics"fuses together Haraway, San-
doval, and Latourwith my own investments in the relationship
between subjectivityformationand politicalconsciousness(in the
context of U.S. culture)and the proliferationof communications
and visual technologies. I want to argue that this "movement"
called the ThirdWave is a networkbuilt on specifictechnologics,
and RiotGrrrlis one node, or series of nodes, that markspoints of
networkingand clustering.I like the way Latourdescribesa simi-
lar notion: "Toshuttle back and forth, we rely on the notion of
translation,or network. More supple than the notion of system,
more historicalthan the notion of structure,more empiricalthan
the notion of complexity, the idea of network is the Ariadne's
threadof these interwovenstories."26
THE TECHNOLOGICS OF THIRD WAVE

CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING
RIOT: (verb) 1. to take part in a tumult or disturbance of the peace;

2. [Now Rare] a) to live in a wild, loose manner, b) to engage in un-
restrained revelry.
-Annalee Newitz, "RiotGrrrls!"available from
http: / garnet.berkeley.edu / ~annaleen/riot.online.html, Internet,
accessed March 1997
In a 1993 essay, "The Female Bodywars: Rethinking Feminist

Media Politics," Patricia Zimmerman discusses the production of
low-cost video documentariesas an emergingfeministstrategyin
reproductiverights activism that places women and camcorders
in a symbiotic relationship,one that allows the constructionof
cyborg identities.Like Sean Cubit,she argues that "theprolifera-
tion of video technologiesmultiplies the number of sites for cul-
tural struggles."27Similarly, in the production of music and zines,
the proliferation and "democratization" of music technologies
(underground and small, local recording companies), print tech-
nologies (Kinko's et al., and the increasing availability of comput-
ers to young people in school), and Intemrnet technologies (espe-
cially as more programs designed for the computer "alliterate"
web-page creator become available, and as the cost of the technol-
ogy reaches levels low enough for mass consumption), sites of
political praxis are expanded. Democraticized technologies
become a resource enabling young women to get information to
other young women, girls, and boys, a means for developing
political consciousness, and a space that can legitimate girls'
issues. Technology that is accessible to young people alters the
controlling role of adults and other authority figures in the pro-
duction of youth cultures and in the selection of political issues in
which young people become involved. Beyond its use of these
democratic technologies, the production of such hybrid texts as
zines or girl music frequently resists and critiques the commodifi-
cation of politically charged youth (sub)cultures by mass media.28
Riot Grrrl, an alternative feminist movement emerging out of
the alternative punk scene, provides one critical expression of
youth (sub)cultures. Because I live in Washington State, I tend to
associate Riot Grrrl with music cultures in Portland, Tacoma,
Olympia, and Seattle; but this movement is as much national as it
is local.29This is due in part to media coverage during the early

1990s, which exposed many more people to an emerging "new"
feminist political movement, challenging popular media insis-
tence that "feminism" was a label rejected by all young women.
But it also watered down the political content of the movement
by focusing almost exclusively on commodifying the image of
"the Riot Grrrl."However, the mainstream media has not been as
important in the formation of Riot Grrrl as a local, national, and
transnational movement as has the effective and sophisticated
networking of girls involved in consciousness raising and infor-
mation distribution. As one girl, Spirit, writes: "Our networking
through mail, the Internet, through music, through zines and
through the punk scene keeps us closely knit and strong."30In
fact, more and more of what I learn about Riot Grrrl comes from
playing on the Internet. Putting in a net search for "riot grrrl"
brings up hundreds of sites somehow linked to those two words.
In this way the Intemet serves as one place of clustering, a nodal
point, for a movement that does not appear collective or unified.31
But what is this thing "Riot Grrrl"?32 Spirit learned about Riot
Grrrlin a local entertainmentnewspaper in San Jose, California.
She says she was attracted to the movement because it seemed to
reflect her own beliefs, which she describes as "generally anar-
chistic, anti fascist, anti sexist, and anti homophobic." She came to
understand Riot Grrrl as "punk rock girls having the [same] be-
liefs [as I], creating a scene alternative to the one that they found
themselves rejected by." For Spirit, the punk scene in San Jose
"isn't very political or issue oriented," which she explains has
made her feel alienated and isolated. Riot Grrrlhelped to give her
a sense of belonging. She describes it as a powerful force for girls
and for punk music cultures:
Riot Grrrl-the idea, the movement, the non localized group, whatever-inspired
literally hundreds of girls to do zines, start bands, collectives, distributions,
have meetings etc. The uprising of riot grrrl has been the only activity in the
scene most of us have seen in years yet most of you probably don't know what
a riot grrrl is and does, why we face so much opposition or who started it.33
Spirit is especially critical of the media coverage Riot Grrrl has

received since the early 1990s, noting that, in response, many of
the most productive chapters (she names Olympia and D.C.)
went into a kind of hiding pattern in order to prevent the possi-
bility of colluding with "exploitation, misquoting, and such.""'In
her estimation, "Themainstream media-what seemed like the

best medium for communication, the best way to spread 'girl
love'-had failed us."Yetshe also recognizesthat this exposurein-
spiredmany more girls "toquestion,challenge,create,demand."35
The attentionthe Riot Grrrlmovement and its media-appoint-
ed "leaders"have received in the popular press has been fought
by those who claim to be Riot Grrrlsand those who have been
labeledwithout consentas such. They don'ttake out full-pageads
in the New YorkTimesor the SeattlePost-Intelligencer.
They respond
to media distortionsby makinguse of more grassrootstactics.For
instance,refusingto be identified as the voice of Riot Grrrl,Tobi
Vail,the drummerfor BikiniKill,uses both the liner notes accom-
panying The C.D. Versionof the First TwoRecordsand her zine
Jigsaw,to proclaim:
We are not in anyway "leaders of" or authorities on the "Riot Girl" movement.
In fact, as individuals we have each had different experiences with, feelings on,
opinions of and varying degrees of involvement with "Riot Girl" and tho we
totally respect those who still feel that label is important and meaningful to
them, we have never used that term to describe ourselves AS A BAND. As,
[sic] individuals we respect and utilize and subscribe to a variety of different
aesthetics, strategies and beliefs, both political and punk-wise, some of which
are probably considered "riotgirl."36
In anotherlocation,Mimi has a heading on her BikiniKill Home-
page called "riotgrrrlstuff"under which appears,in bold-type:
"bikinikill aren'tnecessarily associated with all aspects of riot
grrrl.As with any pseudomovement, stances vary widely from
individual to individual so please check your newsweek fed par-
anoid attitudeat the door please.'37
For me, it isn't so important whether individual Bikini Kill
members call themselves Riot Grrrls or if they reject the label.
What I am interested in is how they use the resources they have
available to them as tools for grassroots girl-positive activism.
They are actively invested in a punk and feminist cultural reper-
toire of music production, technology, performance, instruments,
and underground distribution networks. They adopt punk DIY
(Do It Yourself) philosophy to encourage women and girls to take
the initiative to create art and knowledge, to change their cultural
and political landscape, rather than waiting for someone else to
do it for them. They work with fans and friends who maintain
Intemrnet homepages and various other print technologies used to
make zines (members of the group have been involved with dif-
ferent zines, i.e., Fuck Me Blind, Jigsaw, Girl Power, Riot Grrrl).38
Bikini Kill is a band-like Bratmobile,Team Dresch, Heavens to
Betsey,Sleater-Kinney(to name just a few local examplesbased in
and aroundOlympia,Washington)-verymuch invested in issues
identified as significantby many ThirdWave feminists.A survey
of the topics covered in their songs include racism,sexism, child
abuse, domestic violence, sexuality,classism,privilege,sex indus-
tries, media spectaclization,AIDS, apathy,girl power, consumer
pacifism,rockstarelitism,and the commodificationof coolness.
Although bands like Bikini Kill frequently refuse to be Riot
Grrrl's"leaders,"and in fact generally consider it a movement that
died out in the early 1990s,KathleenHanna does claim some of
the responsibilityfor its spread. In Angry Womenin Rock,vol. 1,
she and Andrea Juno discuss Riot Grrrl as a movement that
emerged among a communityof friends in response to riotingin
D.C. afteran AfricanAmericanman was shot in the backby cops.
But she also says that it started as a lie-a consequence of her hav-
ing told a journalist from L.A. Weeklythat there were Riot Grrrl
chapters in cities across the country when there really weren't. In
one sense, this leak of false information into the media was a sub-
versive use of the mainstream press to incite a movement-or a
"riot,"as they might say. And, in fact, almost every city Hanna
mentioned in that article had a Riot Grrrl chapter within a year.
However, my interest is not to determine the movement's origins
but rather to explore its purpose: feminist consciousness raising
within punk subculture and the positive encouragement of wom-
en and girl artists and cultural producers. In her interview with
Juno, Hanna mentions the first notice she sent out through the
fanzine Riot Grrrl and distributed at performances: "Girls: let's
have a meeting about punk rock and feminism! Let's share our
skills and put on some rock shows together!"39Although she talks
about Riot Grrrl from her personal perspective, including the
ways she as an individual has been involved, she also tells a
cohort story of women (and some men) who got tired of local
punk scenes where girls were made to feel the place belonged to
the guys. Instead of retreating, they decided to re-create it as their
own-infusing it with new, girl-positive, feminist significance to
combat the scenes' apparently masculinist roots. Kathleen Hanna
was not the only woman involved in the punk scene in the early
1990s who got tired of the sexism, elitism, and violence within the
scene and within U.S. culture at large, but she did make use of
xeroxmachines,music, performancespace, and the press to voice
her discontentand speak out to otheryoung women. Such public
uses of communicationstechnologyhelped enablea movementof
sorts. This movement encouraged young women to see them-
selves as producers and creators of knowledge, as verbal and
expressive dissenters, rather than as passive consumers of U.S.
cultureor of the punk scene and youth subculturesthey helped to
define and shape.
For Spirit, who may not know people like Kathleen Hanna,
Riot Grrrlis a punk-orientedform of feminism,with all the atten-
dant stereotyping, antagonism, challenges, and fire; but she is
also carefulto point out that "riotgrrrldidn't invent punk rock
feminism.""Rather,girls and women who consider themselves,
their politics, and their issues part of their punk orientation"are
simply reclaiming our place/voice in punk rock-a voice we've
always had that's been trampled on." She concludes her essay
refusing to allow herself or her girlfriendsto be excluded from
punk rock scenes. JenniferMiro, a member of the mid-seventies'
band The Nuns, discusses just such a process of exclusion in San
Franciscoat the end of 1977:
Later it became this macho hardcore thrasherpunk scene and that was not
what it was about at first.Therewere a lot of women in the beginning.It was
women doing things. Then it became this whole macho, anti-women thing.
Thenwomen didn'tgo to see punk bands anymorebecausethey were afraidof
getting killed. I didn't even go because it was so violent and so macho that it
was repulsive.Womenjust got squeezed out.4'
An importantaspect of "reclaimingour place/voice"is the for-
mation of collectivities or groups that share common objectives
and goals. The formationof Riot Grrrl,one might say,is a "reflex-
ive impulse," a response of young women who recognize that
within punk, as well as in otherculturalsites, they are "serialized"
as women in particularways that are demeaning and inhibiting.
As Iris MarionYoung explains in "Genderas Seriality:Thinking
about Women as a Social Collective,""as a series woman is the
name of a structuralrelationto materialobjectsas they have been
produced and organizedby a priorhistory.... Gender,like class,
is a vast, multifaceted,layered, complex, and overlapping set of
structures and objects."42This Riot Grrrl movement actively con-
fronts these structures and objects by claiming them: their bodies,
music and its objects,informationtechnologies,language, anger

and violence, even punk culture.In these acts of resistanceand
subversion many young women produce critiquesthat address
their own and others'experiencesas women as well as theirexpe-
riences of race,sexuality,class, and other forms of embodiedness.
For example, Allison Wolfe, one of the women behind the zine
GirlGermswrites:
i don't believe in this idea that somehow "punx"are thee chosen ones, the
rejects of society different separate suffering artists no one will ever under-
stand "us"so tragic special special spe [sic] special. Just give me one reason
why society hasn't touched you. i think some punk distinctionscan be really
scary, an excuse to be really consuming capitalistracist rockstaristheterosex-
ist... [?]in some untouchable"alternative" format.43
WhereasMiro'sstatementabout the punk scene in 1977 marks a
moment when women receded into passivity and invisibility,if
not absence, Wolfe'scritique of punk culture in 1991, through a
medium familiar to the punk scene, suggests a moment when
women are re-emerging as prominent figures.44Not only are
women becoming prominent in punk, but feminists are also
becoming prominent. Wolfe's problematizing of "punk distinc-
tions"as supposedly exempt from the influence of "society"con-
tributesto an increasingawarenessthat subculturalsites are not
outside the grasp of socializationand social control,while it also
implies that they ought to be places where critiqueand practical
counter-possibilitiesare explored. Because writing, performing,
and public engagement are encouraged within the subcultural
scene, disseminationof such ideas is facilitatedas an aspectof the
subculture'sfunction. Appropriationof democratized technolo-
gies enables the proliferationof this function and constructsdif-
ferent,counterpublicsites of resistance.
PatriciaZimmerman'sanalysis of the interfacebetween repro-
ductive rightsactivistsand low-end video technologythat opened
this section demonstrateshow the convergence of music, print,
and informationtechnologies, young women, and feminist con-
sciousness raising multiplies the cultural spaces where political
activitiescan occur.In issue #4 of GirlGerms,one young woman,
RebeccaB., gives an accountof her experienceat "Girl'sNight"at
the InternationalPop Underground on August 20, 1991. Girl's
Night, she explains,was originallysuggested as a way to provide
an "opportunityto demarginalizethe role of girls in the conven-
tion and punk rock."ForRebeccaB., the event proved to be a rad-

icalizing moment even though, ironically, she only attended
because guys were finally allowed in, which meant her boyfriend
could go. And, she states, "whereverhe went, I followed."And
yet, Girl'sNight ended up (to paraphraseher own words) shatter-
ing her securitiesand makingher think.In a way, Rebecca'sstory
is about the interactionbetween two worlds-a "postfeminist"one
in which following a boy doesn'tseem downgradingand the one
created by Girl Night organizers, apparently modeling them-
selves after Second Wave women's music festivals. This interac-
tion becomes the point of emergencefor a third kind of "world,"
or "reality,"in Rebecca's language.45
Rebecca'saccountof Girl'sNight includes a descriptionof how
girls/women can and do use musical instruments,microphones,
stages, theirbodies and voices, and performanceas "aforum"for
"femaleexpression."By appropriating the objects, spaces, and
aesthetics of a culture generally dominated and determined by
men and male issues, Rebecca argues, a new "reality"is being
formed, a "reality"in which "stands the new girl, writing her
dreams, speaking her will, making her music, restructuringthe
very punk rockworld you reside in."46 Rebeccadescribesgirl bod-
ies filling up the stage and the consciousnessof being embodied
girls filling up a room (the barroom,concert hall, sound room,
bedroom) with sound and words and movement. Girl's Night
served as a moment of feminist consciousness formation for
Rebecca:
Girl'snight will always be precious to me because,believe it or no, it was the
first time I saw women stand on a stage as though they truly belonged there.
The first time I had ever heard the voice of a sister proudly singing the rage so
shamefullylocked in my own heart.Until girl'snight, I never knew that punk
rockwas anythingbut a phallicextensionof the white middle class male'sfrus-
trations.47
The voice at the microphone, the people and machines that put
together the text of a CD or tape, the performance event, the
women at the keyboardcreatinghomepages and filling in infor-
mation, the women at Kinko'sor at work putting together her/
their zine(s) to distributeto girlfriendsand other girls who write
for copies all representmoments of convergencebetween democ-
ratized technologies and a networked, fracturedform of Third
Wave feminist differentialconsciousness.Girls like Rebeccamay
have the opportunity to experience such moments of conscious-

ness raising in culturalsites created and institutionalizedby the
Second Wave(i.e.,women's studies classrooms,progressivebook-
stores,rape crisiscenters,or domesticviolence shelters,to name a
few). But instead, she experiences it inside a space and event she
was not taught to see as coded "hers."Her last claim should not
go underremarked. During Girl's Night, Rebecca realizes that a
space coded white, middle-class, male, and frustrated does not
innately have to reflect such narrow interests. It matters who
takes up the tools, and it matters how those tools get used.
Although such a moment of coming to consciousness is not in
itself uniquely ThirdWave,the historical,(sub)cultural,and tech-
nological specificity of the moment constitutesthis event within
the culturalgeographyof ThirdWavefeminism.
"IT'S MINE, BUT IT DOESN'T BELONG TO ME"

For these "punkrock girls,"and for other girls and women who
producezines and music that aren'tnecessarilypunk, the produc-
tion of a new movement space and its objectsis politicallypower-
ful. And, although it may not seem like the most effective space in
which to bring about social change,many of these women recog-
nize their work as extensions of, influencedby, and interconnect-
ed with other historicalsocial justice movements. The conscious
use of the word "revolution"after "RiotGrrrl"indicatesthis con-
nection.As one of my favoriteRiotGrrrls,Nomy Lamm,says:
This is the revolution. I don't understand the revolution. I can't lay it all out in
black and white and tell you what is revolutionary and what is not. The punk
scene is a revolution, but not in and of itself. Feminism is a revolution; it is soli-
darity as well as critique and confrontation. This is the fat grrrl revolution. It's
mine, but it doesn't belong to me. Fuckin' yeah."
Thereis no finalityin this ending. The "Fuckin'yeah"is more like
a pause afterwhich Lammor anyone else can take up the threads
of thought and keep the conversation moving and weaving.
Revolutionhere is change, radicalintervention,rearticulatingthe
interrelationsof punk, feminism, fat consciousness, class, race,
and ability as they meet on the body and in the voice of Nomy
Lamm.49Even her language expressesthe complexity:just as race
is not as simple as the binary "blackand white,""therevolution"
cannot be described in either/or oppositional statements. It is
about who and how one fills in the spaces; it is about how a girl
can make her feminism punk and her punk feminist; and how, for
Lamm, all of this has to be articulated around fat, media represen-
tations of the female body, and self/girl-love.
Lamm's proclamation: "It'smine, but it doesn't belong to me,"
like RebeccaWalker'sstatement, "I'mnot a postfeminism femi-
nist. I am the Third Wave,"50claims the right to name and con-
struct her consciousness without becoming the sole owner of
what counts as feminism or feminist consciousness. They call out
their issues, locate themselves, make feminism work for them,
and conclude by opening up the conversation to others, taking
what they need and passing it on. Walker'srejectionof postfemi-
nism and Lamm's embrace of a polymorphous feminism connects
these two women not only historically and generationally, but
also in their insistence that feminism provides a context and lan-
guage from/with which they can articulate their issues. This is a
consequence of the post-civil rights recognition of difference as a
positive thing and represents another (postmodern) distinction
between the Second and Third Waves.
The refusal to claim ownership of feminism allows these Third
Wavers to maintain a sense of their own and other feminist-iden-
tified individuals' tactical subjectivity. When we understand that
feminism is not about fitting into a mold but about expanding our
ability to be revolutionary from within the worlds and communi-
ties and scenes we move around and through, then collective
action becomes possible across the differences that affect people
differently. This is not an argument for making feminism so
expansive as to include absolutely anyone on the basis that she is
a woman (something that seems quite popular in our culture); it
is, instead, an attempt to point out how feminism enables revolu-
tionary forms of consciousness when it is understood as ideolo-
gy-praxis that strategically invokes the experiences of women
across different locales and identities.
When Christine Doza attempts to theorize her place within
structures of social inequality, she employs a metaphor of "con-
necting the dots": "Iam learning to connect the dots. One dot for
woman-hate, one for racism, one for classism, one for telling me
who I can fuck. When I connect all the dots, it's a picture of privi-
lege and the way it's disguised behind pretty white smiles."
Doza's metaphor enables her to see that "there'sa system of abuse
here" and that "Ineed to know what part I'm playing in it."51
Similarly,Kathleen Hanna's useful complication of male privi-
lege-"The fact that he grew up in a working class family has
everythingto do with how he is gonna expresssexism, what kind
of music he is gonna like, how i am going to treat him"52-forces
her readers to think beyond the one-dimensional identity of gen-
der. In many ways, Doza's dots parallel Hanna's notion of a jig-
saw puzzle, an image that travels throughout her music and writ-
ing. According to Hanna, "you have to be able to see the puzzle
before you start putting it together,"implying that one must learn
about the culture one lives in-to become conscious of systems of
domination and means of empowerment-to begin to be able to
see how we each differently are affected by and affect a systemati-
cally oppressive social structure. This suggests that we need to
understand the context of our individual lives as well as those of
others, the ways our lives are shaped and constrained by cultural
institutions. We need to understand the interconnections between
our individual and group lives and institutions and to under-
stand historical connections.
Although this task is painful and daunting (who really wants
to have to deal with the ramifications of being both oppressor and
oppressed?), the move toward this level of consciousness raising
among some Riot Grrrls is worth further study. Just as Lamm
challenges the idea that feminism is a subject/object/label owned
by specific people/groups, Doza and Hanna challenge us to see
that we are in and of "the system of abuse" and that we have com-
plicated relationships to oppressor/power and oppressed/power-
lessness. For young, mostly white and middle-class, women in
the United States who turn to Riot Grrrl-even now when so many
of its founders view it as "so '92"-tolearn that being a feminist
involves thinking about oneself as both oppressed and as oppres-
sor is revolutionary. In the wake of the successes of the 1960s and
1970s, girls/young women in the United States today already
know they are at a disadvantage. But rather than claim a position
of total victimhood, isn't it more expedient to try to understand
how the slipperiness of sexism, racism, classism, and other modes
of domination are interwoven into the various and sundry privi-
leges they are aware they have?
CONCLUSION
I haven'tspoken much about the Internetin this essay, although,
as I hope the sources I have used indicate,its presencehas been
significant.For those who have access to it, the language of the
Internet and the metaphorical geographies employed to describe
it make possible technologicrhetoricsof the type of networking
Third Wave feminists engage in. In Surfergrrrls:Look Ethel! An
Internet Guide for Us! Laurel Gilbert and Crystal Kile include
schematic lists of the most common Internet memes and meta-
phors-the information superhighway, consensual hallucination or
cyberspace, the electronic frontier, encyclopedia Galactica, the
Net, the World Wide Web (all masculinist, imperialist, capitalist,
and fictional)-to show how "cybergrrrls"negotiate the ideologi-
cal, political, commercial, and rhetorical terrains of the Internet in
different, girl-positive ways. One strategic appropriation they
note is the way "many women on the Net have seized on the
'web' and 'webweaver' memes, finding their traditional associa-
tions with so-called feminine values of holism and continuity to
be both personally and politically empowering." Like a "URL"
that gives the "site/path/file" directions to a particular website,
Gilbert and Kile's guide is a "site/path/file" that links writing,
publishing, computer, linguistic, narrative, and historiographic
technologies in order to "think about our online selves, the gen-
dering of technology and our common cyberfuture."53These link-
ings constitute a "technologics," a means for networking across
cultural-technological spaces-a mobility necessary for the forma-
tion and survival of Third Wave feminism.
Technology is a major discursive repertoire in the cultural geog-
raphy of Third Wave feminism; "democratized technologies" have
played a significant role in the feminist political consciousness of
many young women today. This is not to say that technology has
only now become an important tool for feminists-there are
numerous examples of feminist uses of technology in the First
and Second Waves, uses that have clear connections to some of
the technologies used in the Third Wave-but the intimacy and
immediacy of our relationships with much of today's technology,
especially communications technologies, does have a distinct
impact on our consciousness. The ability to record one's music, to
type, print, format, and copy one's zine, to make one's video doc-
umentaries on a camcorder, to design and post one's website,
without having to go through corporate,mainstream,commer-

cial, official-andeven adult-channels,makes a difference.Access
to "democratizedtechnologies"can enable a shift in the locus of
political activism,as well as a change in who can produce politi-
cized cultural-technological objects. This responds to a need
PatriciaZimmermannotes at the end of "TheFemaleBody Wars":
The days when politicalactivityfocused solely on the streets,aiming to change
the world and make it a better place are gone, looking more and more like a
painted Volkswagonbus without an engine..... Activistpolitics needs a differ-
ent kind of vehicle, one with more power and ability to maneuverover multi-
ple terrains-real,discursive,and representational.We must recapturepleasure
and desire in our consumptionof media images just as we must see we need
new technologies like camcorders.Picket signs alone are not enough, as they
will be cast within residual modes and rendered ineffective and
impotent-quaint signposts from another era demanding a different kind of
intervention.M
Young feminists today, as well as older feminists and other
social justice activists (advocates),recognizethat politicalactivity
is always being subverted by the media-just as painted Volks-
wagon buses have come to represent some nostalgic sign of
authenticity for neo-hippies, however devoid of antiwar and
counterculturepolitics. Our historical moment (post-1960s,bor-
dering the twenty-firstcentury,late capitalist)precipitatespartic-
ular kinds of political, cultural, aesthetic, and ideological con-
sciousness; and like Zimmerman, I believe we need to look to
other culturaland subculturalspaces for signs of activistpolitics.
As Angela McRobbiehas noted: "Subculturesare aestheticmove-
ments whose raw materials are by definition, 'popular,'in that
they are drawn from the world of the popularmass media."55 Like
the majorrecordinglabels who "plunder"music subculturesand
"indies"(independentbands and labels) for "talentand trends,"56
subcultures"plunder"mainstreammedia, but their purposes are
different:one is geared to profit marginsand sustainingmarkets;
the other to finding constructivemeaning in a time of crisis and
uncertainty.At a time when the mainstreammass media scripts
politics as bumper stickers,soundbites, and tabloid sensational-
ism, it seems especially important to look for and foster (sub)cul-
tural spaces that insist on political content and intent in members'
activities and in the objects they create. These include the tactical
subjectivities employed to counter and subvert the depoliticized
politics of conspicuous consumption. Although youth (sub)cul-
tures like punk and Riot Grrrl are often represented by the media
as a trend (and a passing one at that),I insist that we make a mis-

take when we disregard apparently "aesthetic"movements as
nonpolitical. The working-class connections to punk culture in
Englandand the white working-class/urban-middle-class/subur-
ban associationsof much punk culture in the United States (in-
cluding Riot Grrrl)attests to the significance of the political in
these (sub)culturalaestheticmovements.
In the Third Wave, feminist collective consciousness may not
necessarilymanifestitself in a nationalizedand highly mobilized
social movement unified around a single goal or identity.At the
moment, this hardly seems imaginable. Perhaps occasionally
groups will come togetherto accomplisha specificpurpose-such
as the protectionof reproductiverights for all women and men;
protestingenvironmentalinjusticesin poor and raciallysegregat-
ed communitiesand ThirdWorldcountries;combatinganti-immi-
grationand racistxenophobicmovements;or endorsingthe right
of all people, regardless of sexuality, to love whom they want,
how they want, and to have their rights to do so legally recog-
nized-but I think it is also importantto look at ThirdWavefemi-
nist activistpoliticsin spaces that cross over and between what is
called the "mainstream" or what is recognizedas "asocial move-
ment."We need to consider the potent political movement cul-
turesbeing generatedby feminists(like the young women I write
about) who are producingknowledge for each other throughthe
innovative integrationof technology,alternativemedia, (sub)cul-
tural and/or feminist networks, and feminist consciousnessrais-
ing. Such dispersed movement culturespaces are vital, as are the
networksconstantlybeing formedand reformedamong them.
NOTES
This article is a winner of the Feminist Studies Award for the best essay submitted by a
graduate student in 1998.
This essay has benefited over several years (and in several forms) from careful readings
by wonderful friends, colleagues, and teachers, especially No6l Sturgeon, Marian
Sciachitano, Carol Siegal, Chris Oakley, and Kendal Broad. At the University of
California, Santa Barbara, Jacqueline Bobo, Shirley Lim, and Chela Sandoval each
responded to an earlier version of the essay in ways that have been encouraging and
inspiring. Anonymous readers at Feminist Studies gave excellent feedback and construc-
tive criticismthat helped me through the revising process,but which I have also been
able to apply to my dissertationmore widely.
1. Formore on this significantdisctinctionbetween generationas age and generationas

"thehaving-done-this-ness," see E. Ann Kaplan'sintroductoryessay, "Feminism,Aging,
and ChangingParadigms,"in Generations: AcademicFeministsin Dialogue,ed. Devoney
Looserand E. Ann Kaplan(Minneapolis:Universityof MinnesotaPress,1997),13-29.
2. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: TheMeaningof Style(London:Methuen,1979);and Angela
McRobbie,Feminismand YouthCulture:From"Jackie" to "JustSeventeen"(Houndsmill
and London:MacmillanEducation,1991).
3. I include the caution that the name "ThirdWave feminism"may be more about
desire than a reflectionof an already existing thing. Recent publicationsdedicated to
Third Wave or "youth"feminism include Leslie Heywood and JenniferDrake, eds.,
Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism (Minneapolis: University of
MinnesotaPress, 1997);"ThirdWave Feminism,"Special Issue of Hypatia12 (summer
1997);and "Feminismand YouthCulture,"SpecialIssue of Signs23 (spring1998).
4. See FredricJameson,Postmodernism, or, TheCulturalLogicof LateCapitalism(Durham:
Duke University Press, 1991). One of the origins of this essay is a conversationI had
with some colleagues afterreadingJeanBaudrillard'sSelectedWritings(Stanford,Calif.:
StanfordUniversityPress, 1988).We had an especiallyfraughtdiscussionover his argu-
ment about the powerlessness of the consumer in the "ageof consumption."I find it
very seductive to buy into the idea that the consumerhas no agency in the late twen-
tieth century,but I resistthis conclusionbecauseit leaves no room for counter-hegemon-
ic relations of consumption.This essay focuses particularlyon the ways subcultures/
scenes engage with consumersociety throughthe symbol and formof consumptionthat
dominatesour historicalmoment:technology,and especiallycommunicationstechnolo-
gies.
5. In WhiteWomen,RaceMatters:The Social Constructionof Whiteness(Minneapolis:
University of MinneapolisPress, 1993),Ruth Frankenberguses "discursiverepertoire"
to describethe combinationsof discursivetools the women in her study used to maneu-
ver through narrativesof race (16). See also JamesClifford,ThePredicament of Culture:
Twentieth-Century Ethnography,Literature,and Art (Cambridge:Harvard University
Press,1988),23.
6. Ann Swidler, "Culturein Action: Symbols and Strategies,"AmericanSociological
Review51 (April1986):273.
7. See EdnieKaehGarrison,"TheThirdWave and the CulturalPredicamentof Feminist
Consciousnessin the United States"(Ph.D.diss., WashingtonStateUniversity,2000).
8. Donna Haraway,"ACyborgManifesto:Science,Technology,and SocialistFeminism
in the Late TwentiethCentury,"in her Simians,Cyborgs,and Women:TheReinventionof
Nature(New York:Routledge,1991),180,181.
9. This naming makes chronologicaland metaphoricalsense because it self-consciously
draws upon the languageof women'smovementactivists,historians,and theorists.This
feminism is "Third"to the "First"and "Second"which precededit, and it shareswith its
predecessors an understanding of social movement activity as "waves"-collectivities
and actions that rise and fall over time, measured most often by degrees of mobiliza-
tion. The First,Second, and ThirdWaves representmoments of increased,coordinated,
and intentional feminist activity. "Wave"is a metaphor often employed to describe
highly visible and organized social movement formations. This is especially true of
women's movement formations.The language and image is so pervasive as to be taken
for granted,so "ThirdWave"is only one recentexample.
10. The same erasurehas often been done in Second Wave constructionsof "First"and
"Second,"ignoring feminist activity and cohortsbetween 1920 and the 1960s.It is only
in the past fifteen years that the period between the first two "waves"has become the
subjectof scholarly interventions.See BarbaraRyan, Feminismand the Women'sMove-

ment:Dynamicsof Changein SocialMovementIdeologyand Activism(New York:Rout-
ledge, 1992);LeilaRupp and VertaTaylor,Survivalin theDoldrums:TheAmericanWom-
en's RightsMovement,1945 to the1960s(New York:OxfordUniversityPress, 1987);and
Nancy Cott, TheGroundingof ModernFeminism(New Haven: Yale University Press,
1987).
11. MarianSciachitanohas suggested to me that feminist women of color are the first
ThirdWavers,and that the cohortI am writing about actuallymay be a "FourthWave."
Her ideas add anotherdimension to the narrativesthat constructthe ThirdWave'sori-
gins as the widespreadresponseto Anita Hill'ssexualharassmentcase againstClarence
Thomas,as well as complicatingthe assumptionsthat "ThirdWavers"are of a particular
generation. For a fascinating example of this tendency, see Catherine Stimpson's
"Women'sStudiesand Its Discontents,"Dissent43 (winter1996):67-75.
12. Chela Sandoval, "U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of
OppositionalConsciousnessin the Postmodemrn World,"Genders10 (spring1991):1-24.
13. KathleenHanna,"JigsawYouth,"Jigsawfanzine (Olympia,Washington),no. 4 (spring
1991). Available from http://www.columbia.edu/ -rli3/music_html/bikinikill/jig-
saw.html,Intemrnet, accessedFebruary1995.See also the liner notes from BikiniKill, The
CD Versionof theFirstTwoRecords,1994(KillRockStars,129 N.E. StateAvenue, no. 418,
Olympia,WA 98501).
14. RebeccaWalker,"Becomingthe Third Wave,"in Ms. (January/February 1992);re-
printed in Testimony:YoungAfricanAmericanson Self-Discovery and BlackIdentity,ed.
NatashaTarpley(Boston:BeaconPress,1995),215-18.
15. Sandoval,"U.S.ThirdWorldFeminism,"4. I realize that my use of Sandoval'scon-
cept of differentialconsciousness in this essay may have some problematicaspects;I
risk being accused of appropriating-inappropriately-atheory about the practices of
U.S. ThirdWorld feminists for Riot Grrrl,which is composed largely of white middle-
class women. I am encouragedby the fact that in "U.S.Third World Feminism,"San-
doval herselfwrites that "therecognitionof differentialconsciousnessis vital to the gen-
eration of a next 'thirdwave' women's movement and provides grounds for alliance
with other decolonizing movements for emancipation"(4). My purpose here is to
explore the possibilities of linking the praxis of U.S. Third World feminism with "the
aims of white feminism,studies of race,ethnicity,and marginality,and with postmod-
em theoriesof culture"that Sandovalsuggests in the passage with which I opened this
section. This includes, for me, acknowledgingthat the theorizingof feminists of color
(which I am not), poor women (which I have been for most of my life), and lesbians
(which I am) can be partof my feministtool kit as well.
16. On affinity politics, see Iris Marion Young, Justiceand the Politics of Difference
(Princeton:PrincetonUniversity Press, 1990);and Noi1 Sturgeon, "TheorizingMove-
ments: Direct Action and Direct Theory,"in CulturalPoliticsand SocialMovements,ed.
MarcyDamrnovsky, BarbaraEpstein,and RichardFlacks(Philadelphia:Temple Univer-
sity Press,1995),35-51.
17. Sandoval,"U.S.ThirdWorldFeminism,"15.
18. On strategic essentialism, see Gayatri Spivak, ThePostcolonialCritic:Interviews,
Strategies,Dialogues,ed. SarahHarasym(New York:Routledge,1990);Donna Haraway,
"SituatedKnowledges:The 'ScienceQuestion'in Feminismand the Privilege of Partial
Perspective,"in her Simians,Cyborgs,and Women,183-202;Teresade Lauretis,"Upping
the Anti (sic) in Feminist Theory,"in Conflictsin Feminism,ed. MarianneHirsch and
EvelynFox Keller(New York:Routledge,1990),254-70;ChelaSandoval,"NewSciences:
Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed,"in CyborgHandbook,ed.
ChrisHablesGraywith Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera and StevenMentor(New York:Rout-
ledge, 1995),407-21;Noel Sturgeon,Ecofeminist Natures:Race,Gender,PoliticalAction,and
FeministTheory(New York:Routledge, 1997);T.V. Reed, FifteenJuggles,Five Believers:
LiteraryPoliticsand the Poeticsof AmericanSocialMovements(Berkeley:University of

California Press, 1990).
19. Sandoval, "U.S. Third World Feminism," 22, 17.
20. Neither is this limited to "feminism" in the narrow sense of being about "women."
Some of the recent publications I've read with great excitement include Robin Bernstein
and Seth ClarkSilbermann,eds., Generation Q:Gays,Lesbians,andBisexualsBornaround
1969's StonewallRiots Tell TheirStoriesof GrowingUp in the Age of MissingInformation
(Los Angeles: Alyson Publications, 1996); Veronica Chambers, Mama's Girl (New York:
Riverhead Books, 1996); Tarpley; Arlene Stein, ed., Sisters, Sexperts, Queers: Beyond the
LesbianNation (New York: Plume, 1993); Gish Jen, Mona in the PromisedLand (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1996); Nan Bauer Maglin and Donna Perry, eds., "Bad Girls"/"Good
Girls": Women, Sex, and Power in the Nineties (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University
Press, 1996). Most of the writers in these texts focus on the post-1960s' decades from the
perspectives of those too young to have personal recollections of it. Although the 1960s
is an important marker for all of us in the United States, "our" ("us young people")
memories of those times are not literally our own.
21. JeeYeun Lee, "Beyond Bean Counting," in Listen Up, 205-11.
22. I am using the words "mutually exclusive" to link this notion of gender as an identi-
ty, experience, condition of embodiedness separate from other identities, experiences, or
conditions of embodiedness like race, class, sexuality, not/able-bodied, etc.) to Chela
Sandoval's discussion of the production of histories of "hegemonic feminism" which
have made different forms of feminism "mutually exclusive" and therefore maneuver-
ability between feminisms impossible and/or invisible practices. See her "U.S. Third
World Feminism," 3-10.
23. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1993), 120. See Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto," 149-82;
Donna Haraway, "The Promise of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappro-
priate/d Others," in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula
A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 295-337; "Situated Knowledges," 183-202; and
Sandoval, "U.S. Third World Feminism," 1-24.
24. In fact, Candy-Ass Records is currently being managed by Donna Dresch under her
own company, Chainsaw Records, in Olympia, Washington.
25. Ednie Kaeh Garrison, "Are We on a Wavelength Yet? On Feminist Oceanography,
Radios, and Third Wave Feminism," Women's Center Dissertation Fellows Colloquium,
University of California, Santa Barbara, 21 Apr. 1999.
26. Latour, 3.
27. Patricia Zimmerman, "The Female Bodywars: Rethinking Feminist Media Politics,"
Socialist Review 23, no. 2 (1993): 35-56. See also Sean Cubitt, Timeshift:On Video Culture
(London: Routledge, 1991).
28. There are literally thousands upon thousands of girl-centered zines, some still in
production, some no longer circulating. Some of the names of the zines I have collected
are BambooGirl,FeministCarpetCleaner,Bitch:FeministResponseto PopularCulture,I Scare
Myself,My Evil TwinSister,Fat Girl,Fat?So!,I'm So FuckingBeautiful,RevolutionRising,
MeatHook,HousewifeTurnedAssassin,Bust,Chestlick,NightmareGirl,Pokerface, Hysteria
ActionForum,HerPosse,Chainsaw,GirlieJones,andMysteryDate.As well, S. BrynAustin
and Pam Gregg write about a variety of queer zines in their essay "A Freak among
Freaks: The 'Zine Scene," in Sisters, Sexperts, Queers (81-95), and a number of zine mak-
ers have scored book contracts for their zines, including Pagan Kennedy's zine Pagan's
Head which is now a "novel" called "Zine: How I Spent Six Years of My Life in the
Undergroundand Finally... FoundMyself... I Think(New York:St. Martin'sGriffin,
1995);and Marilyn Wann's, Fat!So?BecauseYouDon't Have to Apologizefor YourSize
(Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1999). Besides distribution networks that circulate zines
locally, nationally, and transnationally, there are a number of stores across the country
that specialize in alternativeand small press publications.Three of my majorsources

are in Portland,Oregon:Ozone Records,Powell's Bookstore,and Reading Frenzy:An
AlternativePress Emporium(all within a block of one another).The largestpublication
that reviews zines is FactSheetFive:TheBigFatGuideto theZineRevolution, publishedby
R. Seth Freidman(P.O. Box 170099,San Francisco,CA 94117-0099),which covers the
gamut fromsciencefictionto thriftshopping to s/m to comix to queerto politicsto food
to "grrrlz."
29. Riot Grrrlhas also traveled across the Atlantic at least to GreatBritain.The most
notoriousgroup of grrrlsinvolved in Englandare the membersof Huggy Bear(Niki, Jo,
Chris,John,and Karen-threewomen and two men) who Amy Raphaelcalls "DIYrevo-
lutionaries,full-on feminists, art terrorists."See Amy Raphael,Grrrls:VivaRockDivas
(New York:St. Martin'sGriffin,1996), 148. ("DIY"stands for "do it yourself"and is a
centralphilosophyamong punk aestheticists.)
30. Spirit,"WhatIs a Riot GrrrlAnyway?"availablefrom http://www.columbia.edu/
~rli3/ music_html/bikini_kill/ girl.html,Internet,accessed6 Jan.,1995.
31. Chantal Mouffe coined the term, "Nodal Point."See Mouffe's The Returnof the
Political(London:Verso,1993),8.
32. In Hillary Carlip's Girl Power:YoungWomenSpeakOut! PersonalWritingsfrom
TeenageGirls(New York:Warner,1995),the authorincludes a chapter,"RiotGrrrls,"in
which she combinesthe writings of young women with a descriptivenarrativeof what
RiotGrrrlsare about (31-64).
33. I avoid "correcting," altering,or changingthe grammarin any of the excerptsfrom
zines or Internetpages, unless the text interfereswith the ability to comprehendthe
intendedmeanings.
34. Some of the articlesSpiritand other Riot Grrrlshave been reactingto and resisting
include Farai Chideya, Melissa Rossi, and Dogen Hannah, "Revolution-GirlStyle,"
Newsweek,23 Nov. 1992,84-86;"RiotGrrrls,"RollingStone,8 July 1993,23;Nina Malkin,
"It'sa GrrrlThing,"Seventeen52 (May 1993):80-82;anotherpossible inclusion that isn't
simply about "RiotGrrrl"is Louise Bernikow, "TheNew Activists: Fearless, Funny,
FightingMad,"Cosmopolitan 214 (April1993):162-65,212.
35. This is one example of what I mean when I critiqueBaudrillard'scritiqueof con-
sumer society (see note 4). Whereashe sees only "fashion,trend,fad,"I want to continue
to allow for the possibilityof challengingand questioning,that is leaving open the pos-
sibilityof a politics of style, or style as politics.This is not a naive, utopiandenial-I real-
ize the "trend"has cultural dominance-but the radicalizing possibilities still exist.
Perhapsthe "RiotGrrrl"who standsmost visibly on the borderbetween fad and politics
is CourtneyLove. The more recentmusical phenomenonfrom GreatBritain,the Spice
Girls, who sell themselves as advocates of "girlpower,"are more troublingfor me as
they seem to completelyfit into the kind of world Baudrillarddescribes.
36. BikiniKill, TheCD Versionof theFirstTwoRecords(1992),linernotes.
37. Mimi, "TheBikini Kill Homepage,"available from http://www.columbia.edu/
~rli3/music_html/bikini_kill/bikini.html,Internet,accessed 6 Jan. 1995. Notice that
Riot Grrrlis a "pseudomovement" here. I imagine that the term could referto a number
of things:the way the media has emptied it of its "revolutionary" and politicalcontent;
the fact that Riot Grrrldoesn't fit the characteristicof what gets called a "socialmove-
ment"in the sociologicalsense; or perhapsthat because it is viewed as a "subcultural"
phenomenonit is not considereda full-blownsocial movement.I suspect that for some,
"pseudomovement" is preferableto "movement"for the simple reason that it can resist
some of the problems"movements"experience,in terms of hierarchicalleadershipand
organizationalstructures,the impulse to unify around a single issue or ideology, and
the seductionof institutionalization.
38. One strategymany women and girls in the punk and indie scenes have devised is
the creationof their own recordingcompaniesas vehicles for producingthe music they
want to hear. Some of these companiesinclude Kill RockStarsand K Records,both in

Olympia, Washington;Chainsaw and Candy-Ass Records, both in Portland,Oregon
(recentlymoved to Olympia);and ThrillJockeyRecords,Chicago.Like many of these
labels, Outpunk,a queer punk zine and distributionnetwork run out of Matt Woben-
smith's apartmentin San Francisco,distributes zines, books, and other hard-to-find
undergroundprint media, besides putting out CDs, tapes, and 7-inchrecordsby queer-
punk bands in the United Statesand England.
39. KathleenHanna, interview with AndreaJuno,"KathleenHanna:BikiniKill,"Angry
Womenin Rock,vol. 1 (New York:JunoBooks,1996),100,98.
40. Some of the better-knownrole models often listed include JoanJett,PattiSmith,the
Runaways,the Go Gos, the Au Pairs,and Cyndi Lauper.
41. JenniferMiro,quoted in Spirit.
42. Iris Marion Young, "Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social
Collective,"Signs 19 (spring 1994):736, 728. Young'suse of the series is drawn from a
conceptof "seriality" developed by Jean-PaulSartreas a specifickind of social collectivi-
ty distinguishablefromwhat he calls "groups."However, Young also makes it clearthat
she "raids"Sartrefor her own ends, "takingand rearticulatingfor my own purposes the
conceptsI thinkwill help resolve the dilemmaI have posed. In doing so I need not drag
all of Sartrewith me, and I may be 'disloyal'to him"(723).Ironically,this strategyalso
helps Young avoid being Sartrein drag.
43. The other woman behind Girl Germsis Molly Neuman, who, with Allison Wolfe,
was in the band Bratmobile.See Allison Wolfe and Molly Neuman, Girl Germs,no. 4
(1991):25-26.
44. In their 1978 essay, "Girlsand Subcultures,"Angela McRobbieand Jenny Garber
raise questionsaboutthe lack of researchon girls in subculturesin England,wondering,
specifically, if this is a consequence of the invisibility of girls in those subcultures.
McRobbieespecially challenges this perception. See McRobbie,Feminismand Youth
Culture.
45. RebeccaB., "Girl:because you know we'll rock and sock it to ya,"GirlGerms,no. 4
(1991):21-22. Thanksto Carol Siegel for pointing out the way in which two different
worlds "arein contact"in this story. Her suggestions about the modeling of Girl'sNight
afterSecondWave women's music festivalsis even more potent consideringthe notori-
ous problems girl-positivebands (whether or not they are identified with Riot Grrrl)
have had with protests by boys when their performancesare advertised as women-
only. Many Riot Grrrl-sponsoredevents have had to put up with such dissension-even
at Riot GrrrlConventionswhere Second Wave models of the c-r group have been imi-
tated. At the Riot GrrrlConventionin Los Angeles in 1995 at least one boy protested
when "Freeto Fight"held grrrl-onlyself-defenseworkshops. For example, see Tamra,
"riotgrrrl convention, los angeles, summer 1995,"available from http:/ /ernie.bgsu.
edu/~-ckile/rg95.html, Internet,accessedFebruary1996.This is complicatedeven more
by the experiencesof the lesbianhard-core/punkband Tribe8 at the MichiganWomen's
Music Festival. See Evelyn McDonnell, "QueerPunk Meets Womyn's Music,"Ms. 5
(November1994):78-82;and KarlaMantilla,"Tribe8: Bridgingthe Generations?" offour
backs26 (October1996):19.
46. RebeccaB., 22. Angela McRobbiehas alreadysuggested that there are some potent
affinities between punk style and feminist style in her 1978 essay, "SettlingAccounts
with Subcultures:A FeministCritique,"in Feminismand YouthCulture,16-34.Rebecca's
commentsabout the impact playing musical instrumentsand performingin public can
have on girls (as performersand as audience) and its subsequentimpact on punk cul-
ture supports McRobbie'sassertion that subcultures are symbiotically connected to
political movements like feminism and the New Left (the two she names). This also
goes a long way in arguingfor a "politicsof style,"an understandingof "style"as a form
of politics-as overt politicalexpression.
47. RebeccaB., 22.

48. Nomy Lamm,"It'sa Big FatRevolution,"in ListenUp,94.
49. Nomy Lammwas chosen as one of Ms.'swomen of the year for 1996.See Anastasia
Higginbotham, "Nomy Lamm,"Ms. 7 (January/February1997):61-63. Lamm'spiece
which appearedin Ms. in 1996 was precededby letters on the way fat oppressionhas
not been dealt with by the magazine and then followed by letters of enthusiasm for
Ms.'s inclusion of Lamm's piece. See Nomy Lamm, "FatIs Your Problem,"Ms. 6
(March/April1996):96.
50. Walker,218.
51. ChristineDoza, "Bloodlove," in ListenUp,251, 253.
52. Hanna.
53. Gilbert and Kile (152) use "meme"as defined by RichardDawkins in TheSelfish
Gene.See LaurelGilbertand CrystalKile, Surfergrrrrls: LookEthel!An InternetGuidefor
Us! (Seattle:Seal Press,1996),154,6.
54. Zimmerman,52.
55. McRobbie,FeminismandYouthCulture,xv.
56. See JoanneGottleiband Gayle Wald, "SmellsLike Teen Spirit:Riot Grrrls,Revolu-
tion, and Womenin IndependentRock,"CriticalMatrix7, no. 2 (1993):11-44,esp. 13.

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U.S. Feminism-Grrrl Style!

Youth (Sub)Cultures and the Technologics of the Third Wave

EDNIE KAEH GARRISON

"Grrrl," a word coined by BikiniKill singer and activistKathleen

ideological,and discursivelandscapesthat constitutethe context,

to presuppositions that young (usually white) U.S. girls and

from which this article is drawn attempts to examine, theorize,

A NOTE ON THE PRESUMPTION THAT 'THIRD WAVE"

ficity and generationalspecificity.The "third"is the mark of his-

or less significant than gender. She names a particular constituen-

POSTMODERNITY, OPPOSITIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS,

Images of weaving or threading together apparently disparate

strengthto confidentlycommit to a well-defined structureof identity for one

women's studies, or the media backlash, or violence. Perhaps it is

standards to myself, to deny myself the slightest possibility of romanticization.

kind Haraway and Latour describe, but the feminist praxis we

THE TECHNOLOGICS OF THIRD WAVE

RIOT: (verb) 1. to take part in a tumult or disturbance of the peace;

In a 1993 essay, "The Female Bodywars: Rethinking Feminist

is local.29This is due in part to media coverage during the early

Spirit is especially critical of the media coverage Riot Grrrl has

her estimation, "Themainstream media-what seemed like the

music and its objects,informationtechnologies,language, anger

tion and punk rock."ForRebeccaB., the event proved to be a rad-

have the opportunity to experience such moments of conscious-

"IT'S MINE, BUT IT DOESN'T BELONG TO ME"

without having to go through corporate,mainstream,commer-

as a trend (and a passing one at that),I insist that we make a mis-

1. Formore on this significantdisctinctionbetween generationas age and generationas

subjectof scholarly interventions.See BarbaraRyan, Feminismand the Women'sMove-

LiteraryPoliticsand the Poeticsof AmericanSocialMovements(Berkeley:University of

that specialize in alternativeand small press publications.Three of my majorsources

want to hear. Some of these companiesinclude Kill RockStarsand K Records,both in

47. RebeccaB., 22.

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