What Goes Here

short-form workbench

Guest post #1: Christine Doza

God, we were young.

At 35, it’s hard to believe I was ever that young. Riot Grrrl was entirely captivating. I can’t remember how it came to my consciousness. It was just there. Probably a Bikini Kill EP.  

I was so shy, almost unbearably so. When I talk about those days I sum it up by saying “I had a lot of problems back then.” As you convey in the book so well, Sara, and what we all had in common was utter rage, resentment, alienation from school, our families – feeling the dominant culture totally had it in for us. My family life was a dysfunctional, sometimes violent and always unstable mess. I felt vulnerable all the time.

And I was angry. Not long after the Bikini Kill discovery, I started my own fanzine, Upslut, and gave it away to all the girls I knew. In the last edition I published before graduating high school, I outed one of our teachers who was a known sexual harasser. It was this big joke around school, but the girls in my class weren’t laughing. He took me, alone, into a book room and demanded I rescind the allegations, but I had seen worse than him and wasn’t afraid. I had other girls to protect. He was fired the following year.

Sometime later – that summer, maybe – I organized a Riot Grrrl show in Nashville. I moved to New York for college, met other riot grrrls, continued writing and listening to “girl bands” – of which there were ever more. That some people considered Riot Grrrl to be “over” barely mattered. It shaped my world, politicized me, delivered me into a culture of like-minded souls. It was absolutely transformative. It could never be “over” because feminism will never be “over”; demanding human, civil, and equal rights will never be “over.” In some ways, my story – and the story of many girls not living in Olympia or DC – starts near the end of your book. The original riot grrrls lit a match. Their flame may have guttered; the blaze spread.

We were so young. We brought to our fanzines and communities not only our idealism and anger, but our adolescent insecurities. During many places in your book, I winced as I remembered events or saw my own actions reflected in the book: blaming, in-fighting, feeling not-radical-enough or not-cool-enough or not-whatever-enough. Hero(ine) worship. Confrontation and constant political shit-calling. We did our best, but we were kids. Knowing something is an illusion or a construct – like hierarchy – does not automatically exempt you from it.

Years later, in my mid-twenties, I formed a pop band with two friends called W.I.T. It stood for “Whatever It Takes,” as a tongue-in-cheek jab at the kind of judgments hurled at successful female entertainers. We played theatre with expressions of mainstream femininity – and fashion. It was fun, though probably didn’t appear immediately “feminist” to our audience. But we were all feminists. Riot Grrrl played with forms of expression and gender identity, and as you say, with multiplicity. Really, it gave me a lens through which to look at gender roles critically, and I still do – as a performer, a teacher, a writer, a lover. Reading the book I felt absolutely proud to have been part of the movement, and lucky to have been there at just the right time.

  1. 4ever-hiemal reblogged this from saramarcus
  2. saramarcus posted this