Weekly Quote: Remembering Riot Girl

I cannot get enough of this book Rock She Wrote. This week's food-for-thought quote (three weeks late!) is a simple one pulled from an amazing essay entitled "Revolution Girl Style Now" by Emily White, published in LA. Weekly on July 10th 1992, and many times and in many places after that. Riot girl was an amazing feminist musical and cultural movement that came from the underground/post-punk/grunge scene in the early to mid-90s, created by a loose network of women, though many groups continue to exist today. It was predominantly white and many of the women were from upper-to middle class backgrounds and much of the rhetoric focused on confessional politics, the personal-is-political in punk rock and body and sexuality based politics. Or something like that. Maybe just read the essay in its entirety. Here's a snippet:

"The girl revolutionaries, many of whom are too old and world-wise to reasonably be called "girls", take this name because they have glimpsed that loud, untamed figure, because their utopia lies in the past. The Bikini Kill girls often talk nostalgically about some first, organic "girl culture" which is destroyed upon contact with the world of boys. Then jealousy interferes; they often chant, "Struggle against the J-word, killer of girl love". If that seems rather innocuous, more interesting is their sense that this "organic" girl community allowed an unregulated sexuality- homosexuality wasn't looked down upon, says Hanna. "Girls' first erotic experiences are usually with each other , but we're taught to forget that. ""

For more on Riot Girl check out this page on wikipedia.
Archive of weekly quotes can be found here.