Headlines

February 08, 2010

Riot Grrl Tobi Vail Reviews 'Girl Power'...

jigsaw | Read Full Story >

jigsaw:

Personal weirdness aside, I think it’s cool that someone wrote this book for a mainstream audience. My hope is that teenage girls and young women who don’t know this history will get inspired to find out about riot grrl. It would be really cool if it inspired girls to create a new young feminist movement rooted in their generation.

The book made me think a lot about documenting history from a strategic perspective. How could this story be told to incite participation in girls? A big part of the original “girl power” idea, was to get girls to stop being consumers of male-dominated culture and start producing our own. I guess my fear is that this kind of pop-culture history could encourage girls to simply consume “girl-culture”, thereby claiming the identity of “riot grrl” or “feminism” through the act of buying a record, as opposed to starting their own band or fanzine or putting on a show. To me the point is to encourage girls to start their own young feminist movement, not just to copy what we did. That is the danger of nostalgia I think…




Click Here