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An earlier version of this paper was delivered as a keynote address at the British Association of American Studies meeting in Birmingham in April 2013. Thanks to John Fagg, Danielle Fuller, and Sara Wood for the invitation to address the association, as well as to conference attendees for their constructive discussion of the paper. Thanks also to audiences at the University of Kansas, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Western Illinois University, the University of Washington, and the May 2015 Global Media and the Public Sphere: Perils, Possibilities, and Paradoxes conference held at Northwestern University for their equally helpful observations and questions. Finally, I would also like to thank all of the women who have spoken to me about riot grrrl and girl zine-ing. My work in this paper has been heavily influenced by the comments and work of Mimi Thi Nguyen, Yumi Lee, Jenna Freedman, Kristin Schilt, and Lisa Darms.
I know what we wanted to start, and I know we started something, but I don't really know what happened and I don't think anyone can really tell you ... you can study it for years, you know.
Tobi Vail, drummer and guitarist, Bikini Kill, EMP Riot Grrrl Retrospective1
What needs to happen - on a punk scale and a large-scale sort of way - is a revolution in the ways ... we frame ourselves within social, psychic and political relations.
Mimi Nguyen, "It's Not a White World, Looking for Race in Punk"
I.
WHAT WAS RIOT GRRRL?
Constructing a historical account of any series of social, cultural, or economic developments is a fraught activity. Decisions must be made about one's animating research questions, about which archives and documents are to be investigated, about how to bracket and punctuate one's understanding of the chronological time to be surveyed. One also has to make decisions about the kinds of narrative tropes to be employed in structuring the resulting account. Together, these and a host of theoretical assumptions and methodological protocols enable certain phenomena - actors, actions, institutions, and events - to wheel into view as the apparent "facts" demanding explanation.2
I invoke this historiographic common sense as a way of rendering contingent the now familiar history of the riot grrrl movement of the 1990s,...