How the Riot Grrrl Movement Can Pave a Way Forward After the 2024 Election

If there is one constituency that the Kamala Harris campaign had a lock on, it was musicians—at least, the good ones (where the Harris campaign had Beyonce, Trump’s had Kid Rock). The Democratic campaign gave significant rally time to Cardi B speak about the importance of women’s rights and healthcare, while Harris’s team is said to have spent as much as $20 million on swing-state concerts featuring the likes of Katy Perry, Jon Bon Jovi and Lady Gaga. This is, of course, to say nothing of the surprising, outsized role of Charli XCX’s album BRAT in shaping the social media campaign of the Harris team.

In the end, it wasn’t enough. Any ground gained from these A-list appearances was lost elsewhere; the Democrats lost support in every state. So now, the task of preventing a second Trump term transforms into the far more exhausting prospect of resisting the worst of the incoming president’s impulses for four more years.

Barely a fortnight removed from the election and Democratic lawmakers already have ideas about how to win the next election, but none of them are reassuring. These suggestions include: selling out trans people (who, it so happens, are among their most loyal voter blocs), embracing more draconian immigration policies and swearing off the sort of ambitious, public spending investments favored by the Biden-Harris administration (such as Build Back Better and the Inflation Reduction Act).

Given the systemic issues facing America and the wider world—from gross inequality and climate catastrophe to war and genocide—such a rightward move from Democrats in the face of four more years of Trump is a truly depressing prospect. Already, there’s no denying the dejection that has taken hold among the younger generations that mobilized to resist Trump’s first term by joining the Women’s March and March To Save Lives, organizing to elect progressive lawmakers like AOC and Cori Bush and taking to the streets in 2020 to fight for racial justice.

While there can be no doubt that the impending Trump administration plunges America into singularly precarious territory, this current moment is not without precedent. As Democrats seem set to lurch towards the right, I’m reminded of how the party did the same thing in 1992—selecting Bill Clinton (of the party’s corporatist, neo-liberal New Democrats wing) as their nominee over Jerry Brown (who ran a populist left-wing campaign). After two terms from Ronald Reagan, followed by one by George Bush Sr., Democrats were facing a similar political landscape to that we’re confronting today: one in which the Republican Party have dictated the terms of political discourse and asserted an iron grip over the levers of power.

In the face of four more years of Republican rule and a Democratic Party eager to shed any lingering traces of progressivism, there is much we can learn from one unapologetically radical force that rose to prominence in the late ‘80s and grew in relevance through the early ‘90s: the riot grrrl movement.

The underground feminist punk movement, which grew out of Olympia, Washington, carried forward the spirit of “the personal is political” via songs that spoke to female desire, autonomy and the specter of male violence—and pushed third-wave feminists to engage with America’s disenchanted female youth on their own terms in their own spaces, rather than focus solely on the academic and abstract. Indeed, the spelling of “grrrl” served as a “jokey variation on all the tortured spelling of ‘womyn/womon/wimmin’ feminists like to experiment with,” wrote Sara Marcus in 2010’s Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution.

Indeed, while the riot grrrl movement chiefly served to push back on America’s patriarchal, capitalist society, it also offered a critique of the elements of prevailing feminist discussions that often seemed detached from where many young women were. “When you’re a teenage girl…a feminist movement that’s mostly about electing new Senators might not be all that compelling to you,” wrote Marcus, reflecting on the space the riot grrrls filled in the feminist movement.

This sense of disconnect once again feels palpable. Democrats made abortion rights a central pillar of their platform this election, but while Democratic governors have largely done their part to protect abortion rights over the last few years, it was under this Democratic administration that Roe v. Wade was overturned and millions lost their bodily autonomy. Of course, the lion’s share of blame for this lies with Trump and the Republican senators who confirmed the Supreme Court justices that struck down Roe v. Wade. But it’s also true that President Biden repeatedly refused to entertain ideas like Supreme Court expansion, or removal of the filibuster, that could’ve offered a pathway to restoring the right to abortion across all of America. Similarly, it’s true that far too little was done in the Obama years to prevent the abortion restrictions and closure of abortion clinics in red states that made safely and legally terminating a pregnancy an impossibility for many people even when the law said they had every right to do just that.

Indeed, as the all-smiles photo the Bidens took with Trump recently demonstrates, the Democratic Party often fails to grasp and communicate the dire stakes of the current moment. In the face of this, we need a resurgence of riot grrrl-style activism that pulls no punches in identifying the existentialism of their struggle.

The 1990s may now be looked back on, comparatively, as something constituting halcyon days. But the stakes back then could feel similarly all-encompassing and the dread, similarly all-consuming. Marcus wrote, “To be young in 1992 was to feel that the world’s fate could be determined in the next seventy-two hours, and that the outcome might not be too favorable to human survival…For the first time in the nation’s history, young people told pollsters they expected to do worse than their parents had done”.

It’s a sentiment that feels just as true today as it did back then, as today’s Generations Z and Alpha face growing inequality, a broken housing market, worldwide ascendent fascism and a climate that is increasingly hostile to our species. The riot grrrls of the early ‘90s knew that the appropriate response to such forces was not to give in to conservative framing (as Democrats now and then seem want to do), but to speak plainly and urgently to the threat of catastrophe. In 1992, Emily White would write that “the Riot Girls rhetoric will enable them to face this dark hour because, like many teenage girls, they phrase every setback, every dream, in the language of crisis.”

This was evident in comments made by Bikini Kill drummer Tobi Vail at a D.C. concert days before the Supreme Court would rule on Planned Parenthood v. Casey (which had the potential to severely undermine the core tenets of Roe v. Wade). “We live in a country where those people [law-makers] don’t care whether we live or die,” she said, “And that’s pretty scary.” Such undiluted portraits of the threats arising from patriarchy, and men at large, would be given voice in song too—as seen in Heavens To Betsy’s “Terrorist”, which likened being followed by a man on the street to an act of war.

But in their music, the riot grrrls never cowered in the face of male violence. On the aforementioned “Terrorist,” Corin Tucker would go on to switch the roles of aggressor and victim in triumphant fashion, bellowing, “Now I’m the terrorist, see how it feels.” Seattle riot grrrls 7 Year Bitch had a simple solution for dealing with men “who get joy from a woman’s fear”: “I’d rather get a gun and blow you away / Then you’ll learn first hand / That dead men don’t rape.”

Crucially, the riot grrrls understood that feminism was not merely something to be sung about, but an action to be taken in every facet of life. As such, they took practical steps to protect their community—Kathleen Hanna, for instance, would call female audience members to the front of the crowd, prioritizing their safety. Elsewhere, the riot grrrls would prove pivotal in attracting people to protests, such as “Rock for Choice.”

In short, the riot grrrls didn’t just offer a striking condemnation of the world as it was, with all its injustice and inequality, but presented the prospect of a better, more equal world and how one might achieve just that. Amidst the understandable despondency felt in the wake of Trump’s recent electoral victory, such is needed once again—more than ever.

Of course, the movement, in its original form, was not without its imperfections. Race “had always been a weak spot” for both third-wave feminists at large and for the riot grrrls specifically, Marcus wrote—with the grrrls being disproportionately white and often reticent to listen to criticisms that they had racial shortcomings. All the while, the movement was not immune to the persuasive power of capitalistic hyper-individualism. By the end of 1992, Marcus posited that “some revolutionaries felt they had little hope of changing anything but themselves.”

But, the movement’s ability to mobilize thousands upon thousands of young girls and women during a time of crisis by speaking plainly and aggressively to the threats they faced remains instructive as we head into at least two years of a Republican trifecta. And the movement’s modern disciples have proven adept at harnessing the righteous anger of the ‘90s Riot Grrrls while applying it to modern concerns. The early-to-mid 2010s, for instance, saw the rise of Priests, who offered a defining anthem for those let down by liberalism’s promises of inevitable progress (lead-singer Katie Alice Greer howled “Barack Obama killed something in me” on 2014’s “And Breeding”). More recently, the Linda Lindas—a band of Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney-worshiping teens and pre-teens—offered a striking repudiation of a bigoted classmate on the viral sensation “Racist, Sexist Boy”. Meanwhile, London’s Dream Wife, who formed in the late 2010s, would keep alive the “girls to the front” spirit with their own “bad bitches to the front” policy.

Anyone feeling lost, dazed and confused in the wake of this month’s election would be wise to read the riot grrrl manifesto published in 1991, as clear a roadmap now as it was over three decades ago:

BECAUSE we wanna make it easier for girls to see/hear each other’s work so that we can share strategies and criticize-applaud each other.

BECAUSE we must take over the means of production in order to create our own meanings.

BECAUSE viewing our work as being connected to our girlfriends-politics-real lives is essential if we are gonna figure out how we are doing impacts, reflects, perpetuates, or DISRUPTS the status quo.