How the Riot Grrrl Movement Can Pave a Way Forward After the 2024 Election
30 years ago, the riot grrrls 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.
Photo by Lindsay Brice/Getty Images
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”.