Selling ‘Girl Power’: The Assimilation of Feminist Punk Music for Mainstream Audiences During the Late-1900s
When Kathleen Hanna, lead singer of the 1990s band Bikini Kill, famously called out “girls to the front!” from the stage of one of her shows, she effectively summarized the goals of an emerging subculture of feminist punk during this era — specifically, that of the Riot Grrrl movement (Hunt, 2019). At the intersection of punk rock, fashion, and women’s rights, Riot Grrrl embodied a DIY ethos of creating new spaces in the music industry that would bring women to the forefront. However, its subsequent commodification and assimilation into mainstream pop by the early twenty-first century ultimately threatened the authenticity of this genre’s feminist messaging and its representation of marginalized communities.
The Riot Grrrl movement, which primarily originated in response to the suppression of women in the punk rock scene, closely aligns with media scholar John Fiske’s definition of popular culture in his book Understanding Popular Culture. Fiske argues that “popular culture is the culture of the subordinated and disempowered and thus always bears within it signs of power relations” (Fiske, 1989). Indeed, as punk grew more hardcore in the 1980s, women were increasingly oppressed in this space — sexually harassed, heckled, and even violently pushed to the sidelines of shows by the violent “moshing” dance trend (Shrodes, 2012). As a subset of third-wave feminism, musicians like Hanna aimed to carve out a niche for women in this specific industry. They embraced the anti-establishment, anti-normative aesthetic of punk while simultaneously emphasizing a strong resistance to patriarchal standards and to traditional gender and sexuality norms (Shrodes, 2012). This power struggle manifests in the genre’s song lyrics, which often explored taboo topics of rape, domestic violence, abortion, eating disorders, sexuality, and more (Wright, 2016). During shows, performers would pass the microphone to audience members, very literally giving a voice to the frequently ignored or trivialized experiences of women (Wright, 2016). In these ways, Riot Grrrl highlighted the marginalization of women, using art as a medium to express power struggles and expose conflict.
Although Riot Grrrls resisted subordination to the mainstream — for example, by enforcing media blackouts — the subsequent commodification of this subculture most notably resulted in the mass production of “punk” clothing and the sudden popularity of girl groups in the late 1990s. Riot Grrrl fashion, similar to its music, evaded all gender conventions; it featured anything and everything: “schoolgirl skirts, babydoll dresses, oversized band tees, and grunge-inspired flannel shirts” (Jiji, 2021). Yet, with multi-million-dollar companies like Hot Topic and Urban Outfitters capitalizing on these styles and mass-producing their own version of the punk aesthetic, corporations have inadvertently erased the movement’s spirit of DIY. In his book, Fiske argues that manufacturers exploited the subculture surrounding jeans in their marketing strategies in order to target certain social groups; similarly, the fashion industry profited off Riot Grrrl by making them palatable and tame for mainstream audiences (Fiske, 1989). This widespread consumption of feminist punk extended to the music as well. With newer artists like The Spice Girls, Avril Lavigne, Pink, and Gwen Stefani self-identifying with the “girl power”, “pro-women” spirit of the Riot Grrrls — but doing so with the support of millions of dollars in marketing campaigns — they presented a new image of this subculture to the world: one that is white, heterosexual, and conventionally pretty (Spiers, 2015). Thus, commodifying “girl power” and bringing it from the margins into the mainstream ironically made the Riot Grrrl movement less inclusive for the marginalized groups that created them.
Overall, this transformation of feminist punk, specifically of the Riot Grrrl subculture, demonstrates the larger phenomenon of how mass consumption overshadowed subversive, radically-feminist messaging and instead reinforced societal constructs and norms. In her book Feminism and Pop Culture, Andi Zeisler, writer and co-founder of Bitch Media, questions the effectiveness of commercialized feminism: “is it liberation or co-optation? And does one necessarily cancel out the other? If feminist ideology and discourse are simply plugged into existing models, and if the basic message — in this instance, the message to buy stuff — remains the same, is it feminism?” (Zeisler, 2008). Although there might be power in marketing messages by women, about women, and for women, the transformation to mainstream drastically impacted the demographics of who these women are. The limited representation and production of feminist narratives in this newer era of Riot Grrrl ultimately resulted in inauthentic activism and explains the movement’s transience in popular culture: it had been quickly exploited, diminished, and frankly rewritten by a mainstream corporate agenda.
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