3 / Redefining a Movement: The Riot Grrrl
Collection at Fales Library
and Special Collections
The Riot Grrrl Collection is about the future—thinking ahead to
the status of materials in one hundred years.
—lisa darms, senior archivist,
Fales Library and Special Collections
In the early 1990s , most people in North America, including most
feminists, had never heard the term “Riot Grrrl.” By 1993, Riot
Grrrl was synonymous with a style and politic signifying a new
feminism—a feminism for the “video-age generation . . . sexy,
assertive and loud.”
1
This is the story told by Sara Marcus in
Girls to the Front. Like most people, Marcus discovered Riot
Grrrl in the November 23, 1992, issue of Newsweek. As Marcus
emphasizes in the history of Riot Grrrl she would publish nearly
two decades later, for the young women connected to the Riot
Grrrl scene in Olympia, the autumn of 1992 had been marked by
a series of attempts to thwart the mainstream media’s coopta-
tion of their growing movement. The Newsweek article was “a
culmination of the madness that had been going on all fall. The
big difference was that the girls had managed to beat back all the
previous incursions, but this time the media got its story.”
2
The
consequences of the Newsweek article and subsequent main-
stream media profiles on Riot Grrrl were widespread. On the
one hand, the article served as a call to arms for younger girls,
like Marcus, who were not already connected to the Riot Grrrl
scenes in Olympia, Washington DC, and Minneapolis. On the
other hand, the Newsweek article opened the media floodgates,
86 / redefining a movement
placing Riot Grrrls on the defensive in an economy of represen-
tation they had previously subverted through their astute sus-
picion of the mainstream media and savvy deployment of DIY
media. Although it would be misleading to imply that Riot Grrrl
necessarily lost control of its image after the Newsweek article,
the publication of “Revolution, Grrrl Style” represented a turn-
ing point—Riot Grrrl had gone viral.
3
In many respects, the announcement of the Riot Grrrl Col-
lection at Fales Library bore uncanny resemblance to the
movement’s initial “discovery” by the mainstream media. Lisa
Darms, senior archivist at Fales Library and Special Collections,
explains that news of the collection’s development was never
a secret, but its announcement was also not something that
remained entirely in either her control or that of the collection’s
donors:
We issued an internal newsletter, which is for the library.
It’s not private, but it’s simply a print and pdf newsletter
about acquisitions. It generally goes to alumni and donors.
They wanted to announce the acquisition of Kathleen
Hanna’s papers. It was amazing to watch how quickly—I
think the next day—at the
L Magazine, someone who was
probably associated with NYU in some way, found it and
scanned it in black and white and put it on their online
magazine. From there, it went viral. At that point, I barred
myself—I worried about a flurry of people contacting me
because it hadn’t gone through the press office, which is the
normal way we would do such things, but instead of any-
one contacting me, all subsequent articles referred back to
that one
L Magazine article. I was somewhat ambivalent
about it. I wasn’t trying to keep the collection secret, but
I did want to reach a certain number of potential donors
before making it public.
4
However, neither Darms nor her donors, including Kathleen
Hanna and Becca Albee who were preparing their papers at the
time of the announcement, are strangers to the media’s viral
redefining a movement / 87
potential. In 1992, all three women were students at Evergreen
State College in Olympia, Washington, where they witnessed
and to varying degrees were implicated by the initial media cap-
ture of Riot Grrrl. If anything, the conditions under which news
of the collection’s development went public were all too familiar.
Although the L Magazine’s decision to scan and repost an
article about the development of the Riot Grrrl Collection from
an internal university newsletter and its subsequent impact is
far less significant than the historical arrival of Riot Grrrl in the
mainstream media, the similarities are worth considering.
5
Like
Riot Grrrl in its early stages of development, which was both
public and fiercely protective of its ability to control its represen-
tation and circulation,
6
the development of the collection was by
no means a secret, but from the onset there was an attentiveness
to maintaining control over the collection’s publicity. As Darms
explains, the desire to control the collection’s representation
was partly rooted in a commitment to ensuring it would not be
defined too narrowly: “I don’t want it to be the ‘Kathleen Hanna
Collection.’ She feels the same way. It’s a Riot Grrrl Collection,
but most of the press was just about Kathleen.”
7
Darms was also
concerned about mitigating the circulation of misinformation
about who would be able to access the collection and under what
circumstances.
In the days following the L Magazine post, news of Fales
Library’s Riot Grrrl Collection traveled quickly over multiple
forms of media, proving especially viral in forms of media
that had not yet come into being when Riot Grrrl entered most
people’s consciousness in 1992 (for example, blogs, Twitter and
Facebook).
8
If many archivists and special collections librarians
spend years attempting to generate interest in their collections,
for Darms, this achievement was effortless. That news of an
archival collection could “go viral” reveals as much about Riot
Grrrl as a cultural phenomenon as it does about the significance
of the Riot Grrrl Collection. The media interest in the collec-
tion points not only to what is potentially controversial about
the collection’s development but also to the collection’s status
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