In 1977, as punk burst onto the streets of Britain, Marianne Elliot-Said released her first single 'Oh Bondage, Up Yours'. Amidst skinny white teenagers with drainpipe jeans and spiked hair, Elliot-Said, a Somali-English woman, stood out with her dental braces, gaudy Day-Glo clothes, and afro. She was only 20, but her determination was loud and clear in the song’s opening acapella cry:
“Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard. But I think, ‘OH BONDAGE, UP YOURS!’ ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR!”
Drums crashed. Jagged guitar chords poured over the top. A saxophone wailed. But more piercing than anything else was Elliot-Said’s vocals:
“Oh bondage, up yours! Oh bondage, no more!”
The single attracted huge media attention, not least from the BBC, who banned it from the airwaves. Elliot-Said’s band, X-Ray Spex, became a sensation, and Marianne Elliot-Said became Poly Styrene, one of the few Black faces at the forefront of British punk.
By the early 1980s, punk had died out almost as quickly as it’d been born. Its remnants could be heard in new wave and post-punk bands like Wire, Gang of Four and The Police. But that brief fervour of rebellious spirit and do-it-yourself attitude had by and large dissipated. X-Ray Spex broke up, and despite forging a solo career of her own, Poly Styrene faded into relative obscurity.
But some girls remembered her name. Fast forward to the early 90s, and cross over the Atlantic to fair Olympia, Washington, where we lay our scene. There you will find a group of women holding a meeting. They’re talking about the sexism they’ve been facing in their local music community: the derogatory language men spit at them, the hostile male environment in mosh pits, and how they’re still not being taken seriously. Music seems like a career not worth pursuing - until you look at the women who knew all of this, and pursued it anyway. Poly Styrene. The Slits. Siouxsie Sioux. Kim Gordon. Joan Jett. The Raincoats.
The group of women decided to do something about it.
Riot grrrl, much like the original wave of punk, was born out of frustration. As a feminist movement designed to uplift women’s voices, riot grrrl was a vehicle for expressing feminine rage and frustration. This was reflected in stylising “girl” as “grrrl.” The three r’s symbolised a growl, an expression of deep-seated anger. The word ‘girl’ was chosen to reflect childhood, the period in a woman's life when she has the strongest self-confidence. The use of ‘girl’ was also a reclamation of sorts – it had been tossed around by men who downplayed the struggles faced by women, shrugging off female hurt and pain as childish. Now, women were reclaiming a word that had been used to belittle them, and embracing the notion of being “too emotional”.
“Girls to the front” was a famous slogan of the “riot grrrl” movement. Gig audiences, especially at barricades, had often been a male-dominated space where women felt unsafe.
“Sometimes when shows have gotten really violent we had to ask boys to move to the side or the back because it was just too fucking scary for us, after several attacks and threats, to face another sea of hostile boy-faces right in the front,” explained Kathi Willcox, Bikini Kill bassist, in a fanzine interview.
Riot grrrl combined the resurgence of punk with a new wave of feminism to carve out a space for women. “Girls to the front”, the distribution of self-published fanzines, playing in each others’ bands and seeing each others’ gigs, all cemented the movement as a cornerstone of feminist history. However, how feminist was it, really?
Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Sleater-Kinney, Heavens to Betsy, Huggy Bear: these bands are considered the most iconic riot grrrl names. But these women were all cisgender, middle-class, and white. There is one problem when you’re only hearing from one type of woman in the room: only one type of struggle gets recognised.
“I distinctly remember the white women within the punk scene were capable of being just as exclusionary and bigoted as the men were,” wrote Laina Dawes in Why I Was Never A Riot Grrrl. “Among the white women I knew who identified as feminists, there was a strong sense that there was little to no concern as to how ethnicity made my experiences as a woman different than theirs.”
For Dawes, being in the audience at gigs was scary. But it was scary first and foremost because she was Black, not because she was a woman.
When Kathleen Hanna, frontwoman of Bikini Kill, drew the word “SLUT” across her stomach, it was viewed as a powerful reclamation. But nobody considered how it would alienate women of colour (WOC). We have historically been hypersexualised and fetishised by colonisers, but viewed as prostitutes or slaves within our own communities if we choose to date white men. A white woman writing “SLUT” on her stomach may be an empowering declaration of sexual agency, but for WOC, the hand of racism inscribed that word upon our bodies long ago.
Riot grrrl may have encouraged sisterhood and “girls to the front,” but only ever for a very specific type of girl. If you weren’t white, it was very easy to feel excluded from this movement. Intersectionality has simply never been in the riot grrrl dictionary.
Ramdasha Bikceem, creator of GUNK zine, wrote in a journal at the time that “They had a [riot grrrl] workshop on racism and I heard it wasn't too effective, but really how could it have been if it was filled up with mostly all white girls. One girl I spoke to after the meetings said the Asian girls were blaming all the white girls for racism and that she 'just couldn't handle that.' Ever heard of the word Guilt??? [sic]”.
Being a WOC can be exhausting. From blatant racism and microaggressions to defending ourselves or trying to explain why something seemingly inoffensive affects us the way it does, there is simply a layer to our lives that white women will never understand. The supposed ‘safe space’ of riot grrrl isn’t a comfort to WOC. Not only do we have to deal with awful white men in mosh pits, but we also have to explain ourselves to white girls who are supposed to be our “sisters”. If your feminist movement doesn’t consider the needs of women whose lives look different to your own, is it really feminism?
Believe it or not, there were some WOC riot grrrls. Tamar-kali Brown founded Sista Grrrl Riots, a string of musical showcases by and for Black women. Countless zines created by WOC, including Evolution of a Race Riot by Mimi Thi Nguyen; Bamboo Girl, which looked at racism and sexism from the perspective of Asian-Americans; Chop Suey Specs; and GUNK by Ramdasha Bikceem. WOC punks are everywhere. That is, if you know where to look. Most of the time they’re hidden away, cast into the shadows by white voices whose loudness drowns others out.
On paper, riot grrrl should be appealing to all women. It pulses with a quivering anger that any female-identifying person recognises without question. But when white riot grrrls get up onstage and start singing about how they’ve felt ignored, belittled and pushed aside, the irony is not lost on WOC, who have to fight doubly hard for a place onstage in the first place. As a mixed-race black woman in Britain, Poly Styrene sang about breaking free of the societal ‘bondage’ that constrained her. Yet, the supposed faces of punk are Sid Vicious and Siouxsie Sioux – people who wore swastikas as part of their get-up to “shock” people.
Riot grrrl was a so-called revolutionary movement, yet women of colour, whose systematic oppression was twofold, are still ignored in favour of white punks who just need to look the part. Punk, and by extension, riot grrrl, conjures images of white people who don’t really have much to lose when they arm themselves with a guitar and a microphone. When WOC put themselves out there, they have twice as much to risk. Sexism is one thing, but the never-ending layers of racism make their battle two-fronted. If WOC are pushing against the system from all sides, why are they getting the cold shoulder from a movement whose very foundations are supposed to be built on liberation?
Riot grrrl’s white feminism cannot mask an underlying stench of hypocrisy: it’s not “girls to the front” until all girls are there, dancing and singing and shouting. It’s not sisterhood until white suburban girls with guitars finally let WOC take the lead instead. It’s not riot grrrl until WOC get to fight back, too.