Deploying Aesthetics: Riot Grrrl and Womyn's Music in Conversation

• In Event: 195 - Section on Body and Embodiment Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 04. Intersectional Accounts of the Body

Abstract

The aesthetics of punk, which served as a building block for the aesthetics of the Riot Grrrl movement, demonstrate a conscious use of the body as a site to challenge the ideological hegemonies of social class, gender, and sexuality. It is from this perspective
that I will examine the aesthetics of Riot Grrrl as transgressive, as political, and as indicative of feminist movement in the 1990s; I will then discuss the inclusion of these aesthetics into the pre-existing feminist cultural space of the Michigan Womyn’s Music
Festival, and the resulting effects. In doing so I hope to establish that Riot Grrrl art worlds exist as simultaneous feminist movements, characterized by identifiable oppositional aesthetics. These aesthetics are in part achieved by “writing on the body” in
a way that makes the hegemonic processes described by cultural theorists as near invisible stark, explicit, and glaringly visible.

Author

• Chelsea Starr, Eastern New Mexico University