Riot Grrrl Manifestos and Radical Vernacular Feminism

‘We Want Freedom Not Just Safety’: Biography of a Girlfesto as a Strategic Tool in Youth Activism

“…It is a genre that gives the appearance of being at once both word and deed, both promise and incipient action. As Natalya Lusty (2017) argues about manifestos generally, it is through its fervid declarative force that this genre takes on its peculiarly performative charge, converting mere words into action-oriented resolutions.…”

“…They became one of the primary tools of young feminist activism in the 1990s and facilitated radical forms of speech and new political subjectivities for girls. The many manifestos produced within zines became part of an everyday political sensibility tied to the ordinary and not so ordinary lives of the girls and women who produced them, contributed to them and read them (Lusty, 2017). Instead of insisting on the right to be called ‘women’ as mainstream feminism had long been advocating, Riot grrrls foregrounded girl identity, in its simultaneous audacity and awkwardness—and not just girl but a defiant ‘grrrl’ identity that roars back at the dominant culture (Gottleib & Wald, 1994).…”

“…However, Riot grrrl also linked itself to previous generations of feminist activism through their manifestos which often used inter-textual references to earlier feminist manifestos such as the SCUM and the Bitch Manifestos and drew on some of the imagery, fonts and typographic styles of these older documents (Eichhorn, 2013). Far from forming a site of rupture from older forms of feminist radicalism, the Riot grrrl movement celebrated, borrowed from and extended earlier feminist manifestos, reviving the genre in the context of their own vernacular forms of mediated activism (Lusty, 2017).…”

“…The Girlfesto is a mechanism by which arts-based and youth-friendly processes can be translated into clear and actionable policy items, co-produced as Flicker and Nixon (2014) note by girls and supporting adults. The document captures the declarative force and action-oriented resolutions that Lusty (2017) characterizes as typical of the manifesto genre, but the degree to which action will emerge as a response to the Girlfesto remains to be seen. The document has been shared by email with all the event participants, in the Networks for Change Newsletter, in a handbook describing the arts-based methods used at Circles within Circles (Vanner et al, 2019), and in several follow-up events, including a 2018 International Day of the Girl session at John Abbott College in Montreal, the Engaging Youth and Community Responses to Sexualized Violence gathering, held at the First Peoples House, University of Victoria in October, 2018, at the 2019 International Girls Studies Association conference, and as part of the 2019 launch event for the book Young Indigenous Women’s Utopia produced by the girl group of the same name.…”

Greer now: editorial

“…However, recently scholars have turned their attention to radical forms of feminism and how they might be reconceptualised, and perhaps even reanimated (Eichhorn 2015;Hesford 2013;Lusty forthcoming). Kate Eichorn endorses this reconceptualisation, suggesting 'we might begin to understand second wave feminism, even the abandoned utopian project of radical feminism, not as a failed project but rather as the grounds for a feminist project not yet realised ' (2015, 254).…”