I Will Resist With Every Inch and Every Breath

[note: I started writing this a while ago, not really knowing where I was going with it, but wanting to talk about radical women of color media making as a "teaching machine" because I think it is so effective. I know it has been for me personally. What if there had been a radical women of color media movement infiltrating all corners of the internet when you were thirteen? I decided to post this now because I will probably never finish it and because it seemed kind of appropriate to recent discussion.]

[VIDEO: Bikini Kill, Resist this Psychic Death]

I will resist with every inch and every breath
I will resist this psychic death

-Bikini Kill, Resist This Psychic Death

Infusing punk with a dystopian re-telling of rape, incest, and girl-girl intimacy, early riot grrrl production - in the form of the fanzines, the performances, and later the conventions and workshops- re-invented an exhibitionist feminist show-and-tell of sexual abuse and complex desire. Riot grrrl practiced an unabashedly embodied polemic, exercising an oppositional body politic that ruptured the foundation myth of punk egalitarianism. Such that riot grrrl described itself as a culturally productive, politicized counterpublic, riot grrrl was -beyond a distinctive musical styling or the mere invasion of young, mostly white women in rock– an informal pedagogical project, a kind of punk rock “teaching machine.” In fact, riot grrrl existed in and sometimes replaced the classroom as the most meaningful context for the transmission and production of knowledge among its body of participants.

-Mimi Nguyen, from her column in Punk Planet 40

In 1998, I was thirteen. Every time I saved up ten dollars, I took it to the record store and bought another riot girl CD (this was back before CDs started costing $18). In the coming years I found that riot girl & DIY punk feminist creative production had made a space for me to be unapologetically honest about what happened to me. I shut myself in my bedroom for hours, playing along with Bikini Kill songs on my guitar, scribbling words and collating zines, not yet knowing these things would change my life. In my zines, I could talk about depression, self-mutilation, mental illness, teenage girl alienation. How I dealt with the real life symptoms of growing up in a world that explicitly told me, over and over, that I was bad, dirty, stupid, worthless. My boyfriend’s physical, mental, emotional transgressions against me. The violence I enacted on my own body as a response to the violence and hopelessness surrounding me. I could spill it all to total strangers who returned the favor by affirming my words with their own photocopied secrets. In the context of a frustrated, disillusioned but hopeful teenage girlhood, individual secret-sharing was so powerful it created spaces where more of us could speak our truths, where our understanding and love for each other became our liberation.

But as many women of color who came up in riot girl will tell you, Girl love as a liberation strategy falls short when other girls make no space for difference and variation of experience. It falls short when we are forced to collapse my experiences to align easily with theirs. It falls short when other girls refuse to love us through things they don’t understand or haven’t experienced, when girls who’s scathing indictment of whitestraightpunkboy mentality as our singular enemy prohibits intra-community criticism from riot girls of color over an assumption of sameness that marginalizes us and suffocates us.

… I want to reconsider what we meant when we said “community,” “safe space,” and of course, “the personal is political,” because somewhere along the way, the utopian impulse broke down and something dangerous happened. See, the assumption of safety is all too often an assumption of sameness, and that sameness in riot grrrl -and in other feminist spaces– depended upon a transcendent “girl love” that acknowledged difference but only so far … And so at workshops held at numerous riot grrrl conventions all over the country, race and racism proved to be the stumbling block that most obviously -and heartbreakingly- threw the promise of “girl love” all askew. The move to act on “the political as personal” manifested in problematic ways: racism was addressed almost exclusively as an interpersonal dynamic of cross-cultural miscommunication or a lack of knowledge about “other cultures,” and the specific “differences” of any one woman of color stood in for the whole collective she is imagined to represent.

-Mimi Nguyen, from her column in Punk Planet 40

Ten years later I’ve lived through things that riot girl promised to save me from, but didn’t. I was a feminist revert for many years, and even when I claim “feminist” as a descriptor now I am unsure of how well that represents my reality. I don’t want it really. I reinterpret riot girl lyrics through the filter of my adult life as an Arab American woman. And where riot girl didn’t make the space for difference, I make it.

I’m so sorry if I’m alienating some of you
Your fucking culture alienates me

-Bikini Kill, White Boy