Riot Grrrl: How Olympia Changed Punk
Near Olympia, Washington
Kathleen Hanna was twenty-two years old in nineteen ninety when she co-founded a band called Bikini Kill in Olympia, Washington. Olympia was, and is, a small city best known as the state capital and as the home of Evergreen State College, an experimental public institution that had been producing writers, musicians, and politically engaged students since its founding in nineteen sixty-seven. Bikini Kill emerged from the Evergreen and K Records ecosystem, a network of DIY musicians, zine makers, and activists who had been building an alternative music community in Olympia since the early nineteen eighties.
What Bikini Kill did was challenge, explicitly and loudly, the sexism of the punk rock spaces in which they were operating. Male-dominated venues where women were pushed to the back of the crowd. Sound engineers who didn't take women musicians seriously. A culture that celebrated transgression in general but directed its most pointed contempt at women specifically. Hanna's answer was to write a manifesto and shout it at shows, hand it out as a photocopied paper, and invite the women in the audience to come to the front.
The document said RIOT GRRRL across the top. The movement it named spread nationally through photocopied zines, through touring, through word of mouth at shows and in feminist campus organizations. Bands including Sleater-Kinney and Bratmobile extended the Olympia scene's reach. The movement influenced feminist theory, academic gender studies, and the music industry's treatment of women musicians in ways that are still being traced.
That it came from Olympia, Washington, specifically from a public experimental college in the state capital where the legislature meets, is the kind of geographic fact that sounds like a joke until you understand that Evergreen's particular educational culture gave students the time and institutional support to make things that didn't exist yet. Riot Grrrl was one of the things that didn't exist yet. Olympia made it possible for it to start.
