Now, in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s unthinkable-yet-wholly-predictable overturning, I’m thinking about my college self and her born-too-late riot grrrl aspirations again. I know now that the riot grrrl movement was nowhere near as inclusive as it could or should have been; as Mimi Thi Nguyen wrote for the feminist theory journal Women & Performance in 2012, “Women of color wondered out loud for whom writing ‘SLUT’ across their stomachs operated as reclamations of sexual agency against feminine passivity, where racisms had already inscribed such terms onto some bodies.” The privilege of feminist rebellion is too often reserved for white, upper-middle-class women, and for years, valid critiques like Nguyen’s—and the simple passage of time—pushed me away from embracing the full-on riot grrrl aesthetic. (Also, practically speaking, it was hard to move through the working world in the Docs, babydoll dresses, and smeared eyeliner I favored in 2013.) Still, to this day, I think of riot grrrl as the first flame to light the candle of my then-precious and unyielding rage—and now that the Supreme Court has ruled against my reproductive autonomy, I can feel the flame’s warmth moving me toward that rage again.
I press play on Live Through This over and over again, take a sonic tour through the discographies of Bratmobile and L7 and Le Tigre, and I can’t believe that one of the central tenets the riot grrrls fought for—the right to safe, legal, on-demand abortion—is no longer the law of the land. But also, I can believe it. I have to. The stage has been set for this for months, for years; the Republican war on trans bodies and lives led us to this, and it won’t stop here. If I want to help, to fight, to donate and support and make my advocacy as intersectional as possible, I need to stay angry; but how long can you boil without spilling over?
If I had to channel the sum total of what I’m feeling post-Roe down to one hope, it would be this: Please let my someday, longed-for daughters evolve past the punk feminist reference points of my youth. Let them find my old copy of Girls to the Front, highlighted and underlined and filled with postcards and old receipts and photos of me and my friends at our first pro-choice demonstrations, and wonder what it is we were fighting for. Please, God, let them not have to fight these same old battles, over and over again. I hope the incandescent rage of the riot grrrls makes no sense to them, but unless we act—soon, and together, and primarily on behalf of the many marginalized people to whom losing fundamental rights is nothing new—I fear it will.
For all the latest fasion News Click Here
