Rebel Girl
My Life as a Feminist Punk
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
'A roadmap for a new generation' VOGUE
'Radical, funny and fearless’ VANITY FAIR
‘Gripping’ NYLON
An electric, searing memoir by the original Riot Grrrl and legendary frontwoman of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre
Kathleen Hanna’s rallying cry to feminists echoed far and wide through the punk scene of the 1980s, ’90s, and beyond. Her band, Bikini Kill, embodies this iconic time, and today their gutsy, radical lyrics of anthems like ‘Rebel Girl’ and ‘Double Dare Ya’ are more powerful than ever. But where did this transformative voice come from?
In Rebel Girl, Hanna’s raw and insightful new memoir, she takes us from her tumultuous childhood home, to her formative college years in Olympia, Washington, and on to her first years on tour, fighting hard for gigs and for her band. As Hanna makes blindingly clear, being in a ‘girl band’, especially a punk girl band, in those years was not a simple or a safe prospect. Male violence and antagonism threatened at every turn, and surviving as a band took limitless amounts of grit and bravery.
But the relationships she developed during those years buoyed her – including with her bandmates Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox, and Billy Karren; her friendship with Kurt Cobain; and her introduction to Joan Jett – and they were a testament to how the true punk world nurtured and cared for its own.
Hanna opens up about falling in love with Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys and her debilitating battle with Lyme disease, and she brings us behind the scenes of her later bands, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin. She also writes candidly about the Riot Grrrl movement and its decline, documenting with love its grassroots origins but critiquing its later exclusivity.
In an uncut voice all her own, Hanna reveals the darkest, hardest times along with the most joyful – and how it all fuelled her revolutionary art, from the 1980s to today.
About the author
Kathleen Hanna is a singer, musician, artist, feminist activist and writer. She is the lead singer of Bikini Kill and was the frontwoman for Le Tigre and The Julie Ruins. Hanna pioneered riot grrrl, an underground feminist movement that helped women express anger, rage and frustration, and talk about issues like rape, domestic abuse, sexuality, racism, patriarchy, classicism, anarchism and female empowerment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hanna, lead singer of the punk feminist band Bikini Kill, debuts with a no-holds-barred account of her turbulent life. Growing up with a violent, alcoholic father who once threatened suicide, Hanna began singing as an artistic outlet in college. After her roommate was attacked by a man, Hanna trained as a volunteer at a domestic violence shelter, awakening feminist convictions that she explored in punk band Viva Knievel and—starting in 1991—in Bikini Kill. Later chapters discuss the somewhat accidental origins of riot grrrl, a feminist punk movement that elicited anger from male concertgoers and sexist takes from the media (she'd held the meeting that established it partly to find writers for her zine). Also recounted are Bikini Kill's late-1990s breakup (they'd go on to reunite in 2017 and 2019), and Hanna's tenure as frontwoman for the band Le Tigre in 1999, a period during which she gained a measure of healing; though she'd informally counseled women about sexual abuse for years, she'd never processed her own traumas, including abuse by her father, stalkings, and rapes ("I just kept overworking and stuffing it down"). While the narrative feels unstructured in places—early performances, creative tensions between bandmembers, and feminist musings blend together—Hanna's visceral prose captivates, and she's refreshingly candid about the riot grrrl movement's failures, including its whiteness and her "tokenistic" efforts to diversify it (at one workshop, she realized that "BIPOC women were as disappointed in white punk feminists as I'd been by white male punks"). It's a raw and revealing portrait of a vital figure in the feminist punk scene.
