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Safe Space: The Riot Grrrl Collection ELIZABETH K. KEENAN and LISA DARMS RÉS

Safe Space: The Riot Grrrl Collection ELIZABETH K. KEENAN and LISA DARMS RÉSUMÉ Riot Grrrl, un mouvement du début des années 1990 pour adolescentes féministes, s’est inspiré du mouvement punk pour adopter les modes d’expression du « Do it yourself (DIY) », dans le but d’encourager les adolescentes à aborder leur oppression commune. La collection Riot Grrrl, détenue par la Fales Library & Special Collections de l’University New York, documente le mouvement grâce aux documents personnels de celles qui en étaient actives durant ses premières années. Cet article se sert du concept féministe du « lieu sûr » (« safe space ») afin d’examiner la collection à partir de deux perspectives : celle de sa fondatrice, Lisa Darms, qui est archiviste supérieure à Fales, et celle de l’ethnomusicologue Elizabeth Keenan, une spécialiste qui a travaillé en profondeur avec cette collection. Le concept du lieu sûr était crucial pour les adolescentes lors de leurs réunions et soirées dansantes et pour leurs groupes musicaux qui ensemble ont contribué à la fondation de Riot Grrrl. Les auteurs soutiennent que le lieu sûr de Riot Grrrl a créé un « contre-public intime » – c’est-à- dire un espace dans lequel les adolescentes ont pu établir une communauté féministe par l’entremise de textes partagés – mais un contre-public qui opérait parfois contre ses propres intentions : les limites imposées pour délimiter le lieu sûr ont parfois mené vers des exclusions basées sur la race, les classes sociales ou l’identité de genre. Les auteures élargissent le concept du lieu sûr aux questions liées à la création de collections par des communautés militantes et dans ces milieux; aux idées de l’intimité et de la vie privée auxquelles sont confrontés les donateurs et les chercheurs dans la salle de lecture des collections spéciales; et à la tension entre le désir d’avoir accès à l’histoire militante et les besoins liés à la conservation archivistique. Cet article examine comment l’itération du lieu sûr se fait par rapport aux documents personnels des archives Riot Grrrl, tant du côté des documents eux-mêmes que de leur place dans les archives. ABSTRACT Riot Grrrl, an early-1990s teen feminist movement, adopted punk’s DIY modes of expression to encourage girls to address their shared oppression. The Riot Grrrl Collection, held at New York University’s Fales Library & Special Collections, documents the movement through the personal papers of those who were active in its formative years. This article uses the lens of feminist “safe space” to look at the collection from two perspectives: that of its founder, Lisa Darms, who is senior archivist at Fales, and that of ethnomusicologist Elizabeth Keenan, a scholar who has worked extensively with the collection. The concept of safe space was crucial Archivaria 76 (Fall 2013): 55–74 Archivaria, The Journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists – All rights reserved 56 Archivaria 76 Archivaria, The Journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists – All rights reserved to the all-girl meetings, dance parties, and bands that formed the foundation of Riot Grrrl. The authors argue that the safe space of Riot Grrrl created an intimate counter- public – that is, a space where girls established a feminist community through shared texts – but one that sometimes worked against its own intentions: boundaries erected for safety sometimes led to exclusion along lines of race, class, or gender identity. The authors extend the idea of safe space to issues of collection building from and within activist communities; to ideas of intimacy and privacy as they play out for donors, for researchers, and in the special collections reading room; and to the tension between the desire for access to activist history versus the requirements of archival preserva- tion. The article examines how iterations of safe space are enacted across the personal papers in the Riot Grrrl archive, through both the materials themselves and their place in the archive. Introduction Riot Grrrl, a 1990s feminist movement directed at young women and teenage girls, grew out of punk subculture and adopted punk’s DIY modes of expres- sion to encourage girls to address their shared oppression. By forming bands, writing zines, and meeting in all-girl groups to share experiences, riot grrrls sought to appropriate and radicalize the tropes of girldom in the service of a girl revolution. Originating in Olympia, Washington, and Washington, DC, Riot Grrrl started small, but owing to (largely unwanted) media attention, it grew to influence a generation of teen girls and North American culture at large. The Riot Grrrl Collection at New York University’s (NYU) Fales Library & Special Collections documents the creation of early Riot Grrrl zines, music, and activism, primarily through the personal papers of those involved in the movement. Because Riot Grrrl was (and is) both a political and cultural movement, its output was diverse; the individual collections comprise correspondence, artwork, journals and notebooks, audio and video recordings, photographs, clippings, and flyers, as well as source materials related to the creation of artworks, writings, fanzines, bands, performances, and events. Although the collection is not a zine collection, zines currently make up approximately half of the paper holdings. At the time of writing, the collection DIY refers to “do-it-yourself”; in punk and other subcultures, it refers to the act of creating or building something without the help of experts or authorities, often with the goal of creating alternative economies outside the mainstream. In this article, we use “Riot Grrrl” to describe the movement and “riot grrrl” to describe indi- viduals, following the common practice among scholars of the movement. Although people still identify as riot grrrls today, this collection documents the movement’s most active period, from its formation and general dissolution during the period 1989 to 1997. comprised fourteen manuscript collections and two archives, all of which were donated by their creators. The collection constantly expands, and with new donations its scope and content change radically every few months. Although the collection is only a few years old and represents less than half of one percent of the total archival holdings at Fales, it is already being used by about 15 percent of Fales archives patrons. It is also regularly shared in classes taught by Fales staff to students from NYU, the New School, Fordham University, the School of Visual Arts, PACE University, and else- where. In addition to its scholarly interest, the collection has received cover- age in the popular press, including the New York Times, Village Voice, Le Monde, Pitchfork, and more. In an attempt to make the collection even more accessible, the Feminist Press published a book of materials selected from the collection by its curator, Lisa Darms, in summer 2013. The amount of publi- city the collection and book have received foreground the tensions inherent in making available to a scholarly “public” a collection of personal, “private” papers from an underground movement – one committed to creating “safe space” for its members. The relationship of these two “publics” – the public from whom these personal papers are drawn and the public who uses the collection – raises questions about access, privacy, and privilege, as well as the protected but complex nature of the safe space that Riot Grrrl sought to establish and that the archive mirrors. In recent years, social theorists have drawn on Jürgen Habermas to develop concepts of publics and counterpublics that address questions of access and power, the construction of identitarian (and anti- identitarian) movements, and the development of “women’s culture.” For Lauren Berlant, the idea of an “intimate public” is one where participants “feel as though it expresses what is common among them, a subjective like- ness that seems to emanate from their history and their ongoing attachments and actions.” According to Berlant, women’s culture is a mass-marketed inti- The word “archives” is used throughout this article in the specific American sense to denote organizational archives as opposed to personal archives (“manuscript collections” in the United States). Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). For critiques of access and power in publics, see Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig J. Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2, Intimacy (Winter 1998): 547–66; and Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002). Warner, Publics and Counterpublics. Lauren Gail Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). Berlant, The Female Complaint, 5. Safe Space: The Riot Grrrl Collection 57 Archivaria, The Journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists – All rights reserved mate public, where “a set of problems associated with managing femininity is expressed and worked through incessantly.”10 While Berlant addresses mass culture, her idea of the “intimate public” is especially useful for discussing uploads/Litterature/ safe-space-the-riot-grrrl-collection.pdf