Riot grrrl

The riot grrrl movement originated in 1991, when a group of women from Olympia, Washington, and Washington, D.C., held a meeting about sexism in their local punk scenes in the United States. The word "girl" was intentionally used in order to focus on childhood, a time when children have the strongest self-esteem and belief in themselves.' Riot grrrls then took a growling "R", replacing the "I" in the word as a way to take back the derogatory use of the term. Both double and triple "R" spellings are acceptable.' The Seattle and Olympia, Washington, music scenes in the Pacific Northwest had sophisticated do it yourself (DIY) infrastructure. While the model of politically themed zines had already been used in punk culture as an alternative (to mainstream) culture, zines also followed a longer legacy of self-published feminist writing that allowed women to circulate ideas that would not otherwise be published.There was a lot of anger and self-mutilation. In a symbolic sense, women were cutting and destroying the established image of femininity, aggressively tearing it down. Riot grrrl bands were influenced by groundbreaking female punk and mainstream rock performers of the 1970s to the mid-1980s. While many of these musicians were not originally associated with each other during their time and came from a variety of backgrounds and styles, as a group they anticipated many of riot grrrl's musical and thematic attributes. These performers include the Slits, Poly Styrene, Siouxsie Sioux, the Raincoats, Joan Jett, Kim Gordon, and Kim Deal, among others. Of Kim Gordon, in particular, Kathleen Hanna noted, "She was a forerunner, musically [...] Just knowing a woman was in a band trading lead vocals, playing bass, and being a visual artist at the same time made me feel less alone." Pacific Northwest and Washington, D.C. Olympia, Washington, had a strong feminist artistic and cultural legacy that influenced early riot grrrl. In the early 1980s, Stella Marrs, Dana Squires and Julie Fay co-founded the store Girl City, where they created art and performances. The first K Records release in 1982 was a cassette of Heather Lewis' first band Supreme Cool Beings, while she was a student at The Evergreen State College, a year before she co-founded Beat Happening. In 1985, the Go Team formed with then 15-year-old Tobi Vail. The band would go on to collaborate with Olympia scene musicians who are linked to the riot grrrl movement: Donna Dresch, Lois Maffeo, and Billy "Boredom" Karren. Karren was a rotating musician who played in the band, and it was there that he and Vail played together for the first time, later collaborating in several other bands which included Bikini Kill and the Frumpies. Maffeo hosted a women-centered radio show on Olympia's community radio station KAOS. Candice Pedersen interned at K Records in 1986 while at The Evergreen State College, and became co-owner in 1989. In the 1980s, two articles on the topic of women in rock would be published by Puncture, a Portland, Oregon, zine edited by Katherine Spielmann and Patty Stirling. Authored by Rough Trade employee Terri Sutton, these articles became what is considered by some to be groundbreaking and influential writing on riot grrrl ethos. One article, "Women, Sex, & Rock 'n' Roll" (1989) is considered particularly important as the manifesto of the riot grrrl movement. Sutton would also say, in "Women In Rock: An Open Letter", written in 1988, "To me rock and roll is about lust, lust for feeling; the worst I can say about a band is they're boring. That's why it's so crucial that women get up onstage and impart--inspire some emotion." Meanwhile in the Washington, D.C., area, Beat Happening fan Erin Smith started her zine Teenage Gang Debs in 1987. In 1988, two D.C. women that had been in all-women punk bands there previously – Chalk Circle's Sharon Cheslow and Fire Party's Amy Pickering – joined forces with Cynthia Connolly and Lydia Ely to organize group discussions focusing on gender differences and sexism in the D.C. punk community. The results were published in the June 1988 issue of ''Maximum Rock 'n' Roll. These conversations and the book laid the groundwork for riot grrrl when members of Bikini Kill and Bratmobile later came to D.C. in 1991. Meanwhile, in 1989 Kathleen Hanna had co-founded the Olympia art collective/band Amy Carter and feminist gallery/music venue Reko Muse, both with Tammy Rae Carland and Heidi Arbogast. Hanna began to contribute to the zine, submitting interviews to Jigsaw while on tour with Viva Knieval in 1990. In Jigsaw, Vail wrote about "angry grrls", combining the word girls'' with a powerful growl. After touring for two months in summer 1990, Hanna's band Viva Knievel called it quits.' Dresch later started a record label under the name Chainsaw and formed the queercore band Team Dresch. In Chainsaw #2'' she wrote, "Right now, maybe, Chainsaw is about Frustration. Frustration in music. Frustration in living, in being a girl, in being a homo, in being a misfit of any sort...Which is where this whole punk rock thing came from in the first place." They first read Vail's zine Jigsaw in January 1990, and around the same time met Hanna. Kathleen Hanna and her friends Tobi Vail and Kathi Wilcox, who were also studying at Evergreen, recruited Billy Karren to form Bikini Kill in fall 1990. The Riot Grrrl movement believed in girls actively engaging in cultural production, creating their own music and fanzines rather than following existing materials. The bands associated with Riot Grrrl used their music to express feminist and anti-racist viewpoints. Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Heavens to Betsy created songs with extremely personal lyrics that dealt with topics such as rape, incest and eating disorders. Jenny Toomey and Hanna had known each other as young teens while attending the same D.C. area junior high school. Toomey co-founded the indie rock label Simple Machines with Kristin Thomson in early 1990, and they ran the label out of a punk group house in Arlington, Virginia. They shared the house with Positive Force activists before moving into their own group house in Arlington. Toomey visited Olympia during fall 1990, where she formed My New Boyfriend with Tobi Vail, Aaron Stauffer from Seaweed, and Christina Calle. Upon returning to Arlington, Toomey and Thomson formed the indie rock band Tsunami. The third issue of Vail's zine Jigsaw, published in 1991 after she spent time in Washington, D.C., was subtitled "angry grrrl zine". Hanna later said, "We had to go to a Positive Force meeting first. I'd never had a pitch meeting before. But I was doing a pitch meeting for why they should let us use their house for this all-women's radical feminist community organizing meeting." Tucker played her first show that night, on guitar and vocals with Heavens to Betsy and Tracy Sawyer on drums. With Billy Karren, Bikini Kill self-released a cassette of demos during summer 1991 titled Revolution Girl Style Now. Hanna, Vail and Wilcox also began collaboration on Bikini Kill zine during their first tours in 1991. Hanna would also stage dive into the crowds to personally remove male hecklers who would often verbally and physically assault her during shows. However, the band's reach did include a large male audience in addition to the female target audience. Jett produced the single "New Radio"/"Rebel Girl" for the band after members of Bikini Kill heard "Activity Grrrl", a song Jett wrote about the band. Bikini Kill's debut album Pussy Whipped, released in 1993, included the song "Rebel Girl". "Rebel Girl" has become one of Bikini Kill's signature songs as well as a widely recognized anthem for the riot grrrl movement While "the unforgettable anthem", as Robert Christgau calls it, never charted due to its independent release, it has received widespread critical acclaim. It has been called a "classic", and praised as part "of the most vital rock-n-roll of the era". Bikini Kill's second album Reject All American was released in 1996, and the band broke up the next year. Despite retrospective acclaim, at the time the band was criticized for excluding men, and even Rolling Stone described Bikini Kill's first album as "yowling and moronic nag-unto-vomit tantrums." "My joke is always like, I didn't just hit the glass ceiling, I pressed my naked [breasts] up against it," Hanna said of that time. Their pioneer reputation endures but, as Hanna recalls:[Bikini Kill was] very vilified during the '90s by so many people, and hated by so many people, and I think that that's been kind of written out of the history. People were throwing chains at our heads – people hated us – and it was really, really hard to be in that band. Bratmobile Hailing from Eugene, Oregon, Bratmobile was a first-generation riot grrrl band that became the second-most prominent founding voice of the riot grrrl movement. In 1990, University of Oregon students Allison Wolfe and Molly Neuman collaborated on feminist zine Girl Germs with Washington, D.C.'s Jen Smith, touching on sexism in their local music scenes. Jen Smith proposed they collaborate with members of Bikini Kill on a zine called Girl Riot. When Neuman began the zine, she changed its title to riot grrrl, providing a networking forum for young women in the wider music scene and giving the movement its name. Thereafter, Bratmobile became a trio with Wolfe, Neuman, and Erin Smith. They played their first show together as Bratmobile in July 1991, with Neuman on drums, Erin Smith on guitar, and Wolfe on vocals. Bratmobile toured with Heavens to Betsy in 1992 and broke up in 1994. A promotional poster reads: As the corporate ogre expands its creeping influence on the minds of industrialized youth, the time has come for the International Rockers of the World to convene in celebration of our grand independence. Hangman hipsters, new mod rockers, sidestreet walkers, scooter-mounted dream girls, punks, teds, the instigators of the Love Rock Explosion, the editors of every angry grrrl zine, the plotters of youth rebellion in every form, the midwestern librarians and Scottish ski instructors who live by night, all are setting aside August 20–25, 1991 as the time. Spread across North America Exposure to Bikini Kill and then Bratmobile inspired other riot grrrl factions to spring up around the United States and Canada. Women in other regional punk music scenes across North America were encouraged to form their own bands and start their own zines. By 1994, riot grrrl had been discovered by the mainstream, and Bikini Kill were increasingly referred to as pioneers of the movement. Dedicated to a DIY ethos, bands and artists encouraged grrrls to challenge hierarchies and self-produce work relating to their own experiences and identities. England As Bikini Kill's music and zines spread throughout England in 1991–92, bands formed and were quick to embrace riot grrrl. Their debut EP was released in 1992, and in the same year they began working closely with Bikini Kill as riot grrrl's popularity peaked on both sides of the Atlantic. Huggy Bear received widespread national attention after performing their third single "Her Jazz", a split release between Catcall and Wiiija Records, on The Word in 1993. Naylor had met Bikini Kill's Kathy Wilcox by chance while they were each traveling in Europe in 1991, and Wilcox sent Naylor music and the first issues of Riot Grrrl and Jigsaw zines during their subsequent correspondence. Thane, from Sheffield, had previously met the Raincoats' Ana da Silva at a Hole show after Hole covered a Raincoats song. Of the original riot grrrl bands, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy and Huggy Bear had split in 1994, Excuse 17 and most of the UK bands had split by 1995, and Bikini Kill and Emily's Sassy Lime (formed in Southern California in 1993) released their last records in 1996. However, Team Dresch were active as late as 1998, the Gossip were active from 1999, and Bratmobile reformed in 2000. Perhaps most prolific of all, Sleater-Kinney were active from 1994 to 2006, releasing seven albums. Corin Tucker (Heavens to Betsy) and Carrie Brownstein (Excuse 17) had formed Sleater-Kinney in Olympia. Many of the women involved in riot grrrl are still active in creating politically charged music. Kathleen Hanna went on to found the electro-feminist post-punk "protest pop" group Le Tigre and later the Julie Ruin, Kathi Wilcox joined the Casual Dots with Christina Billotte of Slant 6, and Tobi Vail formed Spider and the Webs. Sleater-Kinney reformed the band in 2014 after an 8-year hiatus and have released four albums since, while Bratmobile reunited to release two albums, before Allison Wolfe began singing with other all-women bands, Cold Cold Hearts, and Partyline. Molly Neuman went on to play with New York punk band Love Or Perish and run her own indie label called Simple Social Graces Discos, as well as co-owning Lookout! Records and managing the Donnas, Ted Leo, Some Girls, and the Locust. Kaia Wilson of Team Dresch and multimedia artist Tammy Rae Carland went on to form the now-defunct Mr. Lady Records which released albums by the Butchies, Electrelane, Kaia Wilson, Le Tigre, Sarah Dougher, Sextional, Tami Hart, The Haggard, TJO TKO, The Movies, V for Vendetta, The Quails. Bikini Kill played a string of shows in 2019 to present. ==Feminism and riot grrrl culture==

Riot grrrl culture is often associated with third wave feminism, which also grew rapidly during the same early nineties timeframe. The movement of third-wave feminism focused less on laws and the political process and more on individual identity. The movement of third-wave feminism is said to have arisen out of the realization that women are of many colors, ethnicities, nationalities, religions and cultural backgrounds. While multiracial feminist movements have existed prior to the third wave, the proliferation of technology during the early nineties allowed for easier networking amongst feminist groups. Riot grrrls used media spectacle to their advantage, crafting works from oppositional technologies such as zines, videography, and music. The riot grrrl movement allowed women their own space to create music and make political statements about the issues they were facing in the punk rock community and in society. They used their music and publications to express their views on issues such as patriarchy, double standards against women, rape, domestic abuse, sexuality, and female empowerment. An undated, typewritten Bikini Kill tour flier answers the question "What is Riot grrrl?" with: "[Riot Grrrl is ...] Because we girls want to create mediums that speak to US. We are tired of boy band after boy band, boy zine after boy zine, boy punk after boy punk after boy... Because we need to talk to each other. Communication and inclusion are key. We will never know if we don't break the code of silence... Because in every form of media we see ourselves slapped, decapitated, laughed at, objectified, raped, trivialized, pushed, ignored, stereotyped, kicked, scorned, molested, silenced, invalidated, knifed, shot, choked and killed. Because a safe space needs to be created for girls where we can open our eyes and reach out to each other without being threatened by this sexist society and our day to day bullshit." The riot grrrl movement encouraged women to develop their own place in a male-dominated punk scene. Punk shows had come to be understood as places where "women could make their way to the front of the crowd into the mosh pit, but had to 'fight ten times harder' because they were female, and sexually charged violence such as groping and rape had been reported." In contrast, riot grrrl bands would often actively invite members of the audience to talk about their personal experiences with sensitive issues such as sexual abuse, pass out lyric sheets to everyone in the audience, and often demand that the mosh boys move to the back or side to allow space in front for the girls in the audience. Kathi Wilcox said in a fanzine interview: Kathleen Hanna later wrote: "It was also super schizo to play shows where guys threw stuff at us, called us cunts and yelled "take it off" during our set, and then the next night perform for throngs of amazing girls singing along to every lyric and cheering after every song." Many men were supporters of riot grrrl culture and acts. Calvin Johnson and Slim Moon have been instrumental in publishing riot grrrl bands on the labels they founded, K Records and Kill Rock Stars respectively. Alec Empire of Atari Teenage Riot said, "I was totally into the riot grrrl music, I see it as a very important form of expression. I learned a lot from that, way more maybe than from 'male' punk rock." Dave Grohl and Kurt Cobain dated Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail (also respectively), and often played with Bikini Kill even after splitting with them; Kurt was a big fan of the Slits and even convinced the Raincoats to reform. He once said, "The future of rock belongs to women." Many riot grrrl bands included male band members, such as Billy Karren of Bikini Kill or Jon Slade and Chris Rawley of Huggy Bear. The New-York Historical Society's documentation on "Women & the American Story" said that "the riot grrrl movement struggled to recognize intersectionality" and therefore many women of color left when they felt their voices weren't being heard. In 1997, punk musician Tamar-kali Brown created Sista Grrrl by and for Black women and girls, in response to the marginalization of women of color in riot grrrl. Sista Grrrls was the name for Tamar-kali's New York punk group with three other Black women: Simi Stone, Honeychild Coleman, and Maya Sokora. Scholars have argued that riot grrrl remains relevant on a global scale because it engages with "everyday politics" or the ways that people in their day-to-day activities participate in or experience power dynamics. It allows grrrls to connect their interests and contemporary lives to urgent political issues in personal and subversive ways. One way riot grrrl achieved this was through language that centered young women and girls as political subjects with agency and power, in a way that broke away from historical models of feminism and radical speech. This "history-in-the-making" approach aligned well with riot grrrl's devotion to DIY. These zines were archived by zinewiki.com, and Riot Grrrl Press, started in Washington DC in 1992 by Erika Reinstein & May Summer. Bands often attempted to reappropriate derogatory phrases like "cunt", "bitch", "dyke", and "slut", writing them proudly on their skin with lipstick or fat markers. Kathleen Hanna was writing "slut" on her stomach at shows as early as 1992, intentionally fusing feminist art and activist practices. Bikceem, from New Jersey, had found out about riot grrrl zines after a friend became Tobi Vail's roommate in Olympia. Bikceem's band Gunk performed at the first Riot Grrrl Convention in D.C. in 1992. In GUNK #4 Bikceem wrote about the politics of being a Black grrrl, "I'll go out somewhere with my friends who all look equally as weird as me, but say we get hassled by the cops for skating or something. That cop is going to remember my face a lot clearer than say one of my white girlfriends." In 1997, Nguyen published the compilation zine Evolution of a Race Riot. Websites such as Gurl.com and ChickClick were created out of dissatisfaction of media available to women and parodied content found in mainstream teen and women's magazines. Both Gurl.com and ChickClick had a message board and free web hosting services, where users could also create and contribute their own content, which in turn created a reciprocal relationship where women could also be seen as creators rather than consumers. Starting during the fall of 2010, the "Riot Grrrl Collection" has been housed at New York University's Fales Library and Special Collections, as "The Fales Riot Grrrl Collection". The collection's primary mandate is "to collect unique materials that provide documentation of the creative process of individuals and the chronology of the [Riot Grrrl] movement overall". Kathleen Hanna, Molly Neuman, Allison Wolfe, Ramdasha Bikceem, Johanna Fateman, Becca Albee (co-founder of Excuse 17), Lucy Thane, Tammy Rae Carland, and Mimi Thi Nguyen have donated primary source material. ==Media misconceptions==

At first most Riot Grrrls were open to using the media as a way to spread the word to other girls. Shortly thereafter, however, feeling that they had been misrepresented, trivialized, commercialized, and made into a new fad and trend, the Riot Grrrls changed their minds.As media attention increasingly focused on the emerging grunge and alternative rock scene in the mid-nineties, the term "Riot Grrrl" was often used as a catchall for female-fronted bands and applied to less political alternative rock acts. While many female-centric or all-women rock bands, such as Frightwig, Hole, 7 Year Bitch, Babes in Toyland, the Breeders, the Gits, Lunachicks, Liz Phair, Veruca Salt, and L7, shared similar DIY tactics and feminist ideologies with the riot grrrl movement, not all of these acts self-identified with the riot grrrl label. Courtney Love, in particular, felt the need to disassociate with Riot Grrrl as a whole:As supportive as I am of them, there's a faction that says, "We don't know how to play, but we're not going to follow your male-measured idea of what good is." Look, good is Led Zeppelin II. That's fucking good. And I'm not going to sit here and say you're a good band when you suck. They're like, "But we're entitled to suck." Really? We work so hard to get good at what we do without covering up who we are as women. Newsweek's headline was "Riot Girl is feminism with a loud happy face dotting the 'i'," and USA Today ran a headline saying "From hundreds of once pink, frilly bedrooms comes the young feminist revolution." Hopper, later the author of The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, said, "Some people were really upset because I talked to mainstream media about what I felt riot grrrl was...At the time there was much more of a chasm between the underground and the mainstream and people didn't want mainstream girls showing up to this, and I just thought, I didn't want to be part of something that wasn't for all women." Sharon Cheslow stated in EMP's Riot Grrrl Retrospective documentary: There were a lot of very important ideas that I think the mainstream media couldn't handle, so it was easier to focus on the fact that these were girls who were wearing barrettes in their hair or writing 'slut' on their stomach. Corin Tucker stated: I think it was deliberate that we were made to look like we were just ridiculous girls parading around in our underwear. They refused to do serious interviews with us, they misprinted what we had to say, they would take our articles, and our fanzines, and our essays and take them out of context. We wrote a lot about sexual abuse and sexual assault for teenagers and young women. I think those are really important concepts that the media never addressed. Other female-fronted punk bands, such as Spitboy, were less comfortable with the childhood-centered issues of much of the riot grrrl aesthetic, but nonetheless dealt explicitly with feminist and related issues as well. Lesbian-centric Queercore bands, such as Fifth Column, Tribe 8, Adickdid, the Third Sex, Excuse 17, and Team Dresch, wrote songs dealing with matters specific to women and their position in society, exploring issues such as both sexual and gender identity. A documentary film put together by a San Diego psychiatrist, Dr. Lisa Rose Apramian, Not Bad for a Girl, explored some of these issues in interviews with many of the musicians in the riot grrrl scene at the time. == Criticism ==

The "Riot Grrrl" movement received criticism for not being inclusive enough. Emily White wrote for the Chicago Reader in 1992, "Riot Girls are often accused of being separatist: they want to form a life away from men and invent 'girl culture.'" One major argument was that the movement focused on middle-class white women, alienating other kinds of women. This criticism emerged early in the movement. In 1993, Ramdasha Bikceem wrote in her zine, Gunk, Riot grrrl calls for change, but I question who it's including ... I see Riot Grrrl growing very closed to a very few i.e. white middle class punk girls. Riot grrrl faced similar issues as the original punk scene it was protesting against, in terms of its lack of intersectionality. Black women, specifically, did not feel the counterculture was a safe-space to express their lived experiences, anger, and art. Some have suggested that, while riot grrrl bands worked to ensure their shows were safe spaces in which women could find solidarity and create their own subculture, some higher-profile riot grrrl bands participated in the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, a trans-exclusionary event that had a "womyn-born womyn" policy. Former members of Le Tigre saw protests at their shows for having participated in the festival in 2001 and 2005. However, Kathleen Hanna stated directly that she supported trans rights on her own Twitter account. Additionally, JD Samson, another former member of Le Tigre, is genderfluid. Kathleen Hanna acknowledged some of these critiques in her zine ''April Fools' Day''. When describing her traumas related to addiction, she said: "It seems to me that each addict functions within his/her one context in terms of race, gender, location, class, personality, access, etc. … so it would be ridiculous for me to try and write a 'manifesto' or a 'universal account' of how addiction works." Hanna followed a legacy of privilege-checking in riot grrrl culture and the community commitment to differentiate between personal experiences and trauma from systemic oppression when necessary. Riot grrrl activists have often tended to create themselves into marginalized subjects to strengthen their credibility within the subculture without recognizing their positionality. ==Legacy and resurgence==

of Excuse 17 and Sleater-Kinney in 2005 In the foreword to the 2007 book, Riot Grrrl: Revolution Girl Style Now!, Beth Ditto writes of riot grrrl, A movement formed by a handful of girls who felt empowered, who were angry, hilarious, and extreme through and for each other. Built on the floors of strangers' living rooms, tops of Xerox machines, snail mail, word of mouth and mixtapes, riot grrrl reinvented punk. Additionally, Ditto writes about riot grrrl's influence on her personally and on her music. She muses on the meaning of the movement for her generation, Until I found riot grrrl, or riot grrrl found me I was just another Gloria Steinem NOW feminist trying to take a stand in shop class. Now I am a musician, a writer, a whole person. In 2010 Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution became the first published history of the riot grrrl movement. The author had also attended Riot Grrrl meetings herself. As of 2019 there were approximately ten weekly riot grrrl meetings held nationwide and bands multiplying faster than can be counted.|alt=|leftIn 2013 Astria Suparak and Ceci Moss curated Alien She, an exhibition examining the impact of Riot Grrrl on artists and cultural producers. Alien She focuses on seven people whose visual art practices were informed by their contact with Riot Grrrl. Many of them work in multiple disciplines, such as sculpture, installation, video, documentary film, photography, drawing, printmaking, new media, social practice, curation, music, writing and performance—a reflection of the movement's artistic diversity and mutability. It opened September 2013 at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and ran through February the following year. It visited four subsequent art spaces (Vox Populi in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March – April 2014; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, October 2014 – January 2015; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California, February – May 2015; and Pacific Northwest College of Art: 511 Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon, September 3, 2015 – January 9, 2016). The term "grrrl" (or "grrl") itself has since been co-opted or used by agencies as diverse as advocacy on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (GRRL POWER 1.0 5-PACK / Memetics for the Ladies) and a roller derby league in Singapore. The resurgence of riot grrrl is clearly visible in fourth-wave feminists worldwide who cite the original movement as an interest or influence on their lives and/or their work. Some of them are self-proclaimed riot grrrls while others consider themselves simply admirers or fans. In an age where Internet is the most accessible platform for individuals to express themselves, the fourth-wave riot grrrl community has risen in popularity in recent years. Not only do these online platforms capture discussion regarding larger topics of intersectional oppression, but they also provide space for budding feminists to express smaller issues, such as the successes and challenges of their everyday lives. Young feminists have harnessed the internet as a forum for self-determinism and genuine, open expression: a core part of the riot grrrl message that allows young adults room to decide for themselves who they are. In January 2019, Bikini Kill announced their reunion tour for the first time since their last show in Tokyo 22 years ago. The Guardian stated in an article about reunion that the once-underground riot grrrl movement has gone mainstream due to word of mouth from celebrities and the increased attention to other modern feminist developments such as the Me Too movement. In the same article, drummer Tobi Vail stated her frustration with lack of social progress related to feminism. and its globalization was also aided by the distribution of zines across Asia, Europe, and South America. The discovery of riot grrrl provided women across the globe with access to an outlet that challenged the dominant culture's attitudes toward the female body through a form of self-expression One of the most well-known bands to come out of the globalization of the riot grrrl movement is Pussy Riot, a Russian group formed in 2011 who self-identify as twenty-first century Russian riot grrrls. Pussy Riot first came to popular media attention in 2012 when they staged a protest performance of "Punk Prayer" at the altar of Moscow's largest cathedral. The song includes an appeal to the Virgin Mary to banish Putin. All three members of Pussy Riot were convicted of hooliganism and sentenced two years' imprisonment for desecration of the church. Pussy Riot performs music with themes of feminism, LGBT rights, and opposition to the policies of Russian president Vladimir Putin, whom the group considers to be a dictator. ==See also==