From Siouxsie Sioux to Suzie Bonebreaker: Femininity on the Edge

Last night I got to Talk-Back with other edgy women at the Hippodrome Theatre in downtown Gainesville. The event: a post-screening panel discussion on Gender, Feminism & Pop Culture: Riot Grrrl & Beyond. The film: The Punk Singer, a documentary about Kathleen Hanna and her high-energy bands (Bikini Kill and Le Tigre). Here I am with my co-panelists Trysh Travis and Hazel Levy. Riffing on my recent courses, I kicked off with these talking points about subcultures, punk women, and poetry:

• Dick Hebdige parses punk as “resistance through style,” reminding us that subcultures inhabit subterranean spaces, an Underworld. We pit punk expression against the mainstream. Underground is an edgier space than alternative.
• But what happens when punk and other subcultures gain followers and publicity? Hebdige calls it media recuperation: mainstreaming subcultures by making them look “both more and less exotic than they actually are…dangerous aliens and boisterous kids” (Subculture 97).
• Siouxsie Sioux later complained that the media had “distorted” punk, turning it into “cartoons.” Kathleen Hanna’s power lyrics and girlish sexuality got her noticed, but also got her labeled as wayward girl/girl victim. Bratmobile rocked the riot grrrls, but Bratz dolls followed in their wake.
  

  Siouxsie Sioux

• Must the mainstream domesticate punk expression? Does the safety pin always return to the nursery? Did Kathleen Hanna poach-proof her punk?
• Where do we find the inheritors of punk women and riot grrrls now? I located two sites: poetry on the page/stage, and poetry-in-motion.
• Poetry has always been part of punk. Baudelaire was a male Muse for the young Patti Smith. After all, he wrote the book on lust, disgust, piss, vomit, and urban edginess. Kathleen Hanna credits Kathy Acker as the Muse who beckoned her to exit the spoken word scene and be in a band.
• I find punk expression in the “new grrly, grotesque, burlesque poetics” that poet Arielle Greenberg named the Gurlesque. (She came of age in riot grrrl culture.) Case in point: Brenda Shaughnessy’s slap-down of romantic love poems, “I’m Over the Moon.” Hey diddle diddle, Shaughnessy is not moon-struck because “It’s like having a bad boyfriend in a good band.” This poem appears in the Gurlesque anthology.
• Finally, I see the poetics of punk femininity in roller derby–and here is where Gainesville Roller Rebels jammer Suzie Bonebreaker comes in. Talk about resistance through style: derby girls can have push-up bras & elbow pads, fishnets & tats, ruffled panties and roughhousing. Suzie Bonebreaker’s fave color is Sparkles!, and one of her signature moves is The Johnny Crash. I doubt that this derby girl can be Bratzed. After all, she’s already taken down Suzy Homemaker.  –MB
  

  Suzie Bonebreaker