Current Book Project
Double Dare Ya: A How-To History to Activate, Customize, and Authorize Your Feminist Self. Monograph on the art and visual culture of the Riot Grrrl movement of the 1990s and early 2000s.
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Project abstract:
In the 1990s and early 2000s, a generation of young Americans mobilized grassroots feminism to challenge the status quo of U.S. culture. Emerging from the punk scene, Riot Grrrl musicians played a catalytic role in this movement, but their influence extended far beyond music. Double Dare Ya: A How-To History to Activate, Customize, and Authorize Your Feminist Self examines Riot Grrrl as a diffuse, multimedia cultural revolution whose impact can be traced across art, visual culture, self-publishing, fashion, and community-building practices. The book channels the urgency and defiance of a movement shaped by American culture’s overt hostility toward feminism.
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The story centers on cultural outsiders—queer youth, art kids, baby feminists, and small-city creatives—whose numbers were limited but whose provocations generated expansive creative networks. United by a commitment to practicing gender, sexual, and racial equality, these young people rejected the homophobic, pro-life, and hypermasculine politics of the Culture Wars era. While inheriting organizational strategies from second-wave feminism, they also revised them. By the 1990s, universalized claims of womanhood and legalistic goals felt inadequate, especially as feminism was increasingly co-opted by corporate culture and undermined by the Christian Right. At the same time, feminist, queer, and critical race theories—shaped by decolonization, the AIDS crisis, and the War on Drugs—were entering universities, sharpening critiques of entrenched inequality and inspiring new models of resistance.
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Methodologically, the book combines academic scholarship with the ethos of a how-to manual, honoring third-wave feminism’s intellectual rigor while embracing DIY self-authorization. Its subtitle—activate, customize, authorize—maps the movement’s ethics: activism and consciousness-raising; feminism as an individualized, creative identity; and the collective claiming of space and legitimacy. Through four case-study chapters organized by medium, and interspersed with practical community-building instructions, Double Dare Ya positions Riot Grrrl as both a historical phenomenon and an enduring feminist methodology.