CARLY KNASZAK
Staff Writer
Women’s Student Union hosted a “Riot Grrrl! Zine making workshop” on Thursday, March 12, in Williams Center room S204ABC.
The event featured history of the feminist punk movement and a webinar with Hazel Cills, who writes for the magazine Rookie.
The Riot Grrrl movement, according to New York Public Library’s website, “began in the early 1990s, when a group of women in Olympia, Washington, held a meeting to discuss how to address sexism in the punk scene. The women decided they wanted to start a ‘girl riot’ against a society they felt offered no validation of women’s experiences.” The bands that were part of the movement made songs that addressed issues such as rape, domestic abuse, sexuality, racism and female empowerment.
Some of the bands that were part of the Riot Grrrl movement were Bikini Kills, Babes in Toyland, Peaches and Jack Off Jill.
Feminism has had three waves over the course of history: the first wave refers to feminist activity during the 19th and early 20th century; the second wave was the years of feminism in the 60s to the 80s; and, finally, the third wave of feminism started in the 90s and has continued on to present time.
Cills was presented to the room on a projector for a Skype interactive interview. Cills attends college in New York City, is only twenty years old and has written for big name magazines such as Paper, Nylon, The Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Grantland, Buzzfeed and Wondering Sound. Rookie magazine is an online website for teenage girls run by feminists that talks about everything from violence to drugs and politics.
“I was born in a very privileged family. My mom was a feminist and was [a part of] the second wave of feminism. I grew up in a feminist household,”Cills said. “At the age of thirteen, that was when I started putting the pieces together, and that was when I knew I was a feminist.”
Cills explained that feminism comes down to equality among all genders. “There is no static definition of it,” Cills said.
Since Cills writes for mainly online magazines, she addressed how online magazines are taking over the media. “They are the future of journalism,” Cills said. “What happens online is that you have more space to write. You have a wider audience, and it is more for the masses.”
People in the present day use the Internet as an area to speak their minds about everything that is going in the world. Cills mentioned how there are a lot of feminist sites and blogs and, when it comes to the topic of feminism, many people will disagree with certain subjects; running a feminism-based blog is not for everyone unless the blogger is ready for harsh criticism at times.
“People are not going to like you. People sometimes think you are weird for saying you’re a feminist. People don’t want to hear about racist and sexist things if you call them out on it,” Cills said. “You need thick skin.
“Riot Grrrl feels over to me. It had a lot of problems. It was in the 90s. It did not include transgender people but was middle class, white college girls,” Cills said. “It was not the rosy utopia it got made out to be.”
An example of this was in the early 90s when Riot Grrrl declared a media blackout and refused to talk to the media because they believed they would misinterpret what the movement was. But when girls ended up speaking to the media, other girls from the movement would feel betrayed and would be angered when someone spoke out.
“My sisterhood includes people of all genders,” Cills said. The interview with Cills lasted for over a half an hour, and many people in the workshop got to ask her some questions before she signed off.
Magazines, glue, scissors and papers were then provided in the front of the room, and people began making their own zines.
Students who took part in the workshop wrote all over the Photoshopped models in the magazines, making the ads and articles more body-positive by adding quotes in markers on the pages and adding a more realistic vision to them.
“It was really cool. I’ve never Skyped with someone who writes professionally,” said Rae Ongley, secretary of the Women’s Student Union. “A lot of the meetings we have [are] talk-based, so it’s cool to have it being interactive and hands-on with making the zines,” Ongley said.
Virginia Croft, the social Chair of Women’s Student Union, actually met Cills at a concert last summer.
“It was a Cherry Glazerr concert in Brooklyn. I have been reading Rookie for years; I recognized her (Cills) at the show, went up to her and started talking with her,” Croft said. “She is a great person to look up to,” Croft said.
Croft also has her own radio show on campus called Third Wave, and it is on Wednesdays at 9 p.m. The show features feminist punk rock bands and any feminism-related news.
March is Women’s Herstory Month, and the Women’s and Gender Studies program and Women Student Union have presented free events beginning in the first week of March.
Some upcoming events include a talk on Wednesday, March 25, by Opal Tometi, the individual responsible for creating the popular hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. Wednesday, April 1, is “Be Part Of The Solution! With the League of Women Voters.” This event aims to encourage people to vote and to show that every vote matters and can make a difference.