The UH Women’s Resource Center and Girls Rock Camp Houston hosted author of “Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution,” Sara Marcus, for a public reading Tuesday evening at Cemo Hall.
The event was attended by not only UH students, but colleagues from other universities and schools as well.
Marcus began her guest lecture with a PowerPoint presentation that displayed slides of how the Riot Grrrl movement started and explained each slide in detail along the way.
“Riot Grrrl was about teen female rebellion,” Marcus said. “They talked about what happened politically and also capitalism in our female world.”
Marcus carefully walked the audience through her lecture by describing the female protests. She explained what the ladies stood for as well as what they wore — attire that has come to be associated with the punk rock music genre.
Marcus prepared to write her book by finding her sources through word of mouth. She eventually found numbers and connected with her subjects through phone calls.
Marcus mentioned how the revolution helped male dominating societies come to appreciate and respect female bands.
She explained how the Riot Girls stopped giving the media attention and got their audience’s attention by a series of magazines, or “zines” as they called them.
The zines were all focused on women creating their own culture and maintaining their control and overproduction of the movement.
She described how Riot Grrrl represented women who were stereotyped because of their gender, patriarchy and race.
Pictures of women in the movement camps depicted their independence and rebellious attitude; some of the photos consisted of them protesting with objectified messages written on their bodies.
The presentation ended with Marcus reading a prologue from “Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution.”
