Voices from the Stacks: Riot Grrrl and the Jen and Sarah Wolfe Zine Collection

The following is written by Olson Graduate Research Assistant Kaylee Swinford and Instruction Graduate Assistant M Clark

On their 1995 track, “Criminal Boy,” female pop punk band Bunnygrunt begs the question: ‘what is a girl to do?’ The song chronicles a tough sister’s plans to break her all bark and no bite brother out of the slammer, which serves to be a fitting parallel to how the Riot Grrrl feminist movement of the 1990s got its start.

By the ’90s, the male-dominated U.S. punk movement, prominent in cities like Seattle and Portland, had been long ignoring the women participating in and moving forward the empowered anarchist agenda underlying punk music, media, and culture.

The Riot Grrrl Movement, aptly named and noted by its signature growling triple “r”, emerged as an opportunity for women in the punk scene to reclaim and redefine their identities as “girls” through expressions of anger, rage, and frustration. This subculture combined feminism, punk music, and politics by addressing issues of assault, patriarchy, anarchism, and female empowerment. The growth and success of the movement can be attributed to the multiple modalities used to spread their message: music, zines, art, and other DIYs that served as vessels for political activism.

Zines can be simply defined as self-written, often self-published and self-distributed “magazines” of narrow focus, created out of a desire to share. In the case of Riot Grrrl, this included, but was not limited to, punk and feminist literature, social commentary, news, gossip, music reviews, and other topical articles and musings.

Cover of *Panophobia*, zine made by Jen Wolfe

The University of Iowa’s Special Collections and Archives’ Sarah and Jen Wolfe Zine Collection provides a dynamic, wide-ranging, and intimate glimpse into the zines created and distributed during the Riot Grrrl era. Donors of the collection, sisters Sarah and Jen Wolfe, were active Riot Grrrls throughout the late ’90s and early 2000s, with Jen playing bass for the band Bunnygrunt in 1995–1998 and later publishing her own zines: Bunnygrunt and Panophobia. The sisters also operated their own mail-order distribution service, out of Iowa City, Septophilia, for zines and records both, leading to their large collection of various independent, underground, and occasionally personalized zines.

With an established interest in the DIY and communal nature of zines, the Wolfe sisters have curated a thorough and impressive collection that will continue to provide insight of a first-person narrative in both collecting and creating at the height of the Riot Grrrl movement.