Leah Perry presents a feminist history of Riot Grrrl and Kathleen Hanna in order to explore the hope and the limits of an individualist revolution in the 1990s. Perry takes on the performance of shamelessness, embodied in Hanna’s songs as well as through bodywriting, sex work, zine production, and other aspects of the riot grrrl movement. Ultimately Perry exposes the position of these performances: they are alternative youth culture for certain subjects which both work against and from within the structures of neoliberalism. Perry concludes that shamelessness might remain a promising space for an urgent anti-racist, feminist politics, if it can work to destabilize power and center women from oppressed groups.
Articles by Leah Perry
Leah Perry is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at SUNY-Empire State College. She received her doctorate from George Mason University’s Cultural Studies program, a Master’s of Arts from New York University in Humanities and Social Thought, a second Master’s of Arts and Religion from Yale Divinity School, and a Bachelor’s in English from Manhattanville College (magna cum laude). Her teaching and research interests encompass gender and sexuality, American Studies, immigration, race and ethnicity, and media and popular culture. Her book about the role of U.S. immigration discourses, gender, and media in the development of neoliberalism, entitled Neoliberal Crossings: U.S. Immigration, Gender, and Media, 1981-2001, is forthcoming in 2016 with New York University Press. Her work can also be seen in a recent special issue of the Cultural Studies Journal, Cultural Studies and/of the Law (2014), and she contributed a chapter about undocumented immigration to the forthcoming collection, American Shame: Stigma and the Body Politic.