Kathleen Hanna to launch memoir ‘Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk’
One of the central protagonists in the 1990s feminist punk movement, Kathleen Hanna, has revealed that her memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk, is complete and will arrive on May 24th, 2024 via the HarperCollins imprint Ecco.
The book traces Hanna’s remarkable life story from her early introduction to feminism through the formation of her most successful musical endeavour, Bikini Kill. She had been inspired to become a feminist from a young age by her mother, who was a firm believer in the cause.
When Hanna was just nine years old, her mother took her to a feminist rally in Washington DC, where she was transfixed by a speech made by political activist and feminist icon Gloria Steinem.
In an interview with Bust magazine in 2000, Hanna recalled: “My mom was a housewife and wasn’t somebody that people would think of as a feminist, and when Ms. magazine came out, we were incredibly inspired by it.
“I used to cut pictures out of it and make posters that said ‘Girls can do anything’, and stuff like that, and my mom was inspired to work at a basement of a church doing anti-domestic violence work. Then she took me to the Solidarity Day thing, and it was the first time I had ever been in a big crowd of women yelling, and it really made me want to do it forever.”
While a student at The Evergreen State College, Olympia, in the late 1980s, Hanna would pay her student fees with a job as a stripper. Meanwhile, she always found time to combine her love for the arts with her feminist ideology. She set up photography exhibitions with fellow students to communicate societal issues, including sexism, domestic violence, and the AIDS outbreak, a particularly prominent issue at the time.
Hanna’s work with Bikini Kill and later projects, such as Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin, has captured the imagination of countless male and female artists as a crucial voice in the music industry.
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