Hi everyone, thanks for tuning in. My paper is too long, so I’m going to get right to it. The purpose of this paper and its broader idea is to formulate one of many possible responses to the question, What happened to feminism in indie rock after riot grrrl?1 In both mainstream criticism and in music scholarship, the conventional and to a large degree accurate narrative about feminism in popular music usually pivots away from rock around 1995, when The Spice Girls heralded the coming postfeminist turn.2 But while postfeminist pop music—from The Spice Girls to Avril Lavigne all the way to Taylor Swift—has clearly constituted the dominant articulation of feminism in popular music since that time, feminist indie rock has continued to exist, and more recently, to thrive.
Here, I am not concerned with describing the state of indie rock generally, nor do I want to limit...