Rebel Girl: My Life As A Feminist Punk by Kathleen Hanna

Review by Douglas Baptie

A meeting with novelist Kathy Acker — who tells her she should be in a band — gives frustrated student artist Kathleen Hanna a direction but will not, ultimately, free her from the kind of familial dysfunction and misogyny that has coloured her life. Rebel Girl: My Life As A Feminist Punk might sound like a righteous manifesto but is rather an honest memoir of radical ambition, unresolved trauma and self-doubt.

Rather than an oasis of progressivism, college proves a disappointment and Hanna hopes that her band — Bikini Kill — whose mix of north west US garage punk and artier east coast dissonance will be a platform for empowerment and social change, but they are taunted (and worse) by punk audiences and other feminists questioning their motivations. That their shows become quasi-counselling sessions for lines of young women wishing to offload stories of abuse weighs heavy; even riot grrrl, the ‘girls to the front’ movement with which Hanna is most famously associated, falters on contradictions of internal strife and white, middle-class politics.

Illness bubbles beneath the surface of Rebel Girl and while her post-Bikini Kill solo work and electro punk project Le Tigre offer Hanna some creative respite, the demands of a life on the edge (financial, physical) bring an underlying condition to the surface and she spends much of the 2000s flitting in and out of the public’s consciousness as her health allows.

Sewn into the fabric of this compelling memoir’s anecdotal schema are those who counsel Hanna through her journey: the activists, musicians and artists who believe in her. They — and the family she builds with Beastie Boy Ad-Rock — are the bright souls in what can read as an oft-dispiriting litany of awful behaviours. For those who appreciate not just Hanna’s music but a well-crafted and candid rock biography, Rebel Girl… succeeds as an unremitting testament to trying.