Punk singer, artist, and the front-woman of the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, Kathleen Hanna has spent the last three decades as a trailblazer in the punk feminist movement. She joins guest host Roxane Gay to talk about her new memoir and storied career making art and music.
Roxane Gay:
You can’t tell the story of third wave feminism, punk music, and the Riot Grrrl Movement without telling the story of Kathleen Hanna. Hanna was the lead singer of Bikini Kill and later the bands La Tigre and the Julie Ruin. Over the past 30 years, Hanna has made music and art. She has made necessary joyful, fierce, angry noise. Her feminism, her politics and her activism have deeply informed her music, and her music continues to inform the culture. Now, for the first time, she tells her own story in a new memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk. Kathleen Hanna, welcome to Design Matters.
Kathleen Hanna:
I am very, very happy to be here.
Roxane Gay:
As am I. This is a really exciting day for me. In the prologue of Rebel Girl, you share that you didn’t want your memoir to be a list of all your traumas, and so you left a lot of that on the cutting floor. And as someone who often writes about trauma, that was really interesting to me because a lot of times when we talk about trauma, people assume that trauma is the only thing that defines our lives. And especially for women, that reduces us to suffering and nothing more. So I would love for you to talk a bit more about why you made that decision to leave some of that on the cutting room floor. And then how do you tell your story without some of those stories?
Kathleen Hanna:
That’s a great question. The book was 600 pages because I wrote it in TextEdit. Yes, I am a first time author, so I wrote my book in TextEdit. And when my friend Ada Calhoun, who’s a fantastic editor and writer herself, put it into the correct format, she said, “Your book is not 325 pages like you thought. It’s over 600.” So with that in mind, we just had to cut a lot anyway. And I had already started thinking about how much trauma there was and how an audience could deal with it, even though I was really writing it without thinking of an audience. I just wrote it and made it for myself as something I felt I needed to do. But I also didn’t want to retraumatize other people. And a part of the process was me realizing that I always look at the negative.
And in kind of recovering these stories about my life that were less than stellar, I also had to go back in and find the joy. And in doing that, it not only balanced out the book, but it balanced out me as a person and gave me a new attitude towards gratitude. And so I wanted to make sure that I didn’t cut too much because I wasn’t just raped once. I was raped many times. And there’s actually some rapes that are not even in the book. My whole joke was like, “I left an ass raped out. Come on. What more do you want from me?” But one of the things that I’ve been dealing with last week because I’ve been doing a lot of interviews, and I’m sure you know this from being on press junkets yourself, weird themes will come up where people will just in one day ask you the same question that you haven’t been asked.
For whatever reason, the question that was asked of me kept bringing up the cumulative effect of the massive amounts of sexual harassment that I had to contend with at venues all over the world for years and years and years up into Le Tigre where in the book I make it look a little sunnier of like, “Now we’re finally going to get a sound person and not have to deal with all this crap.” But we didn’t get a sound person until four years into the band. So I was still dealing with a sound man who threatened to stab me. And then when I go and I look for help from the people who work there, they’re like, “Oh, he’s a harmless weirdo.”
Roxane Gay:
There are a lot of supposedly harmless weirdos-
Kathleen Hanna:
Harmless weirdos.
Roxane Gay:
… in the world
Kathleen Hanna:
Yeah. Until they shoot up a classroom and say feminist against the wall.
Roxane Gay:
Correct.
Kathleen Hanna:
Yeah. But dealing with stuff like that cumulatively ended up being its own massive trauma that I’m still wading through today. The fact of walking into each venue and having a different form of sexual harassment happen or just hatred of women or the angry feminist thing precedes you to the venue and men who feel threatened by it are then just, they’re already ready. They live in this town, so they’re ready for you. They’re ready to flip all the seats up in the women’s bathroom because they think it’s funny, which is not a big deal. But when it cumulatively is constantly happening-
Roxane Gay:
Absolutely.
Kathleen Hanna:
… plus, they won’t do sound for you because they think you don’t know how to hold a mic and you have to walk through the drawings of dicks and women being assaulted on the wall next to people’s band names and sit there while you’re waiting to go on stage and have bouncers threaten you, it’s like then you got to go on stage and pretend everything’s okay. And I do feel like that’s in the book, but recently I’ve been sort of like, “I wish I had a page that was just a list of the worst of the worst to give that feeling of being dehumanized, constantly treated like you’re not supposed to be there” that adds up.
Roxane Gay:
How do you, especially when you were younger, how do you each day find the strength, the energy, the armor to go back into another venue knowing that you’re going to bring with you the accumulation of all of these macro and microaggressions and that you’re going to get more and then you also have to perform and make music and entertain? How did you do that day after day and year after year?
Kathleen Hanna:
I mean, I just called to say I have no boundaries, you know?
Roxane Gay:
Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm.
Kathleen Hanna:
I feel like self-care wasn’t a conversation. I felt like I’d been kind of tamped down until I was 17 and I left home and then I started writing stuff and making lyrics and poetry, and I all of a sudden came alive. That spirit of wanting to find the connection between my lyrics and my singing and other women was so strong. And I had a lot of workarounds. I told myself, “If people didn’t hate you, you wouldn’t be on the right path.” I did have these ways of seeing it didn’t have anything to do with me and reminding myself, “This has nothing to do with me.” And then it was the being on stage. I mean, I really would, as Valerie Salinas said, “Swim through a river of shit” just to be on stage performing. And seeing 16-year-old girls cry in the front row while they sing your lyrics, kind of an experience you don’t want to miss if you ever have the opportunity to do it.
Roxane Gay:
Sure. For sure. One of the things that struck me, especially early on in Rebel Girl, was your articulation that you finally get to tell your own story. And as someone who has been in the public eye for decades now, what does that power feel like to be able to articulate your own story instead of having other people do it for you, whether it’s fans or journalists or anything like that? And then how do you navigate other people telling your story and also thinking that they know the whole of your story?
Kathleen Hanna:
I think I’ll tackle that first one first. I have many policies in my head as if I’m a corporation. And one of my policies is I don’t speak to nonsense. So if my story is told wrong by somebody else, I’m not going to get pulled off the path I’m on to deal with it because it’s a time waster for me and I just don’t care enough. I feel like I learned very early on through some scrapes with public scrutiny in the press that there’s no point, there’s no justice. You know what I mean? You’re not going to get the justice through this mediated system of the press. You’re not ever going to be able to tell your story unmediated or your side of the story. So I just sort of don’t really care about when people tell a narrative about me that’s incorrect because sometimes it might hurt my feelings or something, and so I write about it in my journal and then I walk away. Because I think it’s important to give yourself space to vent about it to friends or-
Roxane Gay:
Absolutely,
Kathleen Hanna:
… whatever, and not be like, “I have to be so thick-skinned that I don’t feel anything and I just don’t ever take it personally.” Because I do sometimes take it personally. And on a bad day where I’m feeling really insecure, I might even seek out bad things people say about me, which is a whole other can of worms, but that doesn’t mean I need to publicly speak back to it.
And then the second part is I really didn’t write this book to set the record straight in any way, shape or form. I wrote it because I had to. I wrote it because I did feel silenced, and so that’s a part of it. And it’s a really fine line between setting the record straight and telling your story if you’re somebody who’s been in the public eye, which I’m sure you relate to.
So I told it for myself without an audience in mind just because I needed to turn my life into some kind of narrative so I could wrap it in a bow and leave it. And I could say, if you want an explanation of how I was involved in Riot Grrrl, turn to page 176. It feels good to just say this stuff because you go through all this stuff and you know it’s like a really advanced form of lyric writing. In writing a song, I really learned that if there was somebody who was bullying me in a really particularly horrible way and I didn’t want to give them that tension, I didn’t want to turn around to the person doing spitballs at my head and give them the attention that they were trying to get. And with a lot of men, they do stuff because they want to see the look of humiliation and fear on women’s faces, and they get off on it. And so I don’t want to give them that.
So part of the thing that I would do is just write a fucking mean song about them. And then I get royalties on that song, “Fuck you. Thanks for the inspiration.” There’s something really powerful to me in that. And so there’s something really powerful for me in writing out my story. And I’m terrified to say this because women and all marginalized people supposedly only spew and rant, like everything’s autobiographical. But I did just write it all down and vomit on the page and all of that stuff for 600 pages, and then I went back first with a butcher knife and then with a scalpel, and I was really strategic about the way I edited it. And that felt like I’m taking these things that were once very painful and I’m making them into something cohesive.
Once I put it all out, I was able to look at it and look at myself as a character and really kind of grapple with, “Whoa, that was not okay. What happened in that situation or what I did in that situation was not okay.” And so I was able to look back at things as I was editing especially and grapple with my successes and failures.
Roxane Gay:
Yes. Writing a memoir is very humbling and very eye-opening in the ways that it encourages you to do that reckoning not only with yourself but with others. One of the stories that really struck me was, in college, how you shared how your peers just couldn’t seem to offer you and other women meaningful artistic critique while you were creating meaningful art. And at the core of that is really not being taken seriously, which women continue to deal with. So how did you learn how to take yourself seriously as an artist?
Kathleen Hanna:
I was really lucky that these weirdo photographer girls went to my school and I looked up to them and we started a group outside of school where we were sharing articles from High Performance Magazine. I found a bunch of stack of heresies in an old bookstore that I read. And so I was really getting support from written material that I was finding and from friends in real time who were having the same experiences. And once I found one person to say, “Hey, the way I’m being treated like in my visual art classes, this is what’s happening,” and then another woman said, “Oh, that’s happening to me too,” then it became, there’s eight of us. And then we started meeting, and then I got the support that I needed. And I really started realizing how much more there was for me outside of college than there kind of was within it. Although I’m so happy I got to go.
Roxane Gay:
Yeah, of course, of course. And it is always interesting to realize what you can learn in the classroom and then of course what you can learn beyond the classroom.
I’ve been watching a lot of your performances over the past week. And particularly in the earlier ones, I was struck by the unapologetic anger that you brought to the stage. Women are often told that anger is unbecoming and that there’s just no place in proper womanhood for it, and yet you make space for anger in your work, which is incredibly refreshing. How did you come to embrace and celebrate anger, especially on stage where anger is sometimes being given to you from the audience and you just seem to give it right back?
Kathleen Hanna:
I mean, in a way, you answered the question for me. It’s like walking into a club and getting treated like crap, and then having guys yell, “Shut up” and take it off during the whole performance. How can I not get angry? I wasn’t making strategic artistic choices at that point in my life. I did kind of consider myself a feminist performance artist first and a singer second. And I did understand that I wasn’t performing rage, I was actually feeling rage. And that publicly feeling that rage was cathartic to other people.
Roxane Gay:
Absolutely.
Kathleen Hanna:
I don’t know. I always go back to this story about when Arthur Ashe first saw John McEnroe play and John McEnroe was such a brat yelling back at the refs and calling them names. And Arthur Ashe, who was one of I guess the first really famous Black tennis players, didn’t have that ability because he had to walk into every room and be the ambassador and be kind and be generous. And in his book, he talked about how he saw John McEnroe just being a brat. I thought at that point in the book, it was going to be like, “And I felt bitter and I felt like I’d been robbed and I had to always hold my tongue and look at this white kid with all this privilege who’s doing this shit.” But no, he was attracted to McEnroe and wanted to coach him because he wanted to be close to that.
I always thought that was a really amazing thing. And I feel like… I mean, definitely I’m nowhere near an Arthur Ashe, but I always felt like it was really telling that it’s like to see someone, whoever, having rage when you so needed to express it can be cathartic and can be something that’s almost like you’re repelled by it, but also attracted to it.
Roxane Gay:
When you started seeing girls to the front at concerts, it was really revolutionary. And as someone who we’re very close in age, I remember how horrible concerts were for girls getting just shoved out of the front and getting harmed in ways that were sometimes intentional and sometimes not, but harm was done nonetheless. Did you know how revolutionary it was to create that space for girls to come to the front?
Kathleen Hanna:
I didn’t really think of it as revolutionary. I remember thinking like, “Punk wasn’t meeting up to my expectations.” I was like, “I came here because I wanted something that was different than the mainstream, and I wanted a place that was progressively political.” I wanted a place that was challenging classism, not in lazy ways like you have to charge $5 at every show, because that can exclude musicians who don’t have money and can’t afford to play $5 shows for their entire careers. But what I found was kind of more of the same. I was just like, “Well, we have to change things.”
And also I always thought a lot of the stuff that we did was really, I wouldn’t say banal, I don’t know if that’s the right word, but I didn’t feel like it was very revolutionary at all. I felt like it was just totally normal. I was like, “Okay, there’s only four girls here and they’re all in the back and we’re playing music directed at women and they can’t see.” We want them to start bands, so we have bands to play with on tour because there’s not enough girl bands, though there were a lot of great ones at that time and before. So I’m standing there and I just think, “Oh, I’ll invite them to the front.” I didn’t write about it, an essay about it or anything like that. It was just like, “Hey, come up here.” And then it started to become a thing and
it worked.
People were so angry, men were so angry about it. I mean, we had to write pamphlets that we handed out that said, “This show is an experiment. If you’re a straight white male…” And we didn’t say cis back then, we would hand out these fires that were like, “Here’s why we’re doing this. Please let this experiment happen.” Because the violence would just erupt, and we were trying to do anything to keep more violence from happening.
I mean the anger, it was very intense, but it changed over time to be the more girls came up front and then the more violent the men in the crowd became, the more they became actually our security team because we didn’t have management security. We often had a roadie, but no tour manager, no sound person. We needed them. It wasn’t just this altruistic, “Let’s change the scene thing.” It was also like we would ask them to walk us out to the band after the show and they would protect us from guys who were trying to get up on stage.
I didn’t like putting other girls in that position, but it just is how it turned out. And then it became a schtick. Then it became me cosplay. It felt like cosplay. It was like I’m looking out and I’m seeing audiences that used to be 1% female or female identified, non-binary. I saw all of a sudden so many more people who weren’t straight white dudes at the shows taking up the front, and I didn’t need to say it anymore because we’d gotten bigger and more people were coming and more women were coming. And so it started to be like, “Well, you have to say it because that’s your thing.” And I was like, “I just believe everything should be kind of site specific.” And to sound like a corny MFA candidate, but I was like, “I’ll say that if it makes sense. But if it doesn’t make any sense, it can be dangerous in a crowd of now 500 to 1,000 people to try and get people to change this pact. To try and get people to move around the room can actually create safety problems.”
And so it wasn’t safe to say. And there were already, as I mentioned, a lot of women in the front, so I wouldn’t say it. And then sometimes people would get angry at me and I’m like, “I’m not going to cosplay this angry woman, trope, who always says the same thing.” And then now at the reunion, it’s taken on a whole new meaning.
Roxane Gay:
Oh, I’m sure. I’m sure.
Kathleen Hanna:
Yeah.
Roxane Gay:
Especially then, but also now, when you are a public person, when you have a persona that people think is you, they expect things, whether it’s to say girls to the front or to be angry or to do any of the things that you are known by. How do you resist that pressure to be what people want you to be and instead just be yourself? Or, do you?
Kathleen Hanna:
Ooh, that “Do you?” is really.-
Roxane Gay:
It’s so hard to do.
Kathleen Hanna:
… like a mystery novel. I was like, “Or do I?” I’m really lucky I have a really great support system of friends and I have a dog, and my dog doesn’t care if I just played a show or wrote a book. And so I don’t really see myself as iconic. How sick are you of hearing the word iconic? I mean, is it just me?
Roxane Gay:
No, it’s funny because my next question was how does it feel to be called a feminist icon? Some people would see it as a blessing, but it’s kind of a burden to have that label put on you when like you said, your dog doesn’t care. You’re just Kathleen to your dog.
Kathleen Hanna:
And to me, I’m still the girl who went on tour thinking everybody was going to be like, “Oh, yay!” They’re actually bringing really obvious feminism to the table of punk. “Yay!” And that’s not how it went. But I’m still that person inside. I’m still that optimistic. “Everyone’s going to love this,” and then they don’t. And then I’m disappointed and then I just make more art. I mean, I dealt with a lot of disappointment through my life. I mean, I’ve written phrases that were like, Our fan team was called Girl Power, and then we saw as now it’s written on t-shirts at Target, and the Spice Girls use it and all that stuff. But I was able to look at things and be like, “You know what? I’m an artist. I can just keep making stuff.”
Roxane Gay:
Yeah, absolutely.
Kathleen Hanna:
I don’t care if it gets ripped off. I do get distressed by just branding in general. In the ’90s, before branding was kind of a concept that people were talking so much about, it was about hypocrisy and that word. My bandmate Toby came up with this phrase hypochrobrats, where she’s like, “We are hypocrites because we change and we grow and we’re brats. And we can be both.” I love the idea that just because you say that you’re politically progressive, or if you do that in your art in any way, what I have found in my life is that then it will become, “But you’re wearing leather shoes. But you did this.” And then it’ll become this whole thing where people are looking for a reason to tear you down, and so they’ll try to find the things that make you hypocritical to what they think your political viewpoint should be as a way to discredit you.
I just had to step away from that and be like, “I don’t care.” Because the most powerful thing I can do is be a three-dimensional person who changes publicly. The most powerful thing I can do is not stay on an indie label forever because that’s the expectation. Try being on a major label and then publicly talk about how I kind of hated it, it wasn’t my thing, and I really prefer to be on small indie labels and to work independently. But I had to try it to see. And if we get caught in some kind of brand mentality of like, “You’re outside your brand because you’re supposed to do this or do that,” it doesn’t allow us to change and grow. I want to do new things that I couldn’t just stay stuck in one sort of three paragraph thing that ends with “Girls kick ass.”
Roxane Gay:
In a lot of your concerts and in a lot of your work, you openly talked about sexual harassment and rape and the kinds of violence that women and non-binary people or really that everyone deals with, but particularly women. I know that that always encourages people to then share their own stories with you because you kind of open the door and you create this space of recognition. How did you handle and how do you handle carrying your own stories and then having to receive all of these stories from other people?
Kathleen Hanna:
I mean, for a long time I didn’t deal with my own story at all. I mean, really hard to admit, but I’m 55 years old and I’m still processing a lot of this stuff, partially because I prioritize the care of others over the care of myself, which is a familiar story to a lot of people.
At first, when I was touring with my band Viva Knievel, which was pre-Bikini Kill, I was working at a rape relief domestic violence shelter as a volunteer. And I had learned how to answer crisis phones and how to give resources to people, how to repeat kind of things back that women were saying and help them find their way to psychological and physical safety hopefully in the best case scenario.
So when I went on tour and there would just be two women at a show and I would talk about these forms of violence in between songs, they started coming up to me and saying, “I’ve never told anybody this.” And at first it was the biggest honor. I felt like a woman seeing me on stage and hearing me talk about something and then feeling safe enough to share their story with me felt like I was really honored that they trusted me and I was honored to be given access to their lives.
I would do all that I could to pass on resources and really try to get them to call a local rape relief or domestic violence shelter because that ended up being a huge thing that people were like, “I couldn’t call a place like that because it’s for people with more serious things than me.” And these are women who’ve been gang raped who are telling me someone else has a more serious story. Everybody else has a more serious story. Your pain doesn’t not exist because someone else has it worse. And not dealing with your own trauma isn’t going to make that person’s situation any better. Dealing with your trauma is going to give you the space that you can help other people. But anyways, sorry, I’m going off. First it was a-
Roxane Gay:
No, it’s an important thing.
Kathleen Hanna:
It was a total honor. And after seven years of it, it was no longer feeling like such an honor. It was feeling like a burden. And that’s not to say that I didn’t love every conversation that I had with women who came to our shows. It’s to say that it started taking its toll on my mental health. So in Le Tigre, I started pulling back. We put up a website that had resources not only having to do with sexual assault and domestic violence, but also coming out, kids who were coming out to their parents. I got so much mail in Bikini Kill, kids coming out to their parents and kicked out and feeling absolutely devastated and alone.
And so in Le Tigre, we also put up resources for queer kids. And it felt really great. It felt really great to say, “You know what? I started to say I can do this so that I’m not pretending it’s not happening. This isn’t a big part of our fan base and we can support our fan base without them getting personal one-on-one, face to face contact with me because I was exhausted and I wanted to spend more time on my art.” And that allowed us to have visuals and costumes and dance. Because I wasn’t so wrapped up in the stories of other people and trying to get them help all the time, I was able to protect myself emotionally and be a better performer.
Roxane Gay:
It seems like you’re able to reinvent yourself creatively and to try new things when one project sort of comes to an end and you just seem to be able to throw yourself into something else. How has this ability to reinvent challenged you as a songwriter and now even as a book writer, and how do you find the energy to stay creative?
Kathleen Hanna:
That’s so hard.
Roxane Gay:
It is hard.
Kathleen Hanna:
Like, I don’t know. I mean, I’ve been really fortunate in that I don’t want to give advice because my life is kind of a mess. But I’ve always searched for great collaborators and I’ve always chosen intellect and personality and humor over craft or formal ability in my collaborators. That has been really successful for me because I’ve worked with people who were learning something new together.
I love the beginning of a project. It’s like the butterflies of when you’re first in love. The thing I loved about punk was that anybody can do it, idea. Of course, it was frustrating when I found out anyone meant white guys could get up there and not know how to play their instruments, but if girls did it, it was like, “You guys better go back and take some lessons because you suck.” But I’ve always sort of loved messing with authenticity after being called fake, a fake band for so long, like, “You’re not a real band. You’re just getting attention because you’re women or because you hate men” or whatever.
Roxane Gay:
Okay.
Kathleen Hanna:
Yeah, fine. And then in Le Tigre, I got to challenge the notions of authenticity by not having a live drummer and using backup tracks and having costumes and goofy dances and being like, “I’m not going to be cool. I have no investment in cool. I want connection over cool.” And working with people who want connection over cool has given me the ability to sustain my art practice because it stays fun when you work with people like that.
The book was a bit harder. The book was more like, you know those little crème brûlée blowtorch things, like it’s like I had that going on my face all the time. I just felt so… You’ve written a memoir.
Roxane Gay:
I have.
Kathleen Hanna:
It can be like you get this creepy look on your face and you can’t talk to anybody. I just felt like I had to stop writing for large periods of time and take care of myself or try to. But yeah, I think that I’ve had sustainability and been able to change the medium because I love music and I really care about feminism and I care about changing the world and making the world a better place. And so mixing the stuff I care about with whatever medium I’m working in gives me the energy to continue because it’s not just empty formalist experiments, although I enjoy those as well.
Roxane Gay:
There’s something to be said for them. One of the things I read in an interview you did recently with Rolling Stone was when you talked about the writing process and navigating the isolation and of course having to deal with the fallibility of memory. How did you give yourself permission to have a fallible memory and understand the difference between truth and accuracy?
Kathleen Hanna:
Well, I was really lucky because Bikini Kill was touring while I wrote the book and Le Tigre as well, both bands got back together and reunited. And so during the process of writing, some of my breaks were to go on tour. And so I was able to talk to my bandmates about, “Hey, do you remember this happening?” And there were certain situations where bandmates would go, “It didn’t happen like that. It happened like this.” And to have two different people have two different stories, and then my story, it gave me a lot of courage because I was like, Sometimes I would be like, “Oh, okay, well that happened in Spain, so I’m going to mention it was in Spain.” But a lot of it was subjective. A lot of it was like, “Well, you saw it from that side of the stage and I saw it from this part of the stage” You know what I mean? We all saw it through our own different specific lenses. And I realized that as long as I wasn’t getting something entirely wrong, that it really was my opinion and my memory of what happened.
I did check large facts. I did check dates. I did do a lot of research to make sure that I wasn’t completely off. But finding that my bandmates remembered stuff I didn’t about certain situations, there were certain situations that I left out of the book where I actually took revenge on people, very small acts of revenge, but I wrote a note to someone who wronged me and was just like, “Let them have it” in red crayon. And I forgot that I even did that. And hearing that from my bandmates made me feel really satisfied because I didn’t remember that little mini act of speaking back to power. And so that was really helpful, but it was also like they didn’t care that I remembered it different. They weren’t mad or upset or we should all have the same experience of this. They were like, “Oh, well, that’s your opinion.” And us having different opinions actually made my opinion more powerful to me.
Roxane Gay:
What does writing allow that performance doesn’t?
Kathleen Hanna:
Wow. I will say this. The thing they have in common is that they’re both incredibly therapeutic for me personally. And in writing this book and in touring again, I’ve finally been able to say that out loud because the stereotype… I’ve been told my whole career, “What you do isn’t really art. It’s just therapy.” And when we live in opposition to stereotypes, I feel like I’m still relying on stereotypes to define myself. And so I’m just coming out and saying like… I don’t know if you know what EMDR is. It’s like this modality of a therapy that can help you kind of process memories and
put them in a place where it’s in your memory bank instead of your “it’s happening right now” bank. I’ve walked off-stage with Bikini Kill and with Le Tigre and felt like I just did EMDR. I felt like I left a bunch of really toxic crap on the stage. And I also felt like I left in a wake of joy.
I mean, the real difference to me is performance is so physical and I definitely am one of those above the neck thinkers that I stay in my head a lot and I don’t have the mind-body connection that of course I’m supposed to be striving for. I feel like I attain that to a tiny degree when I’m on stage and I’m able to dance and throw my body around and control where the air and my vocals are coming from in my body, which is a really interesting process of being kind of this human computer that I really enjoy the technical part of singing. And so there’s so much more physicality to being on stage.
The thing I love so much about writing is that I’m not being seen, physically seen. I like that I can just have a spaghetti stain on my shirt and my sweatpants and I can write anywhere. I don’t have to have an office. I don’t need a crew to do it. I don’t need a venue. I don’t need to drive somewhere far away. I don’t need to sit around for 12 hours to wait to write. I can do it whenever I want. I love that about it. I don’t like the isolation. I like the not being seen part, physically seen, and I like working alone and not having to do everything by committee, but my favorite part is actually when I hand it over to an editor and I start getting notes and it becomes collaborative because I just feel like by nature, I really enjoy the collaborative part. I like working with other people. I get lonely.
Roxane Gay:
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. As a writer, primarily, I love the alone part. That is great. I do also though love the collaboration because then I get to get out of my own head and out of this vacuum I’ve been in and get some real perspective. And I’m very fortunate to have an amazing editor and have always had really great editors to sort of keep me honest and to help me help myself, which I really appreciate because toward the end of writing a book, it can get very lonely and you’re just like, “Ugh, man, I don’t know what I just did. I just don’t know.”
The title of the memoir, Rebel Girl, has varied connotations, not only for you, but for your audience, I’m sure. How do you think about the idea of a rebel girl now versus when the song “Rebel Girl” first came out? And do you still see yourself as a rebel girl?
Kathleen Hanna:
I don’t.
Roxane Gay:
That’s interesting.
Kathleen Hanna:
I had weird things about calling it Rebel Girl because I’m not a girl anymore. I had weird things about calling it that, because I feel like the word “rebel” has a lot of negative connotations. It was originally a Joe Hill song actually about a female labor organizer, which I love that history of it. But it has become very feminist bumper sticker. “My other broom is a rebel girl,” or whatever. But it was a good title. And it’s a song my friend, James, who just put out an amazing book called Black Punk Now that I always want to plug because it’s one of those things that’s not only just an amazing book, but an instant classic, I was having lunch with him and he’s like, “You really need to call it Rebel Girl.”
My editor had been pushing for that. Everybody was saying, “That’s what you should call it.” And I was really resisting it, and then I was like, “But I did write that song and it is kind of the most popular song I wrote.” And “Deceptacon” isn’t… That’s another the second most popular song I ever wrote. And “Deceptacon” is not a great book title. It’s just a good title. And it’s a cute picture on the front. And why not? But I addressed it in the book, my ambivalence about that title and how I feel sometimes more like a dirty napkin than a rebel girl, but Dirty Napkin is a terrible title for a book.
Roxane Gay:
Yeah, I laughed out loud when I read that line.
Kathleen Hanna:
Oh, good.
Roxane Gay:
Yeah, no, I did because I thought, “Dirty Napkin. Actually, I would love to read a book called Dirty Napkin.”
Kathleen Hanna:
Maybe that’s part two, Rebel Girl Part II: Dirty Napkin.
Roxane Gay:
My last question is something I love to ask creative people. What do you like most about your work and how you do it?
Kathleen Hanna:
I really love the process of making stuff. I just like making stuff. I love making some instrumental music, putting it on my computer, and then just singing 20 different tracks of nonsense lyrics. Giving myself a week, coming back, and starting to listen and hear what is this song about. And that process of discovery and of being in the unknown place and not being so attached to language that I need it for survival, that I can let language be playful, I love it when that happens, when I become less attached to the direct meaning of words and more attached to the phrasing, the rhythm of them, and in singing the tone. That’s always a beautiful part of making work to me, is the way… All of my work has to do with language even when it’s visual. My relationship with language is the best part of my work, is to watch that relationship change and grow and sometimes be in a really bad place, and then we get together and we have a great relationship again. Those times are when it’s a song I want to sing over and over and over again.
Roxane Gay:
That’s awesome. And I always love hearing when people love the actual process of making and exploring and seeing what language can do. Kathleen Hanna, thank you so much for joining me on this episode of Design Matters. It was a real pleasure to talk with you.
Kathleen Hanna:
Oh, such a pleasure to talk with you.
Roxane Gay:
Kathleen Hanna’s memoir is Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you so much for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Roxane Gay. Debbie Millman will be back and is looking forward to talking with you again soon.