The Stella Zine Riot Grrrl Collection: Notes from a conference paper
This post is a companion piece for a paper I presented on an archive at UGA.
This post is a companion piece for a paper I presented at the Atlanta Studies Symposium this week. It connects to some of my coursework this semester. If you'd like to read my most recent other paper companion post, on protest in World of Warcraft, you can read it here:
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The Stella Zine Riot Grrrl Collection at the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at UGA is a small but growing collection of objects donated by Stella Zine, who was the lead singer of an Atlanta-based queercore all-girl punk band called Pagan Holiday. This band was active from the late 80s through the early 2000s, and Stella played shows with Tribe 8, Pansy Division, and Sleater-Kinney. She also helped found Atlanta's first (possibly the South's first) Riot Grrrl chapter. This project is, in many ways, still catching up with her.
The SZRG collection includes zines, patches, and stickers, none of which were initially made for an archive. Most were made to be used up, worn out, stuck to something, photocopied, or discarded. The fact that it exists in a library folder at all is partly luck and partly Stella's foresight. My paper tries to make sense of what these objects are doing in the archive and what they illuminate about an Atlanta history that doesn't show up in the usual accounts.
I approach this through Derrida's Archive Fever, which frames the archive as a site of both institutionalization and futurity, where things are both preserved and disciplined into existing narratives. José Esteban Muñoz's argument of ephemera as evidence is also central here, as is Mimi Thi Nguyen's writing on punk's resistance to the institutional archive. These objects resist the legibility that the archive demands, and their value is partly in that resistance. Eddy Francisco Alvarez's framework of "finding sequins in the rubble" also applies to this project in useful ways, even if the marginalities involved aren't identical.
The SZRQ collection has three main categories of ephemera: patches, zines, and stickers. Patches are the most tactile. They were meant to be sewn onto clothing, to repair things, to extend use and resist consumption. Zines are the most textual and chronological. One of these zines, Girl Scout Gone Bad, ran three issues, invited reader submissions, carried radical feminist messaging, and even embedded ads for other zines. Stickers are the most outward-facing and the most resistant to an archive. Some were designed for petty vandalism, meant to be affixed somewhere visible where they would likely be removed.
I have a couple of findings I'm pondering. The first concerns Pagan Holiday as a political force within a contested subculture. Stella opened shows with a declaration: "We're Pagan Holiday, we're a sex-positive band that wants girl-boy revolution noooowwww!" They ran benefit concerts for sex workers, harm reduction networks, and lesbian rights organizations. This was a path that sometimes met them with resistance, even from others in the punk scene. The second quick finding pertains to the 1996 Olympics and their disruption of the scene. The Games accelerated surveillance, displaced countless Black and unhoused communities, and furthered a politics of respectability that the queercore scene directly opposed. On the opening night of the Olympics, Stella delivered a tirade about "one-way tickets" handed to the unhoused, police raids on sex shops, and detention centers holding people until the closing ceremony. Her chanted refrain was "Power, Greed, and Coca-Cola." Almost every venue Pagan Holiday played is gone now, turned into luxury apartments, co-working spaces, office buildings, and health clinics. The houses at the epicenter of the 90s queercore scene in Cabbagetown have a median sale price of half a million dollars each.
The similarities between the 1996 Olympics and the campaign to build Cop City ahead of the World Cup are hard to ignore: the same logic of urban securitization, the same displacement, and the same targeting of queer and left-wing cultural spaces (one of the biggest mass arrests tied to the Stop Cop City movement happened at a concert). One of the zinesters from Stella's network was among those slapped with RICO charges by the AG Carr a couple of years back. The archive, especially one like what Stella is building, is a site of resistance, not just preservation, allowing us to see what has been so that we better understand what is happening now.
