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Riot grrrl pioneer Kathleen Hanna: ‘A lot of men really get off on watching a woman get angry’

The feminist punk coined the phrase ‘girl power’ and was responsible for the name of Nirvana’s biggest hit. She reflects on activism, illness, and never letting abuse define her

Photograph: Hannah SternsteinThat band was Bikini Kill, the four-piece fronted by Hanna that lit up the Pacific north-west scene in the early 1990s and spearheaded riot grrrl, a youth movement protesting misogyny through music, meetings and zines. Raw, candid and often bleakly funny, Rebel Girl details her troubled childhood; her college years and early adventures in music, both of which she funded by working as a stripper; her friendship with Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain (Hanna famously scrawled “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” on Cobain’s wall, inadvertently providing the title for his band’s biggest hit); her post-Bikini Kill bands Le Tigre and the Julie Ruin; and her marriage to the Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz, with whom she adopted a son, Julius. Hanna held her hands up; in a series of lectures delivered on college campuses in her mid-40s, she directed students to the academic and zine author Mimi Thi Nguyen’s critique of the movement, Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival.

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