Revolution lady style now
Ladyfest Bay Area gets busy.

By Alissa Chadburn

OLYMPIA, WASH., August 2000: Fueled by truck-stop coffee and rolling in a rickety rental car, we made a 17-hour pilgrimage through the sweaty Northwest to a campsite in exotic rural Washington. It wasn't the promise of rolling hills that pulled us there; it was the other backdrop: 2,000 women, girls, and hangers-on who had all come for Ladyfest, a six-day experiment in radical, feminist, participatory art, film, music, and workshops. We didn't know what to expect, but as we checked in, the first thing we encountered under the "Welcome, Ladies!" sign on the bulletin board at the General Store was the shock of recognition. A photo spread from the hometown daily featured two of our friends from San Francisco bounding down the street, Ladyfest's first poster children.

They looked the way they always do: Cookie, whose band Subtonix was set to play, wearing a miniskirt, a cut-up, cleavage-bearing T-shirt, and thick-smudged eyeliner; and Kat, whose video "Removable Phantom Crotch" was to show that night, in head-to-toe black, her T-shirt and jeans punctuated by a studded belt, her black hair in a high ponytail. Outside San Francisco, I suddenly realized how the world at large must see them: as two freaky, fucked-up, crazy chicks, not as the punk rock goddess and the rebel girl I know, who write songs, make zines, play drums, and make films as passionately as they live their lives.

For the one week of the festival, indie rock- and art-loving women from all over the country had a chance to appreciate their work, their words, their music. Downtown Olympia was overrun with girls like them, sweeping in packs over the sidewalks, their Ladyfest passes tied around their necks with string. On street corners they poured over the map in their programs, trying to figure out how to get to the next venue. There were girls skipping down alleys holding hands, lining sidewalks outside the Capitol Theatre. There were nerdy girls with faces framed by black-rimmed glasses and perfect bobs, carrying bookbags covered with buttons from their favorite bands and silk-screened patches with feminist symbols. There were girls in '60s summer dresses; dykes with short bleached hair, cutoff Dickies, and spiked armbands; femmes with black hair and bangs, tattoos, and strappy high heels – all talking and laughing and flirting and checking one another out.

When Lois performed her riot grrrl-era anthem "Strumpet," you might have thought she had just written it as an ode to the ladies in town. "You say I'm walking around like I own the whole place / Well, I do / Anybody can have it all too." She was as encouraging as a summer camp leader, and I looked around to see I wasn't the only one smiling as I sang along. She changed the words to "I read all about my scene in Time magazine," and the audience giggled – it was a satisfying in-joke. Time, as it happened, had recently run a Ladyfest article featuring Sleater-Kinney that had declared Olympia "the hippest town in the West." I had a video in the festival's film/video program, which was way off the hipster rock-star map. But though superstar grrrl bands dominated the scene, that wasn't supposed to be the point. What Time had overlooked was Ladyfest's truly radical intentions: This wasn't about building a fan base; it was about building artists and participants. Ladyfest created an environment, however temporary, where no one had to explain why women's art should be recognized and valued and supported. It just was.

But when the festival was over, we headed back to our respective towns and megacities, and Ladyfest Olympia evaporated like Mary Timony's fantasy unicorns into the nostalgia of e-groupings. It was hard to imagine another Ladyfest could emerge in urban San Francisco, where day jobs are rental requirements and venues expensive. Two years later, however, San Francisco can expect to be overrun by a similarly messy, multivisioned, feminist arts festival/post-riot grrrl movement in five days of organized chaos on Mission District stages. How did we get here?

From womyn to grrrls to ladies

Ladyfest didn't end in Olympia, and in a sense it didn't really start there either. From Eartha Kitt's vocal burlesque to Janis Joplin's screech to Carolee Schneemann's hand-processed and controversially sexual Fuses to Cindy Sherman's identity-challenging stills to Barbara Kruger's feminist unadvertisements to Audre Lorde's powerful poetics, feminist history can be traced back through any number of artists and performers for whom art and politics (and life) were one and the same. But feminist art-making hasn't only been an individual endeavor. You can see it in the collaborative spirit of the 1972 installation Womanhouse, whose many rooms included a kitchen with pink walls and a ceiling covered with molded fried eggs that morphed into hanging breasts; an enormous crocheted, womblike cave; and a bathroom bathed in menstrual blood and littered with feminine hygiene products. That multimedia work by CalArts' Feminist Art Project was headed by now-feminist icon Judy Chicago, who two years later would debut The Dinner Party, a monumental paean to overlooked women in history that would spark heated debate among conservatives and feminists alike for what became known as its "cunt" imagery. And Chicago was just one of many. The legacy of artists since then who have explored and reclaimed female sexuality and experience is richly varied and far too vast to sum up here.

The process of feminist reinvention and reclamation would start all over again in the early '90s when women-powered bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile formed and inspired thousands of dissatisfied girls to transform themselves into art-and-rage-making grrrls. Armed with microphones and zine manifestos, this new generation of post-Dworkin feminists was angry, sexually powerful, and out to spread the message of "girl love." Riot grrrl chapters formed all over the country and in Europe, and through them girls and women picked up guitars and pens, formed bands, and produced their own records and zines, taking control of the production to make art and music that truly represented them.

Not surprisingly, when the mainstream media, eager to hook on to the next big music trend – this time, "women in rock" – turned their attention to riot grrrls, they presented a watered-down, patronizing view of the movement's radical feminist politics (ooh, girls with guitars – and don't they look cute when they're angry!). After some riot grrrls declared a "media blackout," the media began to paint a picture of riot grrrls as stuck-up bitches prone to in-fighting. The term "grrrl," which had been employed as an empowering, rowdy reclamation, began to be used to describe any woman in the mainstream's eye, radical feminist or not. So-called grrrl power became more of a marketing ploy than a rallying cry. Girlhood, in its sexy package, was just another product, and a profitable one at that. The movement dissipated.

But many self-professed riot grrrls grew up to reestablish themselves under another ironic label: "ladies." In creating Ladyfest, organizers sought to bring back the riot grrrl spirit, to "put the punk back into feminism and the feminism back into punk," as Bratmobile singer Allison Wolfe put it. Like the "grrrl" in "riot grrrl," the "lady" of "Ladyfest" plays off an apparent contradiction: they're not the well-mannered, well-bred, service-oriented, upper-class feminine women the word connotes.

And like riot grrrl before it, the Ladyfest movement seeks to reclaim difference with its playfully inappropriate moniker. "To be a stripper who is also a feminist," Bikini Kill's Kathleen Hanna wrote in the fanzine Jigsaw in the spring of 1991, "to be an abused child holding a microphone screaming all those things that were promised ... These are contradictions I have lived. They exist ... cuz I exist." She demanded recognition that "every fucking 'feminist' is not the same, every fucking girl is not the same, OK???" Noting the fact that "lady" has been banned from the "approved feminist lexicon," Olympia's zine-style program asked, "How could we ever decide what to call ourselves, when we can't decide what we are?" Its organizers were clear: every lady is not the same either.

Neither is every Ladyfest. The Olympia event took criticism for its music-heavy lineup, its lack of diversity (where were the women of color? the transgendered ladies? the working classes?), but it wasn't meant to be the end-all of women's arts festivals; it was meant to be the start of a movement. From its very inception, its organizers encouraged other Ladyfests to take up where theirs left off. And they have: places as distant from one another as Glasgow, Scotland; Bloomington, Ind.; Easthampton, Mass.; Chicago; New York; Lansing, Mich.; and now the Bay Area have sprouted Ladyfests of their own.

Ladies by the bay

The do-it-yourself principle illustrated by that proliferation of festivals is hard at work in Machiko Saito and Denise Dekker's trailer for Ladyfest Bay Area. The video cuts and pastes scenes of ladies and transfolk making art, shooting a video, writing, playing music, and putting together a zine, each immersed in the act of creation at the punk pop pace of Bratmobile's music on the soundtrack. Then the word spreads: "Ladyfest is coming." The "ladies" everywhere mobilize, gathering converts as they go, and they head over to the steps of Mission High School. They wait for thousands more to come, not just to join the club, but also to create their own revolutions lady style now.

It may actually happen that way. Ladyfest Bay Area started as a bunch of strangers with infectious enthusiasm and a common goal: to create a festival that mirrored the vision of Olympia's event and expanded on it. But even as the five-day festival – which features more than 30 bands, close to 90 films, dozens of writers and spoken word artists, almost 50 workshops, several gallery exhibitions, and an array of performance, theater, dance, and multimedia art events – takes off this week, with thousands of ladies, girls, boys, and people of all genders expected to take part, it's just as much about the process as it is about the ends.

The organizing committee, a non-hierarchically structured group of more than 40 ladies and transpeople, is a motley crew: artists and activists, students and mothers, grocery store clerks and sex workers from 17 to thirtysomething. Some are professional fundraisers and P.R. people, while others are grassroots campaigners. Many have no experience in this sort of planning at all. The collective effort, Kyla Schuller of the P.R. committee says, "taught us how to share our skills, both in terms of arts and activism, but in business savvy as well. We've learned how to actually get a project off the ground."

Another organizer, Christine Shea, the visual arts program coordinator, talks like she writes – every other sentence ends in an exclamation point – as she explains her transformation from a Fremont girl with no experience into a lady putting on gallery shows. In putting together "POW! The Power of Women in Illustrative and Sequential Arts," she says, "I broke through so many barriers. I went from just being a fan of these artists to actually being a part of what they do."

But the DIY process hasn't been easy. Ladyfest Bay Area planners (including Bay Guardian copy chief Lynn Rapoport, who recused herself from the editing process for this story) have spent up to 10 months all-consumed, many holding down full-time jobs while devoting the rest of their time to Ladyfest. At general meetings, which a few months ago were stepped up from two to three hours, producers put their own feminist ethics to the test. They discussed each item on the agenda with passion – from what kind of imagery to use on a flyer to represent the festival, to the language they should use in the mission statement to reflect their gender diversity.

Festival planners are creating an "alternate universe," the booking committee's Bridie Lee says. "When questions come up, like are we going to include bio-men, or discussions about trans-inclusiveness, or queer visibility, or women of color – all of the issues that come up in our process – we're creating not only a space within our organizing group, a space for us to meet and debate all of our ideas and work toward all of these ideas that culminate in this festival. We're also trying to create a place where women and trans people and people who in any way feel alienated by the mainstream, where they feel safe and where they feel validated, where they are allowed to discuss things that matter to them, see art and film that represents them, and learn things in the workshops that are important to them."

Ladyfest Olympia's organizers described themselves as "self-identified women," a term meant to include transgendered women. It's an important distinction from the language of the "womyn-born womyn" policy the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival maintains. Unlike the Michigan festival, Ladyfest's goal was never to create a women-only space, but rather to create a space where women's work can be fully supported by people of all genders. Ladyfest Bay Area takes that idea one step further by including transwomen and -men in planning, increasing the visibility of, in the words of its mission statement, "past, present, and future women."

"As a group, we've been constantly challenging ourselves about what Ladyfest is, how it's been, and how we can change that," film programmer and curator Therine Youngblood says. One way she thinks they have succeeded is in developing Ladyfest Bay Area as a pan-arts festival, one that doesn't privilege one art form over another, bringing together dance, performance art, spoken word, music, visual art, and film in an environment where skills are shared through workshops and discussions.

In the Ladyfest universe, and in the feminist art movements that have come before it, that process itself is an art. Creating that art is about tearing yourself out of the passive role of the consumer, Schuller says. "The way that our society is structured, being 'involved' in something so often just comes down to purchasing a product."

Ladyfest is much more than a product; it's an investment in a movement already in motion. I witnessed it at high speed, outside the Herbst Theatre, on the night of the opening gala for the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in mid June, when a band of women-girls-ladies set up a boom box and whizzed through the crowd on roller skates in a flash of glitter tights, tube socks, tennis skirts, and wristbands. They passed out flyers, chatting and dancing to the music of the bands they would be showcasing at the festival. They rolled around like they owned the whole place, and well, they do. Like Lois, they're out to show us anybody else can have it all, too.

All Ladyfest Bay Area profits will be donated to the following local organizations: the Center for Young Women's Development, GirlSource, and Serpent Source Foundation for Women Artists.