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DOI

10.22191/BUUJ/10/2/1

Faculty Sponsor

Francesco Agnellini

Abstract

Filmed at the height of riot grrrl, the documentary Dirty Girls presents a microcosm of the scene at a Santa Monica high school as it follows a group of girls ostracized by the student body due to their opposition to and negation of standard models of early 1990s beauty. This paper aims to situate riot grrrl and the “dirty girls” into larger contexts of the historical oppression of women, that, when viewed beyond the specificities of their given period, illustrate recurring patterns that involve the negative depiction of older women, denoted as “old hags” in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. Despite their common conflict with sexist beauty standards, Harper and Amber of Dirty Girls and the old hag responded to their marginalization in vastly different ways: where the hag is portrayed as vainly attempting to capitulate to societal conventions, the “dirty girls” see their negation both as a strength and as a means towards their political and social ends. In this paper, I argue that despite their differences and the chronological distance between the two phenomena, the hags and the “dirty girls” and riot grrrl are connected through their relationships to contemporary beauty standards. Specifically, the “dirty girls” function as another kind of hag, the grrrl-hag, one that responds to oppressive beauty standards differently than the old hag, by negating the beauty standards and societal expectations expected of and imposed on women and girls, creating their own visions of woman- and girlhood.

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