Kathleen Hanna Is Still Fighting for a Revolution

“So many feminist artists get erased,” says Kathleen Hanna, who, with her new memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk, is determined not to be one of them. Hanna, 55, tells Vanity Fair she needed to sit down and turn her “life into some kind of narrative to make sense of it.” The first draft clocked in at around 600 pages—a “Riot Grrrl Hobbit,” she jokes—before she cut it down to size.

Hanna, of course, has a lot to say, as Rebel Girl charts her trailblazing path as a leader of the 1990s Riot Grrrl movement and front person for Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, finding her voice in xeroxed zines and on sweaty stages. While Hanna’s life was chronicled a decade ago in The Punk Singer—a documentary featuring the likes of Kim Gordon, Joan Jett, and Carrie Brownstein speaking to Hanna’s ambition and influence—the film is a product of its time; Hanna had been largely missing from the stage while battling Lyme disease. Plus, there was more to explore, she says, like “all the stuff that I talked about that never got in the film, and then also stuff that I just wouldn’t talk about on camera.”

Rebel Girl is Hanna in full: politically radical, funny, and fearless. Just as Hanna has never held back as a performer, she writes unflinchingly about misogyny, sexual violence, and her experience getting an abortion as a teenager. Yet she also leaves some traumatic memories “on the cutting room” floor, because, as she writes in the book’s prologue, “it’s more important to remember that I’ve seen ugly basement conference rooms transform into warm campfires, dank rock-bro clubs become bright parties where girls and gay kids and misfits danced together in a sea of freedom and joy.”

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While working on the book, Hanna says she tried writing each day what was important to her, acknowledging that, say, her participation in a Junior Achievement club in high school “may seem really banal to other people.” But that experience, she says, was “a life changer” in figuring out how to become financially independent and “kind of game the system.”

While at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, Hanna channels her artistic vision and feminist perspective through photography, fashion, and spoken-word performances. Writer Kathy Acker, however, urges Hanna to start a band, and she’ll eventually team up with Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox, and Billy Karren. It’s also in Olympia where Hanna, during a night of drunken high jinks with Kurt Cobain, writes “KURT SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT” on his bedroom wall, inspiring Nirvana’s breakthrough hit.

Hanna writes how, while Nirvana was selling millions of albums, she was stripping to make money to fix Bikini Kill’s tour van and, on one occasion, endured the mockery of DC punk scenesters as “Smells Like Teen Spirit” played in the club. “There’s moments in your life where you’re like, OK, this is like a short story that the universe just wrote for me,” Hanna says. “I will never forget what that felt like and how I had to plaster this fake-ass smile on my face,” she adds. “But I got to turn it into a story that I can laugh at.”

After a long hiatus, Bikini Kill has been back touring in recent years, and when I caught them playing New York’s Irving Plaza in July 2022, a few weeks after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, their performance felt cathartic and their message of empowerment especially urgent today. That night, band members mentioned how the last time they played on the same stage was at a Rock for Choice concert in 1994. Hanna says “it’s super depressing and maddening” to still be fighting decades later for abortion rights, which she points out is really health care. “I think we need a radical restructuring of our whole society and I think a lot of people agree with me,” she says.

Hanna is heading out on a book tour in May, with Molly Ringwald, Amy Poehler, and Hanif Abdurraqib among the moderators appearing onstage in various cities, and she will embark on a US tour with Bikini Kill in August. Though Hanna doesn’t rule out Bikini Kill writing new songs, for now, she says, the band remains energized playing material from the ’90s, which “has taken on new dimensions in 2023 and 2024 because of everything going on.”

“It feels very fresh. It doesn’t feel boring to sing. I’m not phoning it in,” Hanna says, adding, “I thought we just wrote a bunch of weird punk songs, and now that I’m older and I’m performing them, I’m like, these songs have fucking legs.”