Kathleen Hanna

Kathleen Hanna
Kathleen Hanna is an American musician, feminist activist, and punk zine writer. In the early-to mid-1990s she was the lead singer of feminist punk band Bikini Kill, before fronting Le Tigre in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 1998, Hanna released a lo-fi solo album under the name Julie Ruin and since 2010 has been working on a project called The Julie Ruin...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth12 November 1968
CityPortland, OR
CountryUnited States of America
It's now taken for granted that women are in bands and you can say feminist things in your songs. But back in the early '90s, there was a lot of violence at Bikini Kill shows that people don't realize happened.
In terms of men being feminist allies, it's just important to speak from your own place. I'd love to hear men singing about masculinity and the damage it does to them.
I felt like going out on the road and mixing it with music - which is something young people are always really interested in - would be a good way to proselytize. It was like feminist evangelism.
I realized that calling yourself a feminist or not calling yourself a feminist, just by being in a band of all girls, it's all you talk about.
Sometimes, being a feminist artist, there are times where I'm in a position where I just want to feel like I'm saying all the right things politically, or I feel like I have to mention my own project over other people's projects.
It's really cool that Miley Cyrus said she's the biggest feminist ever. I was like, 'That's the sound of 200,000 eight-year-olds Googling the word "feminist!
I don't like every other musician's work. The same way that filmmakers don't like every other filmmakers' work. Just because I'm a feminist doesn't mean I'm gonna say that I like every other woman's work, or that I appreciate another statement that another woman publicly made.
I think that the Internet is really cool because a lot of young feminists don't feel like they have to reinvent the wheel.
Younger feminists actually care about stuff that came before them, the same way that I totally cared about and loved and felt so lucky to have access to the feminism that came before me. To have younger people take what me and my friends have done, and to say 'We have access to that, but we're going to put that through our own Internet generation filter and we're going to make it into something that speaks to us and is a lot smarter.'
I am not Lyme disease, that's not who I am, I'm still a feminist artist, but this is a part of my story too, and I'm not going to keep it out to look cooler.
I felt it was really, really important, not just in the vein of feminist erasure or whatever but also just as an artist that I honored my work.
I feel like there's this weird thing that as a feminist band you get put in this role as ambassadors.
I would much rather be the obnoxious feminist girl than be complicit in my own dehumanization.
I have chronic - well, I like to call it late-stage Lyme disease and not chronic, because I like to think someday I'll be all the way cured. It took me a really long time to get diagnosed, and I was misdiagnosed for a long, long time. I was very ill during the end of Le Tigre, which was kind of why that ended, amongst other things.