Trailblazing feminist icon, musician, outspoken women’s rights activist, and original rebel girl Kathleen Hanna‘s new book Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk is due out May 14, 2024 with Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins.
Hanna’s band Bikini Kill embodied the punk scene of the 90s, and today her personal yet feminist lyrics on anthems like “Rebel Girl” and “Double Dare Ya” are more powerful than ever. But where did this transformative voice come from?
In Rebel Girl, Hanna’s raw and insightful new memoir, she takes us from her tumultuous childhood to her formative college years and her first shows. As Hanna makes clear, being in a punk “girl band” in those years was not a simple or safe prospect. Male violence and antagonism threatened at every turn, and surviving as a singer who was a lightning rod for controversy took limitless amounts of determination.
But the relationships she developed during those years buoyed her, including with her bandmates Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox, JD Samson, and Johanna Fateman. And her friendships with musicians like Kurt Cobain, Ian MacKaye, Kim Gordon, and Joan Jett reminded her that despite the odds, the punk world could still nurture and care for its own. Hanna opens up about falling in love with Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys and her debilitating battle with Lyme disease, and she brings us behind the scenes of her musical growth in her bands Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin.
In an uncut voice all her own, Hanna reveals the hardest times along with the most joyful—and how they continue to fuel her revolutionary art and music.
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Kathleen Hanna is a punk singer, artist, zine writer, and the front-woman of the influential bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre. Hanna is a staple in feminist publications, from college curriculums to bestselling books, and a leading voice in the punk feminist movement. She has performed all over the world; at clubs, festivals, and even in a Kinko’s basement. Hanna has earned acclaim spanning The New York Times, NPR, Interview Magazine, V Magazine, Vogue, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, BUST Magazine, NYLON and Los Angeles Times, to name a few.
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