What, exactly, constitutes a girl riot? An examination of the historical precedents for female-fronted uprisings reveals, to name a few: women’s bread riots during the French Revolution; the 1917 general strikes on International Women’s Day in Russia, in which women workers threw rocks through factory windows and dragged their male colleagues into the streets; and the 1929 “Women’s War” staged by thousands of Igbo women in Nigeria against tax collection by British-appointed colonial administrators. History has also more recently recorded scores of college-age women in the UK rioting against rising tuitions in 2011, and, just this year, the predominantly female garment workers of Bangladesh who, following the horrific Rana Plaza factory collapse that killed over one thousand workers, took to the streets in a wave of fury and unprecedented popular resistance, effectively bringing both the industry and the government to a standstill.

These are all powerful instances of women  — and in many cases, girls  — rioting. But it’s a specific cultural moment that never quite materialized into a full-scale storming of the streets that today holds the designation “riot grrrl.” A youth subculture that bloomed in the nineties and is remembered for its vibrant DIY ethos, riot grrrl employed the language of militancy, calling for a revolution in gender inequality through a punk arsenal of music, zines, and activist meetings. This cultural insurrection, built around the demand for “revolution girl style now” was a much-needed spark in a moment of mainstream feminist malaise and a catalyst for the feminist organizing that would come to be known as the third wave. In addition to providing a model for young women’s consciousness-raising around issues such as rape culture and slut-shaming, riot grrrl left an indelible mark on indie music  — members of Bikini Kill and Heavens to Betsy, for example, would go on to form the critically acclaimed but still explicitly feminist bands Le Tigre and Sleater-Kinney. But more than twenty years after the zine Riot Grrrl #1 protested the “general lack of girl power in society as a whole,” the social and political conditions that necessitated the movement feel largely unaltered, and the riot curiously sanitized.

Though riot grrrl as a nineties phenomenon was relatively ephemeral, its specter has taken on a mythic quality. Over the last few years, a steady stream of riot grrrl histories, documentaries, archives, and online effluvia has emerged to enthusiastically compile and comment on the artifacts of the movement. Riot grrrl’s high-profile apostles range from the incarcerated members of Russian dissident group Pussy Riot to Tavi Gevinson, the fashion-blog wunderkind and editor-in-chief of Rookie magazine. Documentaries like Don’t Need You: The Herstory of Riot Grrrl and The Punk Singer, and books like Marisa Meltzer’s Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music, Sara Marcus’s Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, and The Riot Grrrl Collection  — a new compilation of reproductions of the riot grrrl zines housed at the NYU Fales Library  — attempt to chart the genesis, trajectory, and lifespan of this singular feminist subculture. The resurgence of interest in the nineties in general has helped to fuel a riot grrrl revival. So has the coming-of-age of young Rookie-generation feminists in a world where sexual assault and legislative threats to reproductive rights loom as ominously as they did twenty years ago.