ABSTRACT
Pratibha Parmar's 1999 documentary, Righteous Babes, is an ideal site within which to revisit late 1980s debates about feminism, postmodernism, and rock music. In current academic scholarship, those debates tend to be subsumed into new concerns—for example, multiculturalism, postcolonial studies, queer studies—as postmodernism becomes an assumed part of the intellectual landscape. And yet for the new generations of young women (in this case, fans, rock stars, journalists) growing up in the millennium and not necessarily linked to academic scholarship or networks, there are still real questions about what feminism can mean in a postmodern, “millennial” context. Not that the women would necessarily frame their questions in these terms: but through a close reading of Parmar's film, I will show first that some questions in academic feminists' 1980s debates underlie the women's statements and frame their struggles; and second, that 1990s artists build on their 1980s fore-sisters. I will use the film not only to chart the generational differences that separate women, but to highlight as well how popular culture—and in particular the rock music that the film focuses on—becomes a site that brings women of all ages together. An overall focus will be to compare and contrast the different discursive modes of theoretical feminist discourse and a documentary film as they both engage the topic of feminism, postmodernism, and rock music.
