I really like to talk about my work in a way that is complicated.
— Kathleen Hanna
People have always had these weird things about how you have to be really good looking to be a singer.
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.
You learn that the only way to get rock-star power as a girl is to be a groupie and bare your breasts and get chosen for the night. We learn that the only way to get anywhere is through men. And it's a lie.
I wanted to say to myself as much as anyone else that we made art.
Women didn't want to be on the stage with other women because they didn't want their bodies to be compared. They didn't want another female act opening for them because of this weird competitive and tokenistic attitude.
I was in a band in the '90s called Bikini Kill, and we were so freaked out about documentation then, and there was the whole thing, not just about the male gaze, but that people were going to misrepresent you... a kind fear of the mainstream that a lot of us had.
I'm just working and having a good time and seeing what develops, which is so awesome, because you don't know what's going to happen, and I'm letting myself do that a lot more than I ever have.
You don't have to have magic unicorn powers. You work at it, and you get better. It's like anything: You sit there and do it every day, and eventually you get good at it.
So many women have experienced horrific forms of male violence throughout their lives, and why isn't there a song about how you get depressed because of it?
Art revolves around creating something that isn't there.
I wanted to make something that I wanted to hear that I wasn't hearing.
