The beginning of the nineties, in coincidence with the rise of third wave feminism, saw the emergence of a number of left-leaning feminist punk bands in northwestern United States. Bands like Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill began to openly criticize rape, domestic violence, racism, patriarchy and the heteronormed beauty standards imposed by the media. This movement, called Riot Grrrl, was characterized by its interest in direct political action, its DIY ethic and the dissemination of its ideas in fanzines, a type of publication with a long tradition within the punk movement.

At around the same time the female members of a number grunge bands began sporting a new style that quickly caught on and became know as Kinderwhore. The look consisted mostly of babydolls, corsets and slips, sixties’ dresses with peter-pan collars, knee socks or ripped stockings, Mary Jane shoes and a heavy makeup. With their bleached hair, Courtney Love of Hole and Kat Bjelland of Babes in Toyland resembled perverse victorian dolls. From the beginning, their adopters took the style as

a strong feminist statement… about so much more than a little velvet dress, ripped tights and a dumb media-made label. It was about intentionally taking the most constraining parts of the feminine, good-girl aesthetic, inflating them to a cartoon level, and subverting them to kill any ingrained insecurities.¹

As in the case of other feminist punk styles, the kinderwhore look implied a scathing critique of the feminine body as a receptacle of abuse, one of the most common embodiments of bare life (0.16, 1.11, 3.3.1, 3.3.2)

However, this aesthetic—a threshold between the good-girl and the prostitute—allows us a glimpse to an even deeper cultural aspect. It is not at all gratuitous that this style emerged in the west coast during the height of the AIDS epidemic, at a time when it was becoming clear in the public mind that the risk population was not restricted to homosexuals and injecting drug users. In this sense, kinderwhore acted as an indistinction zone between virginal and innocent vulnerability and the aggressiveness of voracious sexuality, which served as a psychological means to neutralize the threat of infection. Psychological vaccination.

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1. Mish Barber Way, “My kinderwhore education,” i-D, July 20, 2015. https://i-d.co/article/my-kinderwhore-education/ ↩︎