Project Overview:
Though the Riot Grrrl! Manifesto was meant for women and girls of the grunge 1990 age, our goal is to direct towards parents or guardians of young women... but especially fathers. We want to make parents see the impacts of society through their daughters’ eyes and show that the values of the manifesto are important values that they should be practicing when raising a daughter. We will be creating a zine with a modern approach to address the values we think are important for parents to understand about this generation and what that means for their daughters (see target audience for specifications surrounding this).
Project Description:
During the 1990s’ third wave of feminism, the Riot Grrrl Movement formed in order to fight and speak out against the oppressive, capitalist society that wanted to define what a girl was. It was a movement born out of the anger of the women that society was trying to dictate. In response and support of this movement, Kathleen Hanna, the lead singer of Bikini Kill (an all girls punk rock band) created a manifesto that put the anger of these women into words. Though the Riot Grrrl Manifesto was meant for women and girls of the grunge 1990 age, our goal was to create a document and promotional piece that directed it towards fathers of young women in today’s society. While some things have changed since the 90’s, there are still so many issues that women face. Specifically, we can see this through the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade as well as the Me Too Movement. For our project, we want to make our target audience of fathers see the impacts of society through their daughters’ eyes and show that the values of the manifesto are still important and relevant today. These are values that they should be practicing when raising a daughter. To achieve this, we created a zine entitled “Daddy’s Little Grrrl” with a modern approach to address not only the manifesto and its values itself, but also help fathers’ gain insight into how their daughters feel and how society is treating them. With this understanding, we hope our zine pushes these fathers to be at the forefront of making a change in society that will benefit their daughters. We also created promotional buttons to go along with the identity and message of our zine. Together, our project has a strong sense of identity that reflects the Riot Grrrl Manifesto and reaches our target audience well.
Category Review:
This manifesto was made to address the patriarchal and capitalist society in which wom-en were angry. Back then, during the third wave of feminism, the manifesto existed in a grunge age environment during the fight for women’s rights in the 1990’s. Even after the movement, however, women are once again being threatened by having their basic human rights taken away with the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. The MeToo movement also contributes to this by showing how the violence and harassment towards women has not ceased and we continue to have to fight. Girls are growing up in an age where we thought this would have dissipated, but nothing has changed, in fact it seems to have almost gotten worse. We are imploring the parents of these girls to help them stand up against this by exposing them as well as making them understand how and why this manifesto still applies to our society today.
Target Audience:
The target audience of this manifesto is parents, especially fathers, to help them address the anger their children are feeling towards the society of this generation. We are targeting young fathers between the ages of 25-45 with daughters in the age range of 12-18 who reside in the United States who are seeing the impacts of changing laws like Roe v. Wade and more. We are specifically targeting fathers because statistically dads spend an average of 8 hours per week and moms spend an average of 14 hours per week on childcare (The State of Moms and Dads). It’s time for fathers to see what the mothers always do and to take that step to be more involved in their daughters’ lives and the issues they face. Research also shows that there is “...an association between low self-esteem and lack of access to both parents... for daughters...” (Raising A Daughter With High Self-Esteem Post-Divorce). Though this article and research is about divorced parents, it still shows the impact and importance of both parents being involved in a daughter’s life to help her be more confident and strong! It’s time to stop sitting on the sidelines, dads. There’s a lot more information and research gone into how daughters are affected by absent/less involved fathers (Fatherless Daughters: How Growing Up Without a Dad Affects Women).
Design Strategy:
Our design strategy to implement an effective and motivational zine is to invoke the overall feeling of empowerment where, instead of sitting on the sidelines doing nothing while their daughters are trying to fight for their rights and place within society, they stand and fight with them. To be distributed as a printed zine, it would have to be a short piece holding impactful information in order to keep the attention of this age range of fathers. It would be available at places such as Dicks Sporting Goods, Bars, and other places that fathers in this age range would visit. Along with this a variety of buttons would act as a promotional piece for our zine. The piece would have an emotionally impact where the fathers would feel more connected to their daughters and have some indication of what they are going through. For that to happen, the graphics will be modern and eye-catching but have a father-daughter tonality to it. Included with this, we want to include warm orange tones with hints of past grunge graphic elements. The typography will include a mix of geometric sans serif and slab serif font families in order to give the zine a clean, edgy and modern look to them.
Timeline and Budget:
If our piece was to be commercially reproduced, our budget would have to account for payment towards an editor, a book designer, marketing and a producer and distributor. Connected to this, assets such as typefaces and other relevant materials would need to be in the budget. A budget like this would be estimated to be around $5,000. However, as design students we cover all the bases, so the budget is relatively low.