CULTURE “One step forward, five steps back,” sings Kathleen Hanna on Le Tigre’s FYR. It is the eternal lament of the progressive. The initials in the song’s title allude to an argument in seminal feminist text The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone, in which the radical activist describes the “50 years of ridicule” American women had to bear between getting the right to vote in 1920 and the book’s publication in 1970. Three decades later, in 2001, Hanna’s electroclash band was once again facing the fact that every time we get a win, reactionary forces are right there with the backlash.
Here in 2023, while on a video call to The Big Issue to mark their reunion, Kathleen Hanna is reflecting, with bandmates Johanna Fateman and JD Samson, on…
