“Bring Me Back Her Head”: Courtney Love and Hole’s Use of Bodily Fragmentation, the Grotesque, and Dismemberment as Sociopolitical Protest

This article examines how Hole’s first three full-length albums, Pretty on the Inside (1991), Live Through This (1994), and My Body, The Hand Grenade (1997), creatively utilize images of women’s bodies (and the band’s own) to protest sexist injustice and enact sociopolitical reform in the United States in the early 1990s. Through performing the Kinderwhore style and including on- and off-stage examples of the abject and the monstrous-feminine in music and marketing, Courtney Love and Hole demonstrated how to use corporeal fragmentation to disrupt misogynistic expectations of women as well as advocate for the end to violence against women and sexism in media.