Pussy Riot: a feminist band lost in history and translation

Abstract

The Pussy Riot story is clearly a story the West wanted to hear. Western journalists, politicians, and celebrities were unanimously inspired by the youthfulness and rebellion of courageous Russian feminists. Their life experience perfectly resonates with the core of these young women's messages. For Russians, however, even for those who share the most liberal values, it is not so simple. Public polls and several months of heated debates have shown that virtually everyone in this deeply conservative country has struggled to make sense of the Pussy Riot performance. So, what do Westerners not understand about Russia and what are the problems of translating feminism(s) into different cultural contexts? How does feminist protest deprived of its roots function here, and why do women in Russia not understand that Pussy Riot's story personally concerns all of them? This essay outlines the difference between Russian and Western readings of the Pussy Riot performance and, using the case of public response in Russia, contemplates the reasons for the failure of feminism in this part of the world.

Keywords:

• Pussy Riot
• Russia
• feminism

Acknowledgments

I express my gratitude to my adviser Dr Adi Kuntsman for her support and insightful remarks and my colleague Ravi Hensman for his helpful suggestions. In particular, I thank all the organizers, speakers, and participants of the “Gender, Sexuality, and Power” OSI-HESP Regional Seminar for Excellence in Teaching Project (2011–2014) for their invaluable contribution to my professional and personal growth and inspiration for writing this paper.

Notes

1. Pussy Riot performance at Christ the Savior Cathedral (original video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grEBLskpDWQ

2. Punk Prayer ‘Mother of God, Chase Putin Away’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCasuaAczKY

3. Guerrilla performance refers to a type of ad hoc concert arranged very quickly and without advance ticket sales. It takes place in an unusual, sometimes unannounced setting not designed to accommodate live music (e.g. public transport, parking lot, roof of a building).

4. This paper does not consider the Kremlin's recent turn toward conservative values traditional gender roles, and a general patriarchal renaissance in Russia, which among other things has conditioned and reinforced the expulsion of women's rights and civil rights discourses from the public sphere. Although I am fully aware of the crucial importance of the contemporary political dimension of this problem, I consider it to be a separate topic for analysis, which is outside the scope of this paper.

5. Mizielinska applies this argument to the translation of the word “queer” into Finnish and Polish. She argues that the term is largely untranslatable in these languages and is mainly retained in the original English, which in her view, “worked against the aim of queer theory, masking its associations with non-normative sexuality instead of throwing sexuality in one's face” (2006, 89).

6. This point could be contested because, as Elena Gapova argues, “the women's question” is not even formulated in Russia, where feminist activists mainly speak about gender-related problems that emerged in Western context(s) (see Gapova 2012a, 2012b).

7. Here again I use the argument and wording from Mizielinska (2006).

8. Mizielinska (2006), Kupla and Mizielinska (2011), and Baer (2011) raise similar questions in relation to Queer theory and sexualities studies.

9. An illustrative example here may be the recent neo-conservative and discriminatory anti-gay law adopted in Russia.