Pussy Riot revisited

Since we first wrote on Pussy Riot back in February, widespread attention has been given to the subsequent arrest, trial and imprisonment of three members of the group, while mass anti-government protest continues in Russia. From the past few months of coverage and debate, here are just a few things which have interested me on the complexities of Pussy Riot’s background and media presentation.

This (mildly NSFW) video is кисья ересь (Heresy of Little Cats), by the Russian electro-punk band Barto:

As a non-speaker of Russian who hasn’t found the lyrics anywhere, I’m sure there’s a lot I’m not getting, but I like the song, the band are pretty admirable, and I like the video’s satirical emphasis on the patriarchal intertwining of political and religious authorities – the formal alliance of Putin’s government and the Russian Orthodox Church, making it possible for civil disobedience to be framed as blasphemy, was a point of contention highlighted by the Pussy Riot trial.

I found the song via this post, which discusses the relatively muted response by the Russian underground music scene to the group’s trial and imprisonment. It also corrects the impression of Pussy Riot as (merely?) a feminist punk band, when they are more a product of the intersection between political activism and performance art:

As a matter of fact Pussy Riot, although calling themselves a punk-band and using the sign of punk in their performances, never belonged to the Russian punk scene. They consider themselves as art-actionists, clearly place themselves in the context of contemporary Russian actionism, quoting the names of Prigov, Brener, Kulik and other art-provocateurs of the 1990s.

So Pussy Riot’s frequently mentioned connection with riot grrrl has more to do with the latter’s existence as a DIY subculture involving zines, art, détournement and activism, than with music alone. Which is fair enough; back in the 90s, one of the odder of Courtney Love’s swipes at Kathleen Hanna, in fact, was that “She’s not really in a band… She’s a political activist who took a bunch of women’s studies classes.” On the subject of Pussy Riot, Hanna herself had this to say:

What if people all over the world started their own performance groups, bands, art collectives, etc… and called them things like Pussy Riot Olympia. Pussy Riot, Athens Greece, Pussy Riot Paris, etc….And maybe if this trial turns out as the prosecutors want it to, with the women getting at least 3 years, we all play benefits and go to Russia en masse under the banner that we are all Pussy Riot, Yoko Ono could be in Pussy Riot, Patti Smith could be wearing a mask next to a troupe of girls from Tennesee storming the Cathedral of Christ the Savior screaming “We are all Pussy Riot!!!”

As I wrote in February, it makes sense to consider Pussy Riot in the context of the former Soviet Union’s long and fascinating history of political protest coalescing around avant garde art and music, especially punk. The Western media, perhaps understandably, tended instead to present the band in more straightforward and simplistic terms – rendering them more comprehensible to a Western audience, sure, but often in a less than helpful manner. I’d been hoping someone would pick up on the patronising and infantilising aspects of much of the media presentation of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich, and, in this article, Sarah Kendzior nails it:

Imagine this: The three men sit in court, awaiting their verdict. The youngest, a experienced dissident described by the media as a “sultry sex symbol” with “Angelina Jolie lips”, glances at his colleague, an activist praised by the Associated Press for his “pre-Raphaelite looks”. Between them sits a third man, whose lack of glamour has led the New Republic to label him “the brain” and deem his hair a “poof of dirty blonde frizz”. The dissidents – or “boys” as they are called in headlines around the world – have been the subject of numerous fashion and style profiles ever since they first spoke out against the Russian government. “He’s a flash of moving color,” the New York Times writes approvingly about their protests, “never an individual boy.” If this sounds ridiculous, it should – and not only because I changed the gender… Pussy Riot identifies as feminist, but you would never know it from the Western media, who celebrate the group with the same language that the Russian regime uses to marginalize them. The three members of Pussy Riot are “girls”, despite the fact that all of them are in their twenties and two of them are mothers. They are “punkettes”, diminutive variations on a 1990s indie-rock prototype that has little resemblance to Pussy Riot’s own trajectory as independent artists and activists.

Of course, as Kendzior also points out, Pussy Riot have far more pressing concerns than being mischaracterized in the press. But:

Pussy Riot also tells us a lot about how we see non-Western political dissent in the new media age, and could suggest a habit of mischaracterizing their grave mission in terms that feel more familiar but ultimately sell the dissidents short: youthful rebellion, rock and roll, damsels in distress.

A lot of this sentiment is familiar: an impulse to treat protest in which women, particularly young women, are prominent, as fun, flippant, and fundamentally unserious. It’s the reverse of the censorious and sensationalist ‘Rage of the Girl Rioters’ response to the 2010 UK student protests. In the case of Pussy Riot, arguments for their sympathetic treatment are often explicitly predicated on the power imbalance involved – they are ‘just’ ordinary women (or indeed ‘girls’), what threat to the state can they possibly pose? – which surely entrenches the idea of women as both relatively powerless and harmless, rather than enabling any sort of feminist empowerment. Away from such frustrating portayals, however, there’s something to be said for the earlier stages of Pussy Riot’s trajectory, which offer examples both of how music can form part of a wider oppositional movement and for how women’s protest can be collective and anonymous, with no need of iconic or martyred figureheads.

And yes, I do realise this post can be summarised as: “Pussy Riot? Preferred their earlier work, before they got so commercial”. So it goes.