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In this provocation, I grapple with questions concerning the legacy and impact of radical feminist performance in Russia's repressive political climate and the possibility of collective resistance through performance. I address the devastating effects of the increasingly totalitarian regime on the work of radical feminist performers such as Pussy Riot, Darya Apakhonchich, and Katrin Nenasheva. The likelihood of surviving as a politically engaged performer-activist – as an outsider inside Russia – has been completely obliterated by the Kremlin but solidarity and collective resistance within and across national borders generate the sites of possibility to dream, imagine, and create together which, as Sara Ahmed (2014 [2004]: 181) reminds us, 'energises the hope of transformation.' In tracing the trajectory of precarity and hope in Russia's current feminist artistic practices rooted in collective resistance, I employ the politics of relation as a framework that places the bodies of performers in relation to 'others to whom [they] belong as inseparable, not separate' thus creating 'affective ties' with others (Aimee Carrillo Rowe 2005, 27). This is an expanded version of a provocation prepared for the 'Collective Resistance' roundtable at the Borderlines IX: Seeking Solidarity and Wonder Through Performance conference at De Montfort University in 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the configurations of belief, critique, and religious freedom in Russia since the performance of the Russian group Pussy Riot in 2012. The 'punk prayer' and its legal and political aftermath are interpreted as an incidence of the contestation of the boundary between the secular and the religious in the Russian legal and social sphere. The authors show that the outcome of this contestation has had a decisive impact on the way in which religion, critique, and the human right of religious freedom have been defined in the present Russian context. In response to Pussy Riot, the Russian legislator turned offending religious feelings into a crime. The article investigates two more recent cases where offended feelings of believers were involved, the opera "Tannhäuser" in Ekaterinburg in 2015 and the movie Matilda in 2017, and analyses how the initial power-conforming configuration that emerged as a reply to the 'punk prayer' has revealed a 'power-disturbing' potential as conservative Orthodox groups have started to challenge the authority of the State and the Church leadership. The article is based on primary sources from Russian debates surrounding Pussy Riot, Matilda, and "Tannhäuser" and on theoretical literature on the religious–secular boundary and human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to explain the widespread attention to contemporary protesting artists among Western audiences by focusing on the case of Pussy Riot. Social movement scholarship provides a first step into understanding how Pussy Riot legitimately protests Russian politics through its punk performances. It then turns to the concept of cosmopolitanism as a performance in everyday life to explain Pussy Riot's appeal among Western audiences. By collecting and analyzing 9001 tweets through a thematic hashtag analysis and topic modeling, this article analyzes how audiences talk about Pussy Riot and shows how Twitter affords users to perform cosmopolitan selves by sharing their ideas and experiences on Pussy Riot with others. Although we distinguish between four types of cosmopolitan selves, the results clearly show Pussy Riot is mainly reflected upon in a media context: Twitter users predominantly talk about Pussy Riot's media appearances rather than readily engage with its explicit political advocacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Pussy Riot affair has been represented in Western media as a feminist plight for rights. This study demonstrates that this interpretation disregards the social context of the case and the negative reactions of the Russian public. I argue that the rejection of Pussy Riot by a large segment of post-Soviet society is related to two factors. First, the group's members practice media activism and belong with new social movements of the post-industrial era. They challenge cultural codes and messages, and rely on the language and concepts that target Western, rather than post-Soviet, audiences. Second, the group exemplifies the new social divisions and boundaries that arise in post-socialist society during the information age. They are perceived by many Russians as cosmopolitan elites produced by global capitalism, and thus we need to seriously factor in issues of class along with gender in order to explain the negative reactions towards them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The arrest of the protest punk band Pussy Riot (PR) in March 2012 and the subsequent prosecution of three band members pose a significant puzzle for political science. Although PR's performances presented a coherent alternative to the Putin regime's image of Russian reality, it was unlikely that the discordant music and crude lyrics of their art protest would inspire Russian society to take to the streets. Yet, the regime mounted a very visible prosecution against the three young women. We argue that the trial marked a shift in the Kremlin's strategy to shape state-society relations. In the face of declining economic conditions and social unrest, the PR trial encapsulated the Kremlin's renewed focus on three related mechanisms to insure social support: coercion, alliance building, and symbolic politics. The PR trial afforded the Kremlin an important opportunity to simultaneously redefine its loyal constituency, secure the Church-state relationship, and stigmatize the opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay brings attention to the recent discursive turn in Russian politics that is reflected in the Kremlin's turn to issues of traditional values and morality. Expressed in Russia's domestic and foreign policies, this new “morality politics” is dated by the Pussy Riot trial in 2012 that the Kremlin used to advance its new discursive frame in the public sphere. Although not entirely new in its orientation, this new stage of “morality politics” differs from the earlier policy initiatives in its intensity, scope and political significance for the regime. The moralizing stance taken by the regime is accompanied by a divide and rule political tactic, whereby the establishment has tried to marginalize the protesters from the rest of the Russian public that the regime is attempting to reconsolidate based on traditional, conservative values. The essay interprets this recent morality turn as a strategy selected by the Kremlin to restore the regime's legitimacy that has been shaken by the protests of 2011–2012 and looks at the social and political consequences of the selected strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Pussy Riot affair was a massive international cause célèbre that ignited a widespread movement of support for the jailed activists around the world. The case tells us a lot about Russian society, the Russian state, and Western perceptions of Russia. It also raises gender as a frame of analysis, something that has been largely overlooked in 20 years of work by mainstream political scientists analyzing Russia's transition to democracy. It has important implications for how Western feminist categories can be applied to the Russian context. This introduction summarizes the main events associated with the trail of the three group members who were accused of staging a “punk prayer” performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in February 2012. It also introduces the findings of the six papers that make up this special section. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article studies the impact of conspiracy theories on post-Soviet Russian nation-building through the analysis of how the Pussy Riot trial was constructed by the Russian media. Conspiracy theory as a phenomenon is defined as a populist tool for relocation of power among different political actors, which creates identities and boosts social cohesion. This interpretation of conspiracy theories helps investigate how the media constructed the image of Pussy Riot and their supporters as a conspiring subversive minority, which threatened the Russian nation. The ability of conspiracy theory for swift social mobilization helped the authorities to strengthen the public support of its policies and model the Russian nation as ethnically and religiously homogeneous. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While Pussy Riot's “Punk Prayer” and its aftermath constituted something of a turning point for Russia politically – as well as personally for the women imprisoned afterwards – it was neither the first nor last of Pussy Riot's endeavors. Among other things, their series of songs, published as video clips on the web, endorsed mass protest against the Putin regime, criticized state-sponsored homophobia, and praised feminism as a possible curative for Russia's many ills. In setting forth their ideas, however, Pussy Riot's lyricists made use of traditional masculine and feminine gender norms as well as homophobia, wielding these against their opponents in the regime and thereby reinforcing them in ways that other self-identified Russian feminists found problematic at best. In this article, I review Pussy Riot's collection of songs in chronological order, highlighting the areas where gender norms and apparent misogyny, sexism, and homophobia appear. I weave my explications of the content of Pussy Riot's productions in with the responses of Russian feminist activists to Pussy Riot's lyrics and actions. Taking into account the views of some non-feminist Russian commentators in addition to self-identified feminist activists, I discuss a range of evaluations of thecontentof Pussy Riot's compositions, as well as differing appraisals of themeansthat Pussy Riot employed to achieve what they viewed as feminist ends: undermining or even unseating the Putin regime. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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The article discusses the case of the musical artists known as Pussy Riot, who were arrested after performing a so-called punk prayer as a protest in a Russian Orthodox Church. Topics include the notion of Orthodox martyrdom during the Bolshevik era, the nature of so-called postculture in relation to political dissenters in Russia, and the purportedly postmodern nature of such dissent. Comments from political scientist Gerhard Mangott are addressed, while a contrast between traditionally religious rural people and urban youth in Russia is noted.