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Following a longstanding sociological tradition, this paper looks at reactions to nonconformity in order to understand the nature of social norms. In particular, it explores the patterns and scope of intolerance towards the perceived ‘enemies of the Church’ in order to understand social norms emerging in post-atheist Russia. Utilising the ‘social drama’ approach, the paper offers a comparative case study of increasingly repressive reactions by the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and state to two art exhibitions at the Sakharov Museum and anti-clerical publications by a blogger in Karelia, along with an in-depth analysis of the recent (2012) Pussy Riot action at Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow and the resulting trial and punishment of three of the band’s members, as well as of a variety of events that have followed this initial action. We then utilise national and cross-national representative survey data to suggest that these repressive reactions were congruent with an intolerant public sentiment tow...

This comment considers the mainstream, online Western news media’s reaction to the imprisonment of three members of the Russian feminist punk band, Pussy Riot, in August 2012. Of particular concern is the band’s style of feminist political protest; it argues that their case is of significance to feminist cultural criminology. Drawing on Young’s analysis of media censuring of feminist political protest as deviance, the contrasting, positive representation in this case of Pussy Riot as dissidents is explored. This positive representation can be understood with regard to Western geopolitical concerns, but also stresses the effectiveness of Pussy Riot in communicating their political message.

This article explores the complex positioning of Jeanne-Justine Fouqueau de Pussy (J.J.), editor-in-chief and columnist for the long-running Journal des Demoiselles (1833–96), vis-a-vis the dominant ideology of the feminine in nineteenth-century France. From 1833 to her retirement in 1853, J.J., a self-supporting and mature divorcee living alone, presented herself as a jeune fille who lived at home with her parents and corresponded about the latest fashions and trends with an anonymous and imaginary reader. This article argues that, in spite of the journal’s markedly conservative tenor as a vehicle for promoting respectable femininity and its explicit aim to prepare young girls for bourgeois marriage, the columns of its principal spokeswoman can be read as the expression of an alternative agenda centred in female sociability and autonomy. Analysing fashion plates and sewing patterns alongside sample columns from the twenty-year span of J.J.’s ‘Correspondance’, the article traces the idea of litera...

At 9:00 a.m. on 17 August 2012 I arrived at the Khamovnichevskii District Court in Moscow, where three members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot were to be sentenced for ‘criminal hooliganism’. Although my hotel was within reasonable walking distance of the courthouse, I was unable to find it (even using Google Maps) until a growing police presence led me to the site. The geographical puzzle is surely deliberate: located on an obscure cross street in a seemingly upmarket residential neighbourhood, the courthouse is visually unexceptional, easily barricaded, and difficult for an uninitiated visitor to discover.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the ?Pussy riot? case and the peculiarities of Russian postsecularism. Special emphasis is placed on the phenomenon of post-secular hybrids, i.e. the overcoming of the situation of social differentiation between religion and other social subsystems (one of the main distinctive features of secularization). It is claimed that the materials of the trial against ?Pussy riot? make evident the appearance in Russia of at least three post-secular hybrids: 1) the blending of religion and politics; 2) installation of religious norms into the public order of the secular state; 3) significance of confessional legal experts as part of the new ?ideological state apparatus?.

In respect of its subject matter, much popular music tends to be introspective and parochial. Its focus rarely falls upon international affairs and global politics. However, there are instances when popular music does engage with wider, political issues and even affects the relations between states. This article draws attention to some of these instances, from the recent imprisonment of Pussy Riot in Russia to Live 8 in 2005. It asks how and when music comes to engage with the geopolitics of human rights and what impact it might have.

The present article deals with the problem of Church canon law in its connection with secular law in modern Russia. This problem is analyzed using the example of the trial of the punk band Pussy Riot, whose members were sentenced to prison terms in 2012 on the charge of hooliganism for their performance in the main Russian Orthodox cathedral in Moscow. Their legal case relied, for the first time in modern Russian history, on the appeal of the secular court to the Orthodox Church canons of the first millennium AD. Scrutinizing the canon laws evoked by the prosecution, the author sheds light on the logic behind the interplay between secular justice and the ancient ecclesiastic rules in today’s Russia. Резюме: Статья Александра Пономарева посвящена проблеме взаимодействия канонического права православной церкви и светского законодательства в современной России. Эта проблема анализируется на примере судебного процесса по делу феминистской панк-группы Pussy Riot, участницы которой были приговорены в 2012 г. к тюремному заключению по обвинению в хулиганстве в главном православном соборе Москвы. Их уголовное дело впервые в современной российской истории апеллировало к канонам христианской церкви 1-го тысячелетия н.э. Разбирая положения канонов, на которые ссылалась сторона обвинения, автор вскрывает логику взаимодействия древних церковных правил и светского правосудия в современной России.

This document lists over 80 screenings of All This Can Happen between September 2012 and July 2016. The list is evidence of the international interest the film generated and indicates the different contexts in which it was shown during its first four years. Most are screenings, often in the context of festivals, whereas others—much less frequently—exhibitions. The hosts vary between explicit screendance events, film festivals, art venues, and educational frameworks. For example, in Berlin’s doku.arts festival, All This Can Happen was screened alongside Mike Lerner und Maxim Posdorowkin’s documentary “Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer” in a programme of films which transgress conventional narratives. The diverse contexts demonstrate that the boundaries between local and international communities and institutions are relatively porous and that films can travel widely. A second list of press reviews, existing review essays and selected blog entries on the film give a sense of audience reception and complement this review.

Dr phil. Reyhan Sahin—also known as Lady Bitch Ray—earned her M.A. in Linguistics, German Literature, and Education in 2004 and her doctorate in Linguistics in 2012 at the University of Bremen. Her alter ego, Lady Bitch Ray is a rapper, performer, fashion designer, and author. The following interview introduces Sahin’s work as a performer and as an academic and sheds light on the negotiation of feminist politics in a neoliberal context as well as how the complex politics of difference play out in contemporary, digital feminisms in the German-speaking context. By speaking in two voices, the academic and the performer/artist, the interview emphasizes the playful possibilities of the urgently political.

This chapter examines the avant-garde principles of Pussy Riot’s aesthetic, the group’s call-and-response methodology, and the group’s political disruptions of both physical and ideological spaces through their performances on Red Square and in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Through Pussy Riot’s politically driven punk performances, the social and aesthetic binaries are blurred; these locations are transformed into performative sites that retain both memories of their past and their iconic stature, but also suggest critiques of contemporary identity, cultural values, and personal associations. The Pussy Riot performers continue the legacy of artists such as Karen Finley whose “art of offending” disrupts stage conventions of female body presentation. Emphasizing their feminist roots, “Pussies” similarly disrupt gender expectations by celebrating the aesthetic of indecency, anarchy, ugliness, and assault.

Comedy has always used invisible characters, but in certain sitcoms these characters give indications of the protagonist's sexual and social shortcomings, such as Captain Mainwaring's wife in Dad's Army, the mother-in-law in The Fall and Rise Of Reginald Perrin, 'Er Indoors in Minder, Norm's wife in Cheers and Niles' wife in Frasier. These five invisible characters are there (or not) for comic effect, but there is rank underlying misogyny involved. The reactions given by these protagonists when discussing these invisible others simultaneously suggest their innate unhappiness and admits a failure to organize a fulfilling coherent relationship. In another example, Mrs Slocombe's discussions of her ‘pussy’ in Are You Being Served? are an integral part of her comic identity that again illustrates social and sexual failures and amplifies her naivety. In Friends (Warners 2004), Ugly Naked Guy who lives opposite the ‘stick insects’ Rachel and Monica points up their bodily concerns. More positively in Sei...

Like other aspects of the James Bond films’ well-established narrative formula and glossy packaging, music is used to provide both continuity and innovation within the series, combining accessible orchestral scoring with original standalone pop songs featuring well-known vocalists, and making a significant contribution to the marketing and economic success of the franchise. Behind this signature sound was British composer John Barry, who assisted Monty Norman in scoring Dr. No and went on to provide incidental music and title songs for a further eleven Bond films. Barry’s Bond scores combine a 1960s-inflected mixture of big band brass and sweeping, romantic string lines with classic song writing skills that continue to provide a template for contemporary artists and composers working on the series. This chapter focuses upon the engagement of music with the Bond film’s problematic and complex politics of gender and identity, exploring the often contradictory representations of femininity found both within the narrative and in its title sequences with particular reference to 1964's 'Goldfinger'. It discusses the overall dominance of 'Bond's' music within the film, but also argues that the characterisation of Jill and Tilly Masterson and Pussy Galore makes significant use of music - and its unexpected absence - to create spaces for alternative and/or queer understandings of femininity within the film, and opportunities for female defiance of Bond's (often problematically forceful) all-conquering vision of heterosexual masculinity. A key element within this analysis is discussion of the film's title sequence and the role of Shirley Bassey's 'Goldfinger' track as a dual signifier of both misogynist dominance and charismatic female resistance.

This essay investigates the political economy of sexuality through an interpretation of sex shows for foreigners in Bangkok, Thailand. Reading these performances as both symptoms of, and analytical commentaries on, Western consumer desire, the essay suggests the ‘pussy shows’ parody the mass production that was a hallmark of Western masculine identity under Fordism. This reading makes a case for the erotic generativity of capitalism, illuminating how Western, post-Fordist political economy of the post-1970s generated demand for these erotic services in Asia and how Western, heterosexual masculine desire is integrated into global capitalist circuits.

This essay analyzes the performances of Margaret Cho, a queer Asian American stand-up comic. Cho not only performs being swallowed up whole by the performing vagina, but she also details the pain and rage of being “eaten by the other.” Through her performances, Cho makes obvious that bodily boundaries are metaphoric for any boundary the nation feels is threatened or susceptible to invasion. Further, the way she is frequently perceived and/or attacked illustrates that her performances, as well as national responses to such performances, are shaped by and depend upon ideological constructions of the “excessively” raced and sexed body. Yet it is Cho's playful juxtaposition of pride and shame, agency and fear, and pleasure and pain that makes for effective queer performances. As she negotiates and troubles how she is read, Cho urges an intersectional approach to gender, sexuality, race, and nation and an attention to how opposing affects inform the transformations one continually experiences.

In this study, the author uses ethnographic and interview data from Pussy Palace, a lesbian/queer bathhouse in Toronto, Canada, to examine the ways in which the bathhouse space impacted participants' sexuality, behaviors, and notions of self. The Toronto Women's Bathhouse Committee (TWBC), an explicitly feminist and queer organization, is responsible for putting on Pussy Palace events and in creating an atmosphere that is simultaneously sexual and safe. Findings indicate elements of both spatial praxis and sexual agency, wherein individuals expressed being able to "take risks," "find their sexuality," and "discover who they are" in a safe space, where nonnormative bodies and sexualities are to be celebrated. Although participants expressed feeling "liberated," many also described feeling anxious, awkward, and insecure. Within a sexual space where bodies are exposed and highly salient, these anxieties worked to inhibit and curtail bodily expression. The author concludes by discussing the significance of spaces like Pussy Palace for lesbian/queer individuals when it comes to sexual expression and the need for further research when it comes to examining lesbian/queer sexualities and public sexual cultures.

This paper gives an account of the developments in the intensive psychotherapy of a seven-year-old boy with global development delay. It also describes the adaptations to technique and the changes in the setting that were required to support the work, which was undertaken in a special school. The importance of the regularity of sessions in helping to establish object constancy; physical and mental boundaries in relation to me/not me; inside and outside is also explored. A central theme of the paper is how close observation can inform the understanding of the emotional states of disabled children, particularly those with little language. The paper draws links between the early communications of mothers and infants and the therapeutic relationship, with reference to music therapy. It describes banging as a form of communication and traces the development of banging into more coherent nursery rhymes arguing that this development is an internalisation of the rhythm of the therapy and of the growing u...

In utilizing my ethnographic research on two Canadian lesbian/queer bathhouses, Pussy Palace in Toronto and SheDogs in Halifax, I seek to show the centrality of queer and the concomitant promises of a queer project when it comes to bodily speech and sexual articulation. While many feminists have criticized queer as being regressive and ineffective, I explicate the ways in which the queering of space employed by the organizers of Pussy Palace and SheDogs enables the discursive and physical conditions for intelligibility among bathhouse patrons. The result is a body that speaks, a body that through its very specificity is recognized and affirmed.

Physical features of space shape the sex and sexual interaction that occurs within bathhouses. Although there is scholarly interest in and documentation of male public sexual cultures, lesbian/queer public sexualities have been sorely neglected. In examining two Canadian lesbian/queer bathhouses— Pussy Palace in Toronto and SheDogs in Halifax—this article fills some of this gap. Utilizing ethnographic methods (in-depth interviews and participant observation), this article accomplishes two objectives: first, it describes the bathhouse setting and how modifications of space affect lesbian/queer sexualities; second, it compares these findings to what has been documented in the way of the gay male bath scene.

I am teaching my fifth graders to add fractions when the body falls. Only one of the students looks up. I have placed Kendrick next to the window at a desk by himself, away from the table clusters because the previous Friday, as I walked by his desk, he said, audibly enough so that Jose, sitting closest to him, snickered: "I smell white pussy." Today he is ignoring his paper, purposely avoiding drawing in the bars that measure 1/5 and those that measure 2/5. 1 see the body fall out of the corner of my eye, and Kendrick stands up and shoves his head so far forward that I hear it hit the glass just after the body thumps to the ground. "Oh my God/' I say I go over to the window, and through the soiled glass I can see the body, toes up and eerily straight, in the dirt of the playground. In the background, two planes land and take off from the airport in symmetry. "What?" Tisha wants to know.

In 1998 the Toronto Women's Bathhouse Committee (TWBC) organized the “Pussy Palace”, Canada's first women's bathhouse event. Held semi-annually at a gay male bathhouse in downtown Toronto, this newly emergent and potentially transgressive form of identity politics and spatial organizing caught the eye of the policing arm of the state; charges were laid and a public trial ensued. Through an analysis of the court decision and mainstream and alternative press coverage of the Pussy Palace, in this paper we explore the unstable and highly transitory operation of “queer” sexual citizenship within the confines of both the homonormativity of the gay and lesbian community and the regulatory regimes of the nation state. We argue that the policing and judicial institutions of the state seek to neutralize the potential transgressiveness of queer identities by absorbing them into hegemonic nationalist and citizenship discourses.

In this paper we examine the tensions inherent in the queer politics of Canada's first women-only bathhouse event, the ‘Pussy Palace’. Organized by the Toronto Women's Bathhouse Committee (TWBC), this event is designed to provide women with a ‘safe’ and ‘supportive’ space in which to explore alternative gendered and sexualized identities. We draw on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with organizers, sponsors and participants of the Pussy Palace to consider how the process of ‘queering space’, which is often interpreted as libratory, can paradoxically discipline gendered and sexualized selves. We argue that queer identities and spaces can be distinct from and oppositional to gay and lesbian identities and spaces. With this argument we contribute to a substantial body of geographical literature on sexualities, and to more recent critical work on queer geographies.

It would be enough to rapidly scan the global media, or briefly surf through transnational alternative journalist networks, to see that almost on a daily basis we are confronted with an infinite puzzle of news concerned with sexual battles across the globe. From the successive SlutWalk marches against sexual assault that have taken place in several cities since 2011 or the Pussy Riot imprisonment in 2012, to the campaign to restrict abortion in Spain, and the gay rights march lead by Mariela Castro in Cuba in 2013, in fact, the list could be endless. If we look at the contemporary global scene, the question then arises: how can we understand the conflicts over difference, culture, race, hegemonies, and power that these sexual struggles pose? What do these sexual battles tell us about sexual citizenship on a global scale? How can we give an account of the extreme heterogeneity of sites, genealogies, meanings, struggles, and trajectories where rights concerning our sexual lives are put at stake? To what extent do they point to the emergence of sexual citizenship understood as a paradigm as it has been circulating internationally, and how does this paradigm affect what counts as sexual freedom and justice?

This article draws on three pieces of qualitative research conducted with women in provincial Russia over the last 10 years. The first section analyses women's discussions of their everyday rights claims and their engagement in “consentful” forms of contention. The second section uses the Pussy Riot case as an example of women's human rights activism coded as “contentious”. Finally, the article highlights the blurred boundaries between contentious and consentful contention that can occur when women engage in online spaces. The article suggests a spectrum of contentious politics for women's rights claims that vary depending on the political opportunity structures available.

When punk activists ‘Pussy Riot’ were sentenced to two years in a penal camp in the summer of 2012 for their unannounced appearance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, it sparked protest rallies across the globe. But this was just one event of what has been ten years of show trials against artists and dissidents. The project ‘The Moscow Trials’ attempted to inject impetus into rigid Russian circumstances through the form of political theatre. In Moscow’s Sakharov Centre a court was set up in which a three-day trial show provided the stage for the exponents of Russia’s cultural war. In a re-enacted show trial with the most important exponents of the Russian cultural war, ‘art’ faced up against ‘religion’; ‘dissident’ Russia against ‘true’ Russia. There were no actors on stage; instead there were real-life protagonists: artists, politicians, church leaders, lawyers, and a judge. A lay court made up of six Moscow residents was intended to reach a verdict: for or against democracy, for or against artistic freedom.

Contains fulltext : 150846.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) In this article we address the complex relation between international human rights organizations and unruly activism. We take the Pussy Riot case as a point of departure to illustrate that the institutionalized methods of international human rights organizations can clash with the more radical agenda and action repertoires of unruly groups and movements. These new forms of civic engagement are situated in a larger context of discontent with globalizing economic and political forces and some broader challenges for human rights. We analyse these unconventional and sometimes violent activisms through a lens of unruly politics, arguing that they denote a fundamental shift in the type of engagement we know of traditional NGOs. We discuss how such activisms pose a particular challenge for international human rights organizations, which can be seen as too hierarchal, elitist, moderate and with too minimalist an agenda to achieve the desired system change. Unruly politics differ from the institutionalized politics of human rights organizations with regard to their understanding of social change, their modes of organization, and their action repertoires. We conclude the article by arguing that the new civic politics with an unruly character and the more traditional human rights advocacy are both valuable and do not need to be reconciled. We sketch three possible ways that international human rights organizations can remain relevant by playing roles which are different from, but complementary to, those of unruly agents, claiming that antagonism can even be fruitful for a process of progressive social change. 18 januari 2016 23 p.

Dette er en undersøkelse av kunstens politiske potensiale i lys av Jacques Rancières teori om estetikken som politikk. Analyseobjektet er Pussy Riots punkebønn-performance som de fremførte i Frelseren Kristus-katedralen i Moskva den 21. februar 2012. Performancen var ment som en kritikk av de tette båndene mellom Vladimir Putin og den russisk ortodokse kirkens patriark Kirill. For Rancière er likhet og likeverd et utgangspunkt i fellesskapets deling og fordeling av det sansbare. Dobbeltheten i det sansbare som er delt og oppdelt kommer til uttrykk i dissensus, som åpner for muligheten til å forskyve denne delingen av det sansbare gjennom politikken. Rancière definerer politikken som en prosess av ulike måter å inndele det sansbare på, for slik å skape grunnlag for nye fellesskap. Frigjøringsprosjektet i tilskuerens emansipasjon baserer seg på en likeverdig mulighet for deltakelse. Det er en utydeliggjøring av grensen mellom dem som handler og dem som ser, mellom individer og medlemmer av en sosial gruppe. Ved å forskyve den sosiale virkelighetens koordinater åpenbarer det seg også nye muligheter i rommet vi deler. Performancen er en kritikken spesifikt rettet mot den udemokratiske alliansen mellom stat og kirke. Rettsforfølgelse og sensur av opposisjonelle, kunstnere og kritiske journalister viser at Putin med sin sentralisering av makten også vil begrense medienes og sivilsamfunnets ytringsfrihet. Ved å introdusere muligheten av det utopiske rommet i kunsten som et rom hvor politiske alternativer kan utspille seg, kan vi skimte det politiske potensiale i Pussy Riots performance.

Art critics Yuri Samodurov, Andrei Yerofeyev, and Lyudmila Vasilovskaya; artists Alexander Savko and Artem Loskutov; members of Pussy Riot; human rights defender Maxim Yefimov; and many other activists might have been sentenced to between three and five years in prison if a proposed Russian law on blasphemy had been adopted earlier.

On 17 August 2012, three members of the female activist collective ‘Pussy Riot’, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, were found guilty of “hooliganism on the basis of religious hatred” under paragraph 213, part 2 of the Russian Criminal Code. They were each sentenced for two years in prison camps; Samutsevich was later released on probation. The defendants were judged for a performance they staged at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior on 21 February 2012.

The James Bond movies are the longest-running franchise in film history, making 007 the most iconic spy figure in international cinema. Likewise, Fleming's novels enjoyed immense popularity during the Cold War, especially after John F. Kennedy announced in an interview with Life magazine that From Russia with Love ranked as one of his top ten favorite books. In fact, at the time of Fleming's death in August 1964, over thirty million copies of Bond books had been sold, and two years later, at the height of Bond mania, that number had doubled to sixty million (Giblin 24). When inflation is considered in the calculations, the cinematic versions of Fleming's novels reflect equally impressive numbers; From Russia with Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964), Thunderball (1965), Diamonds Are Forever (1971), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), and GoIdeneye (1997) all rank among the top one hundred highest grossing films of all time ("List of Highest Grossing Films"). With Penguin Books re-releasing the Bond novels, many people are now turning (or returning) to Fleming's work, and what is perhaps most striking to these twenty-first century readers is the stark political incorrectness that the author employs. As several academic pieces on James Bond reveal,1 the spy clearly views non-British cultures as far inferior to his own, and these views are usually depicted through Fleming's villains who, to Englishmen, are racial others. These characters, which include Bulgarians, Italians, Germans, Yugoslavs, Russians, Koreans, Turks, and Americans, are the victims of shameless racial stereotypes and ethnic slurs (Arms 75). For example, in his first novel, Casino Royale, Fleming describes the local Bulgarians as "stupid, but obedient" and notes that they are merely used by the Russians "for simple killings or as fall-guys for more complicated ones" (27). In Diamonds Are Forever, American gangsters are described as "mostly a lot of Italian bums with monogrammed shirts who spend the day eating spaghetti and meatballs and squirting scent all over themselves" (18). Likewise, many of Fleming's villains, in both the novels and the films, possess sexual deviancies and physical abnormalities demarcating them as degenerate enemies. Stromberg, in The Spy Who Loved Me, possesses webbed hands; Scaramanga, in The Man with the Golden Gun, sports three nipples; Kidd and Wmt, in Diamonds Are Forever, are homosexual henchmen, and in the cinematic version of the story, Blofeld dresses in drag. These narrative devices suggest that the James Bond franchise is unwilling to acknowledge that individual differences exist among any nationality or race; the individual is reflective of the whole, and in the world of Bond, no nationality is safe from criticism -except, of course, the British. However, English nationalism is not only embodied in Fleming's villains; the novels also reveal perceived cultural supremacy through the bodies and sexuality of the series' women. In From Russia with Love, Bond is able to seduce Tatiana Romanova, a Russian agent who is originally sent to seduce and destroy Bond; this plot twist links O07's sexual prowess to his national potency by literally placing Britain on top of Russia, as their affair signals Tatiana's desire to defect to the United Kingdom. The link between female bodies and national governments is also apparent in the story when Rosa Klebb, the head of operations and executions for SMERSH, informs Tatiana of her assignment to beguile Bond. Here, Klebb tells the young Russian, "You will seduce [Bond]. In this matter, you will have no silly compunctions. Your body belongs to the state. Since your birth, the State has nourished it. Now your body must work for the state" (77) -and in fact, Klebb's own body and sexuality reflect the inhumanity and deviancy of the Soviets. Fleming describes Rosa as a neuter who sleeps with both men and women. "She might enjoy the act physically, but the instrument was of no importance ... and this psychological neutrality . …

The August 2012 jailing of Pussy Riot activists for their anti-Putin stunt in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour saw popular conceptions of the role of the Orthodox Church in Russian politics...

The trial and imprisonment of Pussy Riot might have captured imaginations in the west but, Andrew Miller argues, a vast conservative majority within Russia's borders is more likely to see the trio as part of a discredited opposition than as any lightning rod for revolution.

The article addresses the performances of the Russian feminist-punk band Pussy Riot as a paradigm of the politics of profanation developed in the recent work of Giorgio Agamben. Drawing on Agamben's genealogies of the concepts of parody, blasphemy and profanation, the article challenges the depoliticising interpretation of Pussy Riot's scandalous performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow in February 2012 as a blasphemous parody of religious rituals. Instead, we argue that their ‘punk prayer’ exemplifies the logic of profanation that reclaims the performative force of prayer by wresting it away from the conventions and rituals governing its possible use. While not conforming to J. L. Austin's conventional ‘felicity conditions' of the performative act, practices of profanation resonate with the experience of performativity as ‘veridiction’, analysed by Michel Foucault with reference to the ancient Greek parrhesia and by Agamben in the context of Pauline messianism. The article concludes with the discussion of implications of this profanatory performativity for political subjectivation and wider social transformation.

This paper uses the famous events related to Pussy Riot as a natural experiment to examine the effect of alternative media on church membership. A differences-in-differences strategy is used to explore the effect in question. The hypothesis is that, given a lack of religious background on the majority of the population and strong temporal interest in religious issues promoted by some provocative event, mass media can substantially affect religious choice. To check if this is the case, we compare the dynamics of religious choice of those exposed to alternative media reports on church topics and the rest of the people. As a proxy of familiarity with an alternative view, we use a dummy variable for using Internet. Our main result is that, during the experiment run over the year 2012, the growth of self-reported Orthodox and strict Orthodox believers was significantly lower in the treatment group than in the control group. Exposure to alternative media coverage turned out to heavily affect religious choice.

One of the most paradoxical claims about pornography concerns its narrative “endlessness.” Though few might have put it as radically as Andrea Dworkin when she claimed that pornography constitutes a woman’s use as a thing, acted out in fucking “endlessly repeated” (1979, 23), critics from Adorno to Žižek note the compulsively “ongoing” pornographic narrative (Sontag 1967, 39; Feuer 1994, 558; Žižek 2004b, 292). They do so in spite of the very obvious endings of each pornographic episode. In fact, a pornographic scenario rarely ever ends before having presented the image of the ejaculating penis or, less often, of the ejaculating vulva. In the previous episodes, I have already pointed out several twisted meanings of the money shot. We have learned that the money shot symbolizes the economic value of pornography; is criticized for foregrounding male pleasure; shows the compulsory repetition of the genre; highlights the importance of visibility in pornography; emphasizes the apparatus that “shoots” scenes; is the prominent figure of satisfaction; represents the “real” sex act; can be reversed to an internal shot; and sometimes even takes the “pussy point of view.” What remains to be discussed is the narrative function of the money shot: The money shot is almost always placed at the end of a scene and therefore universally marks its closure. What interests me in this episode, then, is the importance of the money shot (as representation of an orgasm) in the narrative of the pornographic episode, not only because it marks so noticeably the “ending” of an episode, but because it is at the same time conceptualized as refusing an ending.

Pussy Riot is an anonymous Russian female punk collective made up of young women who have achieved global fame for their high-profile protests directed at the Putin regime. Founded in August 2011, they hit the world stage in February 2012 when five of their members used the Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow as the site for one of their anti Putin ‘flash gig’ performances.

This paper looks at recent attention given to feral cats in Australia, particularly focusing on their symbolic status in eco-nationalist discourses. Australian eco-nationalism is a specific blend of environmentalist and patriotic sentiments which, in an exaggerated way, positions the feral cat as a rapacious European invader predating on native wild life. This vilification of the cat can be related to much earlier forms of (mainly European) symbolism associating the creature with femininity and evil, which I illustrate by looking at the manner in which the feral cat is opposed to the masculinised Australian wild dog-the dingo. I argue that the recent surfacing of this totemic opposition between 'the howl and the pussycat' is related to an eco-nationalist sense of place which simultaneously recognises and denies that the human colonisation of Australia was (and is) a form of feral invasion.

In the summer of 2012, aMoscowCourtdecision to sentence three members of the protest group Pussy Riot to two years imprisonment after having staged an anti-Putin performance in an orthodox cathedra...

The article draws on the interrelations of manifestation, representation, and distribution on the basis of historical examples, cases of “Femen” and “Pussy Riot”, and the analysis of actions of the art groups “Voina” and “Zmena”. The paper maintains that contemporary persuasion is based on the political economy of images rather than on the semiotics and psychoanalysis of images. The creation, reproduction, and distribution of popular images as well as political ones depends more on the market needs and art/science of marketing than on power and representation. Monopolies and corporations of the media could dictate the content of representations and define consumption in the period of analogous paper media, as G. Debord wrote about it. However, multichannel and self-organising informational networks are based not on the dictat of the propaganda or commercial spectacle, but on the semi-free social distributions and creative consumption. Besides, the contemporary semantic value and the significance of public icons depend equally on the form and process of dissemination as well as on the artistic, original content. This means that the circulation of images and the accumulation of symbolical and, as a consequence, financial capital doesn’t necessarily demand a special artistic value or developed aesthetic characteristics. Diminishing of artistry and targeting of protest actions in order to satisfy the desire of consumers are combined with both civic and commercial objectives. The synergy of civic and consumer interests, political activism and consumption in the media characterizes the contemporary political consciousness. Deterioration of art to the elementary street or labour art, adjustment of visuality in order to supply policy requirements and social networking needs blends with the growth of influence of digital technologies, the social and commercial distribution of reportages. The desire to watch the inspirational art as well as the political visions is supported and satisfied by the production and reproduction of special political events.The article considers two cases: the Ukrainian semi-commercial movement “Femen” and non-commercial art activists as well as the punck rock band „Pussy Riot“ as two possible tactics in the contemporary protest movement. The aim of the article is to analyse various possibilities for protest art tactics in the contemporary media. The social movement “Femen”, its sexism and declarative feminism, its conspicuous activism are an example of manufacturing protest events for political and commercial purposes, for consolidating the interests of corporative capital and civic society. On the contrary, “Pussy Riot” demonstrates manifestations independent of the corporative capital. They are very anarchistic and develop the protest street art. However, the problems of the distribution of art production involved the band into an active participation in the social media and into the creation of independent, communal circles of the circulation of images.Intentions of civic-consumer consciousness directly depend on the content of messages, artistic images and the possible euphoria affects that were disseminated in the digital internet spaces. It is the reason to re-evaluate the interrelations among their manifestation, representation, and distribution in the contemporary social media. The contemporary market oriented to the distribution dictates the demands for the reproduction of representations as also in the new media. If the propaganda is based only on the mass production of messages, its information is ineffective and doesn’t correspond on the logic of the contemporary market research and control, on the process of visuality consumption. The stories about the popularization of the art groups “Voina”, “Zmena” and especially “Pussy Riot” are examples of a well organized artistic protest in the political field and on the political arena with a different dependence on commercial corporations. Their activities cover the spheres of artistic manifestations, the digital market of the distribution and production of consumers’ desires and euphoria. The distribution of protest art goes on in the civic political field, and the growth of the protest movement means the development of demands for protest art production. Creative and informational industries seek to delay mass euphoria and then to keep it in order to exploit the enthusiasm and energy of masses for commercial purposes. The purpose of visible and invisible industries is the accumulation of various forms of capital, but not specific moral or political ideals. Critical thinking and political leadership correspond to different narratives of visual scene and the logic of the mass distribution of the visible. Critical thinking and political leadership need artistic experiments in the streets and in the media as models for political behaviour and demands. Artistic examples help to create the diversity of political manifestations and representations, the multiplicity of the political field. The Ukrainian, Russian, Belorussian modern political protests use different tactics from semi-conformism with the official power up to the antagonistic negation of the government, from the semi-commercial “Femen” and its collaboration with the corporate media up to the completely autonomous and anarchistic “Pussy Riot”. I think that all forms of artistic activism are acceptable for the development of free civic society, but they demand a critical perception and development.