Pussy Riot – Political Affect and Religious Feelings, Part 2 (Vasilina Orlova)
The following is the second of a two-part series. The first can be found here.
The possibility of seven-year sentences for the perpetrators in colorful dresses was discussed as too benevolent a punishment in such circumstances. At the same time, state officials suggested that to keep women in custody was a gesture of good will, because otherwise they could have been in danger of being physically hurt by the angry believers. In his sermon in the Moscow Church of Risopolozhenie, Patriarch Kirill (Gundyaev) said: “Every believer could not be not hurt. And I am asking you to intensify your prayers about the country and our nation because we have no future if we start to jeer in front of the great shrines, and if this jeer lays in someone’s soul as a type of prowess, as a true expression of political protest, as some appropriate action, or harmless joke.”
In the official document of expertise, which served as a basis for the two-year sentence, we find almost the same expressions: “the diminishing of the spiritual basis of the state,” “desiring to inflict deep spiritual wounds,” “encroaching on its <Christianity – V.O.> equality, identity, and high meaningfulness.”.
These formulas are expressive partly because of their unintelligibility, but they led to a legal decision. This decision, grounded in “spiritual basis” and “spiritual wounds,” defined the fates of people – not just of the members of Pussy Riot and their families, including children – and served as a warning to everyone who might be impudent enough to join a certain political movement. It visibly marked the process of the coalescing of the state and the Church, and was mirrored in further practices, serving as a precedent of a kind, despite the fact that jurisprudence in Russia is nominally based on the civil law as opposed to common law where precedent plays greater role.
A remarkable “reversal” event happened three years later. “Orthodox activist” Dmitry Tsorionov, also known as Enteo, with his supporters, members of the group God’s Will, damaged four linoleum engravings made by artist Victor Sidur. It happened during the exhibition “Scuptures That We Do Not See” in Moscow Manege on August, 14, 2015. Tsorionov denied that any damage was done except for a “broken plate.”
As opposed to “spiritual wounds,” the result of his actions was material, and therefore evaluable damage. As a motive, Tsorionov cited the “feelings of believers,” which were offended by blasphemy (koshchunstvo). However, contrary to the expectations of one part of the society, who gleefully discussed the possibility for Tsorionov to obtain “twosie” for his actions, he was arrested for ten days and then freed.
Then he appealed, and research conducted by theologians concluded that the Sidur’s works had “characteristics of pornography, along with the characteristics of the propaganda of sexual perversion.” Furthermore, “it is commonly admitted and does not merit additional proving that the naturalistic depiction of genitalia which is not justified by the creative design (syuzhetni zamysel) belong to the images of pornographic type.” Such expertise regards art objects as separate agencies, which may or may not, according to this logic of thought, “ignite hatred.”
“Religious feelings,” as respected as they should be, are a shaky ground for a silently endorsed conclusion that some objects are damageable and some people are punishable for offending those feelings, because everything becomes potentially recognizable as offensive to religious feelings of some group or the other. Both cases, Pussy Riot and God’s Will alike, show that some type of violence is state-sanctioned and tacitly approved, and some religious feelings are protected more fiercely than others.
Tsorionov’s and Pussy Riot’s cases therefore present a fundamental imbalance in how in the phallocentric imaginary the offences of one type is forgiven, and of another type is severely punished. The gender issue presents itself here with no uncertain decisiveness. The disparity in reading by the state of these two cases present evidence that the corporeal discrimination is inalienable part of the legal discourse. This is a feature of the state of political affairs in Russia that I would call Putin Modern.
For anthropologist Richard Flores, modernity “references a series of economic changes, social practices, discursive articulations, and cultural forms,” and therefore provides a context in which a performance or an event is interpreted. Putin Modern is characterized, first, by the development of the economy as a rigidly centralized system relying on the extraction of oil from the land, and by active proclamation of such economy as efficient and productive.
The second characteristic is the merging of the state bureaucratic apparatus with a criminal network. Thus, those who previously, during the 1990s, were a market mafia and expropriators of a different kind are legitimized and therefore simultaneously eliminated and affirmed in the exuberant embracing of corruption, nepotism, and greed.
The third feature of Putin Modern is the drastic narrowing of the traditionally broad segment of state-paid services, such as health care and education, to which Russian society has been historically accustomed. Some scholars suggest that the type of intervention the state makes into a social sphere signals a “policy shift from neoliberalism to more statist forms” of governance. They see it as the remnant and legacy of the Soviet state, but in 2015 the ambitious projects of mobilizing people, such as the attempts to organize youth in pro-party (“United Russia”) groups, have largely been exhausted. These projects are largely closed or exist for display only, not only because their attempts failed, but rather because they are redundant in the context of the new military projects and discourse.
Putin Modern greets the proclamations of state power and requires the ostensible demonstrations of such, which in turn leads to unwarranted moves on the international stage, such as the annexing of Crimea and a military operation in Syria in support of Bashar Assad. In terms of civil life, freedoms are truncated, and the space of what is allowed is narrow. Even though Russia still has greater degrees of freedom of expression than many other countries with semi-military regimes, all the “resistance” is happening on the social networks and several marginally influential websites. Still, it bothers the state, and the conversation that patriots need to shut down or at least increase control over the internet is recurrent.
Cultural Memory and a Figure of JurodivyC
The Pussy Riot performance turned out to be one of the most widely and wildly discussed topics in Russia for several months. In 2012, as events unfolded, I used the Yandex (a leading Russian internet search engine) service which allows everyone to look up how popular a search term is, and back then I found that there were as many as 300,000 searches for Pussy Riot in March 2012, and more than 560,000 in five months after January 2012. In comparison, the term “Patriarch Kirill” (Gundyaev) was searched only half as many times during the same period. Even “orthodoxy” was less popular.
Why should there be such a broad interest? This was, I suggest, because Pussy Riot worked with the “cultural memory” in multiple ways. The Pussy Riot performance in the church evoked, if only for a sacred place where it was carried out, the spiritual practice of jurodstvo. Within the context of Russian culture, it is a very powerful and easily read allusion.
Jurodstvo is a spiritual practice and a type of saintliness in Orthodox Christianity. The figure of jurodivy is loosely analogous to the figure of a fool for Christ’s sake, familiar to other Christian traditions. The verses in the First Message to Corinthians, 1:4-10, provide a methodological basis for this spiritual practice, known as “We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are prudent in Christ; we are weak, but you are strong; you are distinguished, but we are without honor.”
In the first Russian edition of the Bible, the so-called “Elizavetinskoye” (1751), this phrase sounds differently, which may account for some of the peculiarities of this practice in Russia. “Мы убо буи Христа ради, вы же мудры во Христе” (“Mi ubo boui Khrista radi, vi zhe mudry vo Khriste”) “Boui” has thesame root as “bouiny” (“raving”, “violent”, “turbulent”). It is far from “fool.” In the modern Russian psychiatric everyday language, the word “буйный” is routinely used for describing an aggressive patient suffering from a manic psychotic episode.
Some suggest that “fool for Christ’s sake feigns madness in order to reject the prospect of the usually mandatory hermetic seclusion, thereby remaining a part of secular life.” However, jurodstvo is not bogus. Jurodivy does not feign anything, as it is in contradiction with his status of the God’s person. The madness is real in a sense that it is a sanity in the realm of the otherworldly, as opposed to what the world mistakenly sees as sanity.
In a tropar (church praise) to Xenia Peterburgskaya there are words: “Rejoice, who revealed theinsanity of the world by [her] seeming insanity.” Perhaps a more precise translation to “mnimoye bezumie” is “imaginary,” rather than “seeming” insanity. Either way, there are two separateinsanities at play: the insanity of the world, which is synonymous with common sense, practical considerations, the search for richness and fame, and the everyday little business of living. And the insanity of the saint who observes another world, remembers death, knows the future, speaks to angels etc.
The fool for Christ’s sake is not fooling anyone. Jurodivys do not fake insanity. They do not pretend to be insane, and yet their insanity is pretend. At the same time, they are not the sages who pretend to be mad because their audience is too short-sighted to accept a divine message. In all the simplicity of a figure of a jurodivy, there is a dialectic of what is sane and what is insane, and how we divide one from the other.
Madness is sent to an ascetic as a gift or is permitted by God so that His servant would maintain a praised Christian virtue of humility. The wisdom of the jurodivy is paradoxical, her gestures and speeches are enigmatic, her appearance is strange, sometimes she runs around naked, and the meaning of her actions is revealed long after the events.
For example, one of the beloved and most widely known female jurodivy — jurodivaya — Xenia Peterburgskaya, who lived in the first part of the eighteenth century, “went out of her mind” after the death of her beloved husband. She dressed in her husband’s clothing and answered to his name. She claimed that it was her, Xenia, who died, and that he was alive.
Hagiographies of jurodivys follow the same pattern of a story. A holy fool acts in accordance with the laws of “another world.” These laws are often unknown to ordinary people and their everyday life.
Almost always it is the case that a jurodivy is persecuted. S/he is held in contempt, blamed for her/his insanity, is beaten, insulted, robbed, humiliated, disparaged, and cursed. Later, oftentimes after her/his death, however, it becomes apparent to everyone that this insanity was not insanity at all, but the sanity of another order. Usually after death there are miraculous healings and wonderful events.
Sometimes even in life jurodivy is known for his knowledge of the future. Xenia Peterburgskaya cried over the killing of the dethroned emperor Ioann Antonovich when it had just happened. She also assured a nuptial celebration of a virtuous maiden by prompting her to run to the cemetery where a young and rich widower cried his eyes out on the fresh tomb of his late wife. Jurodivy receives additional gifts of grace by quietly facing the abuse of those who treat her as if she is possessed by demons (and sometimes she is possessed by demons, as a form of other popushchenie, admission from God).
Jurodstvo, which is a type of religious asceticism often confused with jurodstvovanie, the employing of some aspect of this practice in a different context, oftentimes altogether devoid of religious connotations, and generally with a goal of satirizing something/mimicking someone, particularly a figure of authority, for example, a teacher in class. The history of jurodstvovanie in Russian culture is no less rich than the history of jurodstvo, but these are two different, although connected, histories.
In a secular context, jurodstvovanie is a mocking, jesting, satirizing behavior or action. It is meant to be funny, and isoften accompanied by wild gesticulation and face expression. The word “jurodstvovanie” would hardly be used by a performer. It is more of a label that compartmentalizes the behavior, analogous to krivlyanie (grimacing) and has a tinge of derogatory connotation. “Khvatit jurodstvovat’!”(roughly translated as “Stop being silly!” but in a far more displeased way) is anexclamation known to all schoolchildren in Russia.
While jurodstvo as a religious practice is thought to have ended with the institutionalization of insanity, the “birth of the clinic” in Russia, it remains a powerful trope of culture, traceable in literature. On the other hand, jurodstvovanie is a living practice, a part of the contemporary Russian everydayness. Pussy Riot’s performance fits the definition of jurodstvovanie as a mocking action. Curiously, this is the case of jurodstvovanie mocking jurodstvo, since jurodstvo is now a part of a grand narrative, revolving around Orthodoxy, sanctity, tradition, roots, spiritual and military power, classical Russian literature, where jurodivy plays a noticeable role from Pushkin to Ulitskaya, and so on.
Jurodivy is an asocial individual. He laughs when no one does, like Vassily Blazhenny; hesleeps with dogs on the street, as did Andrey Tsaregradsky; he gives away golden coins to a rich merchant whose affluence has just been ruined. Jurodivys are known for their disregard to power. They berate the powerful, as did the jurodivaya Elena, Nikolay Pskovsky, and Mikhail Klopsky.
Here is what Sir Jerome Horsey, an English nobleman and a traveler, writes on Nikolay Pskovsky’s (Salos) interaction with tsar Ivan the Terrible:
The emperour, after hee had saluted the eremite at his lodging, sent him a reward. And the holy man, to requite the emperour, sent him a piece of rawe fleshe, beyng then their Lent time. Which the emperour seeing, bid one to tell him that he marvelled that the holy man woulde offer him flesh to eat in the Lent, when it was forbidden by order of holie Church. And doth Evasko (which is as much to saye, as Jacke) thinke (quoth Nicôla) that it is unlawfull to eate a piece of beasts flesh in Lent, and not to cate up so much mans flesh as hee hath done already?
As Flores shows, it is not so important whether such stories are drawn from what really happened, or were imagined. They were creatively rethought in Russian culture. For example, Alexander Pushkin’s jurodivy in his historical drama “Boris Godunov”, is a character who dares to complain about street boys purloining his coin, to the nearly omnipotent, terrifying Tsar, compelling his ruler to “Order to slaughter them, as you slaughtered the little tsarevitch.” This story is embedded in what might be called the fabric of culture. Its reenactment in the space of culture poses questions about identity, power, resistance, and their pertinence when it comes to the reconstruction of meaning of the contemporary events.
The great and the good, in turn, were ambivalent towards the phenomenon of jurodstvo. There was a power dynamic that made jurodivy a fearful figure, in a sense. God might have been behind him, as might have been demons.
Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich was favorably disposed to Vassily Blazhenny and Kiprian. In contrast, a church reformist and a Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’, Nikon forbade the painting of icons of jurodivys. In 1716, Emperor Peter the Great issued a decree that those priests who feigned insanity and became raving demoniacs should be not only punished but prosecuted in the city courts.
Sometimes the acts that the jurodivy performs, are blasphemous, obscene, and indecent. Jurodivys break church rules, denounce sovereigns, dress in bizarre clothes, cover themselves indirt, run around naked, and throw feces into the parishioners. The skomorokh is an analogous figure of jurodivy in a secular context. He is a jester, a carnivalesque figure, and jurodivy is his twin in the spiritual matters.
On this “feast of fools,” where everyone is anonymous or acts under an assumed name (as did Pussy Riot), the authorship is shifted, the performance is happening, its sacrilegious nature is evident, the eccentric behavior is a source of feast for a viewer, even if this feast is full of indignation, and the only feature that breaks this Bakhtinian world is the punishment that comes in response to the eccentricity and satire, which reminds one that there is an ever-present realm beyond a carnival celebration.
Pussy Riot’s performance looked like jurodstvovanie to many observers and jurodstvo for some, but, most importantly, it reproduced the dynamics of powerless “fool” castigating those in power, which is a meaningful plot in itself. This plot is easily recognizable within the common codes of hagiographies reflected by mass culture. Jurodivy is a universally known figure owing to the cinematography, the last well-known example of a popular movie with jurodivy as a central figure being “Ostrov.”
In mass perception, Pussy Riot were abominable and loathsome figures in 2012. According to Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM), in 2014 44% of 1600 respondents think that Pussy Riot members were justly sentenced. 22% agreed that the sentence was too benign, and it should have been more severe.
If an event is a rupture in continuity, which is what constitutes the “eventness” of the event, it must allude to some type of context, which participants and observers are able to read and interpret.
Obscenity, Femininity, and a Specter of Show Trial
Every now and then scholars mention Pussy Riot in connection with Femen. Both groups consist of political actionists whose creative methods are concerned with “performed femininity,” perhaps on the border of “sextremism.” “Sextremist feminists” is a definition and self-identification that belongs to the Ukrainian-born group “Femen,” famous for their topless protests and actions which outstrip in straightforwardness and blatancy many protest actions around the world. While “sextremism” would hardly define Pussy Riot’s actions, there is this common feature between two groups in that they are feminist, and that the members of the groups are females.
Gender certainly plays a very important role here. At the Pussy Riot trial, “The defense didn’t offer a defense. Their first witness, Samutsevich’s father, claimed that his daughter was a good girl until she fell under Tolokonnikova’s baneful feminist influence and in his speech mentioning “skomorokhs.” Feminism, he argued, was antithetical to Russian civilization; feminism was for Westerners, not for Russians.”
The very motherhood of the accused (Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova both mothers) was used as a tool of symbolic violence against them. The reasoning was that good mothers would not perform risky and meaningless actions that would endanger their future and as a result the futures of their kids, but would spend their time with their children. After Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova received amnesty and were released in 2013, their first move was not to fly to their children, but to meet together for a press conference, for which they were widely criticized. Even Pussy Riot supporters asked incredulous questions: “Did I understand you right that for you the rights defense advocacy about which you are talking is more dear, more important, than your children?”
The whole plot of the Pussy Riot performance and sentence shows that patriarchy uses ideas and ideals of femininity as weapons against women. Not only the machismo and masculinity of power affirmed in the repeated actions of pointing out women’s places, duties, and missions, but the overarching concepts and “shared values” are so strong that they seem to be representing common sense.
While it was already noted that the trial over Pussy Riot evoked the historical specter of show trials in Russia, I would argue that the trial was allusive to the show trials of dissidents in the Soviet state in two aspects: its surreal absurdity, and its supposed moral and propagandistic force were intended to make it meaningful for an outsider, for a viewer, therefore ensuring that it received media attention. An important feature of show trial, when a persecuted individual is coached – by torture, threats to family members who are hostages of the state, and psychological pressure – to respond in a correct way to the questions posed for her during a trial, was absent. While the psychological pressure was in place — and confinement is a pressure on its own—the members of Pussy Riot were not convinced to respond in a premediated and desirable way.
Pussy Riot members were convicted for “hooliganism” conducted by the motive of “religious hatred,” because, according to the logic of the accusation, they inflicted suffering on those who were present in the church at the time of their performance and traumatized them. While for a number of Western observers it was extremely hard to understand what kind of trauma it might be, because for them it was a performance and they have the language to talk about it, many were deeply offended by Pussy Riot’s actions, and experienced a painful affect.
The space of political affect that Pussy Riot created is far from simple. Being an embedded feeling, a visceral emotion, affect governs political processes. Somewhere in the dark intersection of somatic and social, where the light of analytical thought does not quite reach, emerges what Protevi calls “political affect.” The prosecution produced the witnesses who testified that they were offended, who lived the event (“perezhival proisshedshee”) as a violation of a sacred place, and whose “religious feelings were deeply hurt” (“gluboko zatronuli ego religioznie chuvstva”). And there is no reason not to believe those people.
A religious feeling is such that it is not shared with anyone in a direct way, and only communicated through verbal and nonverbal means. The study found that the experience of desecration, though harmless to physical health, was “tied to higher levels, though somewhat differential patterns, of emotional distress. While sacred loss was predictive of intrusive thoughts and depression, desecration was tied to more intrusive thoughts and greater anger.” The sacrilege is perceived as a violation by a religious person.
Many compared their impression of Pussy Riot’s action to a situation that was more evocative to nonreligious people. I was present at a conversation when one person explained to another in a Moscow café: “Imagine that they would come to the tomb of your grandma and dance there,” which turned out to be a decisive example in an argument where a religious person was trying to convey how violated and offended he felt.
In describing Pussy Riot’s action, journalists and different Internet communities used the words “shamelessness” (“besstydstvo”), “obscenity” (“nepristoinost”), “pornography” (pornografia), as well as “bravery” (“khrabrost”), “fearlessness” (“besstrashie”), and “power” (“moshch”).
I would suggest that the punishment for Pussy Riot’s transgression was obscene in its propagandistic force. “Obscenity of propaganda” was a response to the “pornography” of the Pussy Riot performance.
Bernstein called the state response “the spectacular violence of sovereign power” and the bodies of the women “vital sites for the enactment of sovereignty.” She suggests that the contested narratives centered around Pussy Rio” coincided in a trope of “sacrifice”: “Even Pussy Riot’s detractors recognized the sacrificial character of the trial. The latter, however, argued that the women did not constitute legitimate subjects of sacrifice.”
What this approach implicitly suggests, is that the state here is back to its pre-modern incarnation, since in a “modern state” no life can be sacrificed, but rather is a fuel for all-consuming machine working on bio power. In the pre-modern world, Foucault writes, the sovereign power is embodied in the figure of a monarch who has “right of death and power over life,” has “the right to take life or let live,” (emphasis added), as opposed to disembodied bio-power of a nation state, concerned with “the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life.”
In a pre-modern epoch, according to Foucault, the figure of the monarch is an embodiment of power, and a perpetrator offends the sovereign by committing a crime. The punishment is a spectacle, theater, a liturgy, a celebration, a vengeance, and a sermon: a moral lesson, and a warning to others. The trial and imprisonment is not just the bureaucratized, anonymized, faceless procedure, not just a reenactment of an indifferent mechanics of the state apparatus, but the performance in itself, where everything is meaningful and evocative and produces emotions and affects, meant to be displayed and to be impressive, and should achieve something: the reclamation of justice, the re-establishment of truth, triumphant good, and conquered evil.
The modern state, on the contrary, as Agamben asserts, performs the procedures of power routinely and bureaucratically, and the bare life as a core of sovereign power “is exposed to a violence without precedent precisely in the most profane and banal ways.” Therefore, the possibility that Pussy Riot were considered to be sacrifice brings us back to the pre-modern epoch of sovereign power embodied in an individual figure or a ruler, but since it happened in a modern nation state, “Pussy Riot” were meant to be imprisoned and stripped from their personality.
In modern epoch, the body becomes an “object and target,” an instrument and a scene of the implementation of power. It is accordingly trained, subjected to things, observed, reconfigured, and becomes a center of coercion, manipulation, manifold usage and constant improvement. Pussy Riot turned out to be remarkably resilient bodies that resisted attempts to train them into docility, and disappear into undecipherable mass of the incarcerated.
They did try to explain their motives denying that they ever had intentions to offend anyone and infringe on anyone’s religious feelings. Tolokonnikova stated that they accept the aesthetic blame but refuse the criminal charges, and did not want to offend. Alyokhina wrote a “Reconciliatory Latter” (Primiritelnoye Pismo), speaking about the beauty of the religious celebration of Paskha,asking for forgiveness and appealing to the Christian feelings.
Their pleadings fell on deaf ears. As journalists reported, some of the believers displayed the adamant refusal to accept the apology because “the regret was not on their faces,” and some, as a church official Serguei Vinogradov demanded from Pussy Riot members “to beat themselves with shackles or retire to the monastery,” otherwise refusing to accept the sincerity of the apology.
Indubitably there was a “collateral effect” of Pussy Riot’s actions. It was largely unspoken publicly, but discussed among internet communities and tacitly implied, that many of the events performed by Pussy Riot and their predecessor and inspiration, the affiliated group “Voina,” are indecent and blasphemous, and thus deserve punishment, one way or another.
One of the actionists put a chicken in her vagina in a supermarket. Several “Voina” (“War”) members hanged the effigies of gastarbeiters in a supermarket. Tolokonnikova participated in a sexual orgy in the Timiryazev State Museum of Biology, while pregnant (the nerve!) under the slogan “Fuck for the bear cub” when Dmitry Medvedev was elected as president in 2008. None of these episodes was explicitly used against Pussy Riot at the trial, but they undoubtedly were taken into account.
The sentence that Pussy Riot received, signaled the state’s support for one group of citizens while simultaneously giving the other group an explicit warning. The obscenity of the state response was seen as an adequate measure in answering the obscenity of performance, which was also an act of propagandizing of certain ideals that clash with the hegemonic ideas of the nation state.
In the eyes of believers, Pussy Riot committed symbolic violence, in response the state enacted violence of a disproportionate force and magnitude. As Schuler muses, “Why the talk among people gathered here of blasphemy and hate crimes? Why the string quartet surrounded by anti-pornography signs? Why the detachments of husky, heavily armed male militia whose every forward movement caused wary Pussy Riot supporters to skitter back?” Indeed, the powers amassed in opposition to three young female activists were impressive and one could not help but think that there are some hidden dangers there that merit such a response.
Out of pure love for conspiracy theories and emblematic allegories, I could not fail to mention that Putin’s flight on a glider when he was seen leading a flock of migratory birds – six Siberian cranes – on September, 5, 2012 was read by some Russian internet analysts, perhaps ironically, as a symbolic response to Pussy Riot’s indecency. The inconsiderateness of the Pussy Riot performance matches the absurdity of the official narrative of displayed masculinity, where Putin assigns himself a role of avian alpha-male, and performs the deeds of valor worthy of Hercules: swims in the real river and displays his ripped torso, pilots the amphibious plane and exterminates forest fire, recovers from the bottom of the sea the ancient amphoras, protects tiger cubs. Putin has long been using machismo as a legitimation strategy and an excuse for governmental failures5, but the Pussy Riot case added to his pronouncedly masculine image, not surprisingly for Russian feminists, a new dimension of women abuser.
What kind of relationship is there between the body and the sovereignty in the context of nation state and bio-power? The body of a citizen still could become a “teachable moment.” The Pussy Riot story conveys an important message about modern Russia as a neoliberal nation state. As anthropologist Charles Hale writes on neoliberal multiculturalism in Guatemala, corrupt systems inadvertently produce resistance and feed on this resistance by overthrowing, subduing, and oppressing it, and continuously demonstrating the government’s power and potency. What Hale says about Central American societies is I think applicable to the Russian society: it has “all the characteristics—at times exaggerated to the point of cruel parody—of corrupt, predatory capitalism, with obscene levels of inequality and social exclusion, held together by brute force.” “The parody on trial” was the thought shared by many during “Pussy Riot” process. The predatory feeding on who should have been helpless victims but adamantly opposed putting them in this position, was a spectacle for the Russian resistance.
What kind of opposition is possible and effective in the neoliberal context of a nation state? Could a judicial system of a secular state operate with such categories as “blasphemy” and “sacrilege”? Although it was not in a speech of the court itself, and appeared in the testimony of the witnesses, it was evident that the religious lexicon was used to create a space where a political sentence would not be ostensibly displayed as political.
One of the main arguments which was repeated in many variants and at length, was “Let them try to do it in a mosque.” One especially passionate statement of this kind turned into an internet meme. The implication was, Muslims are passionate for their religion and whoever commits something approximating blasphemy in a mosque, is in mortal jeopardy. Besides equating Muslims with violent avengers and racial extremists, those who made this argument apparently did not reflect on the fact that they ascribed to the Russian nation state the functions and sensibilities of a religious state, which would use severe punishment for those who infringe on what it considers to be sacred, be it a sovereign’s power or religious values.
In short, the local specificities of resistance demonstrated by Pussy Riot’s performance and process, play out in the global feminist discourse as the force opposing the masculinized power of the state. Pussy Riot’s case showed that Putin Modern is a system in which a court decision was an instrument of ascribing a second-class symbolic citizenship status, especially taken into consideration the action by Tsorionov. Put in this comparative perspective, one could hardly argue that the state treating of the events is devoid of gendered reading and what I would call here genderization, a process analogous to racialization, ascribing to a group of people certain numberof qualities they should satisfy based on their gender/race, manifest in the body, characteristics.
Putin Modern, as the masculine nation state and a set of political and aesthetic preferences, uses genderization as the instrument in maintaining the phallocentric hegemony. The legally disproportionate sentence to Pussy Riot serves as a symbolic deterrence for other future acts of disobedience, especially female and anti-clerical.
Such symbols redefine the political imaginary and used as precedents to construct patriarchal plutocratic sociopolitical normality.
Vasilina Orlova is currently working on her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. She holds a doctorate in philosophy from Moscow State University (2013). She has published a number of books of prose and poetry in Russian. Her prose and poetry has appeared in prominent Russian literary journals such as Noviy Mir, Druzhba Narodov, and Oktyabr. She has received several Russian literary awards She is the author of Contemporary Bestiary (Gutenberg, 2014) and Holy Robots (Gutenberg, 2017).
Tagged with: "sextremism", Christianity, Jerome Horsey, jurodstvo, madness, Pussy Riot, Putin Modern, Richard Flores, Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich, Victor Sidur, Xenia Peterburgskaya