Tag Archive for: Pussy Riot

Joshua Foust has been criticizing the attention paid to the Pussy Riot trial in controversial ways.

Before I explain where I believe he’s wrong, let me assert that the most effective protests in the US in recent years came when gay service members and veterans chained themselves, in uniform, to the gate of the White House. That protest was by no means an isolated event. Thousands of people were organizing to pressure the government to repeal DADT, and DADT wouldn’t have been repealed without that underlying organization. The protest offended a number of DADT repeal supporters, mostly because wearing uniforms violated restrictions against protesting in uniform, but partly because participants in the protest were branded by some as self-promoters. Nevertheless, because the protest muddled with the symbols of power–the White House, the military, and proudly out service members–it made it far more risky for Obama to continue treating DADT repeal activists like he treats all others pressuring him on politics, by ignoring them.

When I talk about the spectacle of protest, this is what I’m referring to. The spectacle is not primarily about the number of celebrities–or even people on Twitter–responding to it (though of course the spectacle does increase the likelihood it’ll go viral). It has to do with reprogramming symbols of authority in ways that undermine how they’ve been used. The White House protest, IMO, made sustaining DADT a slight on those men and women in uniform chained to the gate. The protest (and the subsequent charges) basically shuffled the symbolism tied to the White House and military in ways that might have been very risky for Obama.

The analogy to Kony is inapt

Which is just one of many reasons I believe Foust’s analogy between Pussy Riot and Kony 2012 is totally inapt. Here’s how Foust makes that analogy.

In a real way, Kony 2012 took a serious problem — warlords escaping justice in Central Africa — and turned it into an exercise in commercialism, militarism, and Western meddling. Local researchers complained about it, and a number of scholars used it as an opportunity to discuss the dos and don’t of constructive activism.

In Russia, Pussy Riot’s newfound Western fans are taking a serious issue (Russia’s degrading political freedoms and civil liberties) and turning it into a celebration of feminist punk music and art.

I agree with Foust’s assessment of the Kony 2012 campaign, and I told him on Twitter that I think it could discredit online activism in general, particularly formal campaigns.

But that doesn’t make these two unlike movements the same. First, Foust claims both “commercializ[e] political action.” Except that–as far as I know–there’s not one organization focusing attention on Pussy Riot; it’s not a formal campaign. As distinct from Kony 2012, no one entity is pushing Pussy Riot as an embodiment of its ideology and preferred solution (there is freepussyriot.org, but as far as I’ve seen, it’s not driving the social media conversation on this and their twitter handle has fewer than 15,000 followers). And while Foust might argue all those who focus on Pussy Riot are primarily feminists or hipsters hijacking the Russian opposition movement, not only is there plenty of counterevidence to that, but it would still ignore the organic nature of the focus on Pussy Riot.

Moreover, to suggest that Pussy Riot is like Kony 2012, you’d have to ignore that Pussy Riot is an integrated part of Russia’s opposition scene (a point Foust acknowledges), one that many Russian dissidents support. That is, the agency of the Pussy Riot protest starts in Russia, not in the US. It’s really no more Foust’s role to decide whether and how people should respond to Pussy Riot than it was Invisible Children’s role to dictate what the response to Kony should be.

Foust misunderstands the spectacle of feminism

Then there’s Foust’s uneven understanding of how spectacle plays here. He gets at least part of what Pussy Riot was aiming to do.

Pussy Riot are clearly not expressing hatred of Orthodox Christianity, but they are protesting the Church’s close relationship to Vladimir Putin and his regime. Hating Putin is not hating religion, unless Putin is now religion in Russia.

But then he seems to entirely miss that Pussy Riot–not people on Twitter in the US–have created the spectacle here.

Focusing on the spectacle of Pussy Riot actually obscures the real issues that prompted their trial in the first place. Pussy Riot are not peasants grabbed off the road and put on trial for being women — they are rather famous (at least in Russia) political activists who got arrested for political activism.

After all, these women are famous–and they are therefore somewhat (though that is all relative in Putin’s world) protected from the worst that Putin might do to them–because they have created a series of spectacles, spectacles that were problematic enough that the Russian state chose to prosecute them, creating the spectacle that has generated Western attention. That spectacle serves as a mockery of Putin’s power, one with the bravery to laugh as they are sentenced. Indeed, their mild sentence is akin to what the government tried to do with the DADT protestors: an attempt to reassert authority, but not too much, because doing so would betray a weakness precisely on the symbols they’ve mobilized. If Putin sent Pussy Riot away for 7 years, it’d be a tacit admission–while the whole world is watching–that both his performed virility and his feigned religion are just acts, acts he can’t have questioned.

More significantly, Foust seems to misunderstand what role feminism plays in all of this (though he left this bit out of his Atlantic piece). Read more →