So, the Pussy Riot story is pretty beat right now: if you follow any news outlets, you know the deal: they performed in an orthodox church, were tried in a perfectly-legal Russian kangaroo court, and then…. that’s it. Right?
Wrong. Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova have been sentenced; the deal’s done and they’re going to spend the rest of their two year term in “women’s prison camps” (read: gulags). The camps will be located in Perm and Mordavia (what a creepy name that second one is); several prisons in these regions once comprised the Soviet Union’s gulag labor-camp system. The third prominent member of the group, Yekaterina Samutsevich, was released earlier this month on a suspended sentence, which is essentially the same thing as probation.
The band announced their reaction to this decision via it’s Twitter account:
“These are the harshest camps of all the possible choices”
(Pretty dehumanizing, huh?)
What is interesting in this phenomenon is how quickly it grew: from a low-profile story making appearances only in minor news outlets and Russia Today, to a celebrity-endorsed full-fledged media frenzy, it seemed to skyrocket at one point. I suppose everyone soon figured out that there isn’t much they can do to actually help Pussy Riot apart from reposting masturbatory declarations of “solidarity” (and how solid is it if it only exists on the internet?).
Most major news outlets jumped on this meteoric feel-good bandwagon, quickly spaying it of any anarcha-feminist force it might have had by sexualizing the band members and turning the entire phenomenon into a cutsie Riot Grrrl display of rebelliousness. This couldn’t be helped: this is a resilient vestige of patriarchal oppression that informs the way in which women are portrayed in mass media: as objects devoid of volition and will; as centerpieces at best, to be looked at but never acknowledged much less understood.
In a show of solidarity, St. Petersburg artist Pyotr Pavlensky sewed his mouth shut
Once they have been fetishized into caricatures of themselves and consumed by the public, radical feminist performance artists can only be thrown away, preferably to some remote Siberian penal colony none of us has ever heard of. This is the way in which the media sees groups like Pussy Riot and Femen, but this is also the way in which we see them: there are still articles coming out about their trial and incarceration, but they’re no longer trending and they’re no longer garnering such volumes of hits and likes. It is, after all, much easier to simplify their message and subscribe to an ideological kitsch than it is to play through a thought-experiment and imagine the breadth of oppression that leads to such acts of aesthetic revolt.
After all, there is a reason the members wore ski masks in their performances: not to avoid getting caught by the authorities, as they understood the risks, but to avoid getting caught in the cycle of objectification that would, inevitably, spay their radical feminist message and render it barren.
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