Are we all Pussy Riot? On narratives of feminist return and the limits of transnational solidarity

Pussy Riot and feminist eventfulness

When discussing the feminist eventfulness of Pussy Riot, it is first important to note that there is not one singular event, but several, three of which are particularly salient for this article: a live feminist event; a feminist media event; and a feminist meme event. Unpacking these different events is revealing of the audience for Pussy Riot’s protests and helps make sense of the different ways events ‘travel’; that is, how events are taken up by and circulate within different kinds of networks (e.g. news media, social media, activist, interpersonal, etc.). The ‘live feminist event’ here refers to the punk prayer protest itself in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, while the feminist media event is the release of these actions, intercut with pre-recorded footage, on YouTube. The punk prayer protest is similar to other interventions that Pussy Riot has made. All of these actions are recorded, then edited, intercut with pre-recorded footage, and with a dubbed over song, are filmed for release on to YouTube. While a Pussy Riot action may be seen by few people ‘live’ – and may not be intelligible as protest to viewers of the event – their audience is expanded to have global reach by virtue of creating a feminist media event via the recording of the protest, and then editing and releasing the video online.

The uncut footage of Pussy Riot’s punk prayer intervention, released several months after the edited video appeared online, is rife with chaos: the women’s voices echo almost unintelligibly through the church, while the accompanying music is played through a portable sound system (a boom box), and clearly very few people in the church know what is going on. ‘I hadn’t heard the words, thank God’, reported one witness (Lipman, 2012). It was not crucial that the meaning of Pussy Riot’s lyrics be understood at the live event; the fact of Pussy Riot’s physical presence at the altar was enough for Pussy Riot to be ‘understood’ by church officials as a form of sacrilege because women are not permitted to step on to the chancel in the Russian Orthodox faith. However, in the edited video the lyrics and music emerge clearly as an integral part of this feminist event because of the political and social critique contained therein. During the trial of the members of Pussy Riot, the charges of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred took into account both the content of the protest and its location, but failed to take into account the political motivation of the protest. Indeed, the emphasis on religious hatred shifted the testimony to questions of whether or not Pussy Riot had intended to offend the Church (Narizhnaya, 2012). The charges, like much of the commentary and press coverage of the event and subsequent trial, depoliticise the protest, framing it in terms of negative affect rather than political critique at the intersection of religion, government corruption, and gender and queer politics, and seemingly relegate the protest to the level of a playful stunt. This framing of feminist events is not unusual. In her analysis of the ways in which feminist Sunera Thobani was attacked in the press following her public critique of the ‘War on Terror’, Ahmed notes that feminists are often constructed as outsiders motivated by ‘purely negative passion’ (2010: 169). In the case of Pussy Riot, despite the fact that one of the protest participants, Alyokhina, herself belongs to the Russian Orthodox faith, members were frequently framed as un-Russian during the trial and by the Kremlin (Meister, 2012; Reidy, 2012).

The protest format used for the punk prayer is similar to Pussy Riot’s other live/media events. Footage of Pussy Riot protesting in Moscow’s Red Square from the documentary Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer (2013), for example, features the members standing on the Lobnoye Mesto, their voices carried away by the wind, with fewer than twenty people wandering around, whereas their YouTube video of the live event overdubs their song, ‘Putin Zassal’, a feminist critique of Vladimir Putin that calls on Russians to take to the streets, and increases viewership of the protest to just under 7000. While there were only a few people in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour at the time of their live feminist event (Lipman, 2012), the edited video of Pussy Riot’s punk prayer has received over 1,750,000 views, thus exponentially increasing both their audience and their global reach. (The video documenting the unedited live event has been viewed over 500,000 times.)

The final event generated by the protest, trial, and incarceration of Pussy Riot that is germane to this article is a ‘feminist meme event’ (Thrift, 2014: 1092; see also Rentschler and Thrift, 2015), that is, the solidarity protests that occurred around the world in support of Pussy Riot at which many supporters donned colourful balaclavas of their own, as well as the online awareness-building that was fostered via videos of the solidarity marches, and other actions, posted to YouTube, as well as the Twitter hashtags ‘freepussyriot’ and ‘weareallpussyriot’. As Samantha C. Thrift argues, a feminist meme event ‘is a form of feminist media event that references not only an external event […] but itself becomes a reference point’ (2014: 1092; see also Rentschler and Thrift, 2015). Because the balaclavas render Pussy Riot participants anonymous, they allow for a kind of identification with the group, conceivably multiplying its membership into the thousands. The anonymity of Pussy Riot members via their masks lends itself to a meme in that it can be taken up by anyone wishing to express solidarity with the group, but also allows for Pussy Riot more of an open concept or movement in which anyone can participate. These feminist events – live, media, and meme – intersect and interact with each other, resonating across different geographic and media spaces, and helping to expand the reach and impact of Pussy Riot.

This notion of resonance emerges from physics and music discourse. In the classic example of resonance, an opera singer hits a high note and a wine glass shatters. This reaction occurs, theoretically, when the frequency of the sonic waves of the vocalist matches the resonant frequency of the wine glass causing it to vibrate as well. This conceptualisation of events, their effects, and how they travel is nonlinear and can help explain the seemingly random, unintentional or uncontrollable effects of particular actions. Conceptually, this notion of resonance shares some similarities with feminist ‘reverberation’, which Joan Wallach Scott describes as a kind of fantasy echo that is never faithful to its origins. Scott theorises her notion of reverberation using Women in Black as a case study, a group started in 1988 in Jerusalem by women who were protesting the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The protest soon spread to other parts of Israel, and in the early 1990s the protest took on a life of its own: Women in Black protests sprang up all over the world and often had nothing to do with the Israeli Occupation. Women in Black became a tactic; Scott calls it ‘an improvisational strategy, deployed locally rather than as a branch of any centralized organization’ (2011: 84). Like resonance, the notion of reverberation thus accounts for the ways in which feminist events generate energy. Unlike resonance, however, reverberation connotes derivativeness, suggesting a powerful origin source from which other groups draw inspiration or energy. This notion of derivativeness is problematic and limits the productiveness of reverberation as a framework for understanding the eventfulness of Pussy Riot within a transnational context. In light of the ways in which Pussy Riot is being framed within Western media as potentially marking the return of Riot Grrrl, theorising this feminist event via reverberation would frame Pussy Riot as a hackneyed offshoot of Riot Grrrl, contributing to the interpellation of Pussy Riot into a larger Western narrative of white feminism more easily understood by a white Western audience.

Resonance thus moves away from derivation and proximity, focusing instead on consonant and dissonant frequencies. This way of theorising the effects of feminist events and how they travel also shares similarities with Ednie Kaeh Garrison’s reimagining of the feminist wave metaphor as radio, rather than ocean, waves. As Garrison argues, ‘One interesting thing about radio wave frequencies is that they aren’t typically conceived of as overlapping and fractured, but they do overlap, they do fracture – especially when there is interference’ (2005: 253). The metaphor of radio waves is conceptually productive because it allows for how different frequencies can cause static. Putting this in a social change framework, some feminist events may resonate with each other entirely or in certain ways, while others may be incommensurable with each other in terms of their goals or discourse, and in ways that cannot be fully controlled. As Thrift argues, the political efficacy of the feminist meme event is that it helps ‘mobilize new modes of feminist critique and collectivity’ (2014: 1092). Resonance allows for both ‘consonant’ and ‘dissonant’ events, acknowledging also that notions of consonance and dissonance are socially constructed and that different ears will hear and receive these ‘sounds of change’ differently (Heble, 2000: 26). In considering the resonance of the Pussy Riot event, then, to whose ears are narratives of Pussy Riot’s marking a return of feminism and Riot Grrrl particularly consonant?

The ‘return’ of feminism

The eventfulness of the Pussy Riot story has led various commentators – from news media journalists to feminist bloggers – to ask if Pussy Riot marks a return or renewal of feminism; a Toronto Star headline, for example, proclaims that ‘Pussy Riot Has Given Feminism a Shot in the Arm’ (Hough, 2012) and The New Yorker ran an article on ‘The Next Generation of the Punk-Rock, Radical-Feminist Movement’ (Friedman, 2012), while blogger Gabrielle asks on Autostraddle: ‘Is Pussy Riot going to be the catalyst for the revival of Riot Grrrl? Or something even bigger?’ (2012). Indeed, this narrative of feminist renewal is often framed particularly as a return of Riot Grrrl, the feminist punk movement that was particularly prominent in the 1990s. Music website Collapse Board asks if Pussy Riot will ‘provoke a new coming of Riot Grrrl’ (True, 2012) and The Guardian similarly asks ‘Have Pussy Riot Sparked a New Wave of Grrrl Power?’ (Snapes, 2012). Although the language of return suggests that Riot Grrrl had gone somewhere and is now coming back, there have been feminist punks who have identified as and with Riot Grrrl throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Riot Grrrl chapters populated by new generations of feminist punk grrrls continued into the early 2000s, as evidenced through a series of Toronto-based zine publications, for example (Riot Grrrl Toronto, 2001). Nonetheless, Riot Grrrl has been indelibly linked with a particular moment – both musically and politically – in the 1990s: musically, through its association with 1990s Seattle-based grunge scenes and politically as an origin source of third-wave feminism. Furthermore, the archiving of Riot Grrrl materials, particularly the new Fales Library collection on Riot Grrrl, focuses on the scene’s heyday in the early 1990s (Eichhorn, 2013: 95).

The question of whether or not Pussy Riot marks the return of Riot Grrrl has the effect of tying Pussy Riot to the latter. Clearly, Pussy Riot references Riot Grrrl through their name and the collective cites Riot Grrrl band Bikini Kill as an inspiration. However, Pussy Riot does not identify as a Riot Grrrl group, seeing it as a Western phenomenon and argues that their group is more grounded in a Russian cultural context and that they take inspiration from a range of sources, including performance art, actionism, and Russian anarchism (Chernov, 2013: 3). This grounding is evident in the site-specific nature of Pussy Riot’s interventions, as well as within their music. ‘Holy Shit’ juxtaposes the gritty electric guitar, drum rhythms, and the half-shouted lyrics typical of punk with choral chants. This part of the song is a quotation from Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil (also known incorrectly as his Vespers), from the sixth movement entitled ‘Theotokos, Virgin, Rejoice’, first performed in Russia by an all-male chorus in 1915 (Bertensson, Leyda and Satina, 2001: 192). In the original, the chant’s lyrics consist of the Hail Mary; similarly, in Pussy Riot’s reworking, this part of the song appeals directly to the Virgin Mary to ‘put Putin away’ and to become a feminist (Pussy Riot, n.d.). The more recognisably punk parts of the song are site-specific, referencing the belt of the Virgin Mary, a relic held at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, and Patriarch Gundyaev, critiqued for worshipping Putin more than God. Through its stylistic features, Pussy Riot’s music is clearly in conversation with Russian music traditions and the content of Pussy Riot’s message is evidently grounded in Russia’s social, political, and religious specificities. The conflation of Pussy Riot with Riot Grrrl in Western media articles – particularly salient examples include the headlines ‘Russia’s Riot Girls’ (Young, 2014) and ‘Pussy Riot Grrrls’ (Friedman, 2012) – has the effect of claiming Pussy Riot as ‘just like’ (American) Riot Grrrl, thus aligning Pussy Riot with Western, specifically American, values and interests.

The question of whether or not Pussy Riot marks a return of feminism, Riot Grrrl, or something entirely new was recently put to former Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna, a key figure within Riot Grrrl, in an interview with the online music criticism publication Pitchfork. Reflecting on this question, Hanna states that when she is asked, ‘How do we restart Riot Grrrl?’ she replies ‘Don’t’ (quoted in Pelly, 2012). And yet, there are clearly folks who want to see a return of Riot Grrrl: Hanna states, ‘everyone is always asking me’ (quoted in Pelly, 2012). What is at stake in this desire for return? It seems to evoke a certain feminist nostalgia for a time that has been imagined perhaps as more exciting, more authentic, and more politically energetic. Although Riot Grrrl was a relatively small subcultural scene, its existence has resonated around the world, in part due to its having been written about extensively in mainstream media, a practice that Riot Grrrls attempted to shape and resist via a call for a media blackout; in part due to the cultivation of a vibrant communication network by Riot Grrrls themselves, both through zines and online; and because Riot Grrrl has been retrospectively cast as a foundational part of third-wave feminism. While not wishing to diminish or dismiss the influence of Riot Grrrl, this kind of nostalgia seems to somewhat misrepresent the scale of the subculture, framing it as though it was the only feminism of the 1990s. Moreover, this desire for return seems to imagine a kind of false unity within Riot Grrrl and glosses the inattentiveness to white privilege that structured much of the scene. It is thus worth asking what exactly commentators are hoping for when they ask if Pussy Riot marks the renaissance of Riot Grrrl.

While Pussy Riot has been framed in some media accounts as marking a return of Riot Grrrl, it has also been framed as generative in its own right. ‘It would be really cool’, Hanna remarks in the same interview, ‘if this reinvigorated feminists from all over the world’ (quoted in Pelly, 2012). This statement, among others, is, like the commentary that links or conflates Pussy Riot with Riot Grrrl, framed by narratives of loss and return: feminists were once invigorated, but have lost this energy and are now tired. Pussy Riot promises to inject some life back not only into feminism, but into feminism worldwide. Hanna’s statement, which is representative of a general hope for Pussy Riot that appears within Western progressive media, rests on the assumption that Pussy Riot is universally relatable to feminists. The feminist subject is thus inscribed as unmarked and generalisable and some of Pussy Riot’s context-specific political critique is potentially diminished.

In her book on the narratives that structure feminist theory, Clare Hemmings argues that Western feminisms are framed by three dominant narratives of progress, loss, and return (2011). ¹ Loss narratives imagine that feminism has become stale and depoliticised. Hemmings argues that these narratives are damaging because they are amenable to post-feminist and neo-imperialist agendas (2011: 26). For example, a loss narrative that inscribes feminism as a once vibrant force now in need of reinvigoration is not all that different from post-feminist claims that feminism is ‘dead’ and irrelevant. In contrast to narratives of loss, return narratives attempt to reconcile and combine. Hemming’s analysis of Western feminist theory focuses on return narratives that seek to integrate a perceived impasse between postmodern and materialist feminisms, but in ways that gloss over some of the actual tensions between these approaches. The return narrative, Hemmings argues, insists that we ‘not look at the past too closely’ (2011: 113).

The narrative of reinvigoration and resurgence that structures media articles on Pussy Riot functions similarly, seeking to integrate Pussy Riot and Riot Grrrl together into a larger feminist narrative that fails to acknowledge the limitations of Riot Grrrl as a scene and relies on a notion of a singular feminism that does not decentre the Western white feminist subject. As Gayle Wald has argued of white-girl femininities in punk rock, when gender performance is highlighted as ‘a privileged site and source of political oppositionality’, questions of nation, culture, and race ‘can be made to disappear under the sign of transgressive gender performance’ (1998: 590). Moreover, when mainstream and feminist media sources claim Pussy Riot as part of Riot Grrrl, the narrative risks decontextualising and flattening out the context specificity of Pussy Riot’s critique and it reasserts Riot Grrrl, which is primarily a Western form of white feminism, as the central, generative source of feminist energy. ²

The limits of transnational solidarity

The eventfulness of Pussy Riot has been buoyed up via a huge groundswell of support from musical celebrities, like Paul McCartney and Madonna. Because Pussy Riot integrates music into their performances, they are often described only as a punk band on Western media news sites, such as CNN (Watson and Somra, 2014), the New York Daily News (Associated Press, 2014), The Telegraph (APTN/AP, 2014), and Global News (Vasilyeva, 2014). One effect of framing Pussy Riot as a music group is that the story of Pussy Riot’s suppression becomes seen as a matter only of artistic expression and free speech. This discursive effect then frames the story of Pussy Riot not as politically motivated performance/intervention – Pussy Riot are simply performing their music – but as a story of a repressive Russian government. This framing of Pussy Riot allows for a Western, particularly US, exceptionalist discourse to surface. It is almost as though Pussy Riot could have been doing anything.

In her work on Riot Grrrl, Mary Celeste Kearney has argued similarly that media coverage of Riot Grrrl frequently framed the scene as only a musical phenomenon, which had a depoliticising effect. While Kearney argues, ‘Because Riot Grrrl’s emergence and scenes were not independent of [the emergence of grunge bands and the “women in rock” phenomena] […] this radical girl movement was easily understood, and thus publicized, as a chapter in both of these larger musical narratives’ rather than as a strongly politicised subculture that included not only music, but zine-making, conferences, and workshops, all of which dealt with feminist political issues including sexual assault, body image, and racism within the movement (2006: 63). While certainly music can be political, the continual description of Pussy Riot as a punk band, in addition to solidarity statements from musical celebrities, is reductive and frames the collective as an entertainment group that ‘just’ does music.

Pussy Riot’s protest, trial, and incarceration also generated its own feminist meme event. The Twitter hashtag ‘freepussyriot’ has been tweeted almost daily since members of the collective were arrested, but the eventfulness of Pussy Riot has become particularly ‘memetic’ through the solidarity protests that have occurred throughout the world and the generation of creative energy in response to the trial and incarceration of its members. Videos posted to YouTube document solidarity protests and other creative actions in Olympia, Wisconsin, San Francisco, Glasgow, Chicago, Dublin, the Ukraine, Johannesburg, Montreal, Washington DC, Hungary, Melbourne, and London, to name just the first page of listings that result from searching under ‘Pussy Riot solidarity’. In print media, the art book Let’s Start a Pussy Riot (Neu and French, 2013) draws together creative responses to the Pussy Riot affair, and reframes ‘pussy riot’ not as a band, but as a movement. Similarly, an issue of STRIKE! magazine asks readers to submit creative responses to a collaborative collage in an homage to Pussy Riot centred around the prompt ‘We are ALL Pussy Riot’ (Admin, 2014).

The phrase became memetic following the release of Peaches and Simonne Jones’s song ‘Free Pussy Riot’, which concludes with the chant ‘We are all Pussy Riot’, and Hanna’s remarks in the Pitchfork interview that ‘Anybody can be Pussy Riot. We are all Pussy Riot’ (quoted in Pelly, 2012). In addition to inspiring STRIKE! magazine, the statement generated its own Twitter hashtag, ‘weareallpussyriot’, has circulated as a headline in online media (see Carmichael, 2014; Morris, 2012; Reznik, 2012), and has even generated its own t-shirt (on sale, at the time of writing, for $5.24; regular price $22.59 on hottopic.com). The circulation of the slogans ‘Free Pussy Riot’ and ‘We are all Pussy Riot’ via Western media sources speaks to the popularity – and marketability – of the collective, but it also prompts the question of why the protest, trial, and incarceration of Pussy Riot has resonated so strongly. ³ If ‘We are all Pussy Riot’, to echo Larisa Reznik, ‘Who Are “We”?’ (2012).

From anonymity to celebrity: Pussy Riot, unmasked

Kathleen Hanna contextualised her statements in the Pitchfork interview that ‘Anybody can be Pussy Riot. We are all Pussy Riot’ by referring to the anonymity Pussy Riot’s balaclavas enable, creating an ‘open concept’ for the group and its membership. Prompted to connect Riot Grrrl and Pussy Riot, Hanna again refers to the balaclavas, stating, ‘I did an interview in ’91 or ’92 and was wearing a ski mask. It was my pathetic attempt at having riot grrrl be leaderless, because everyone was saying I was the leader. And I didn’t want my looks to be focused on. There is definitely the commonality of having something that is not copy-written’ (quoted in Pelly, 2012). Certainly, part of the appeal of the Pussy Riot story is that donning a balaclava has become a striking symbolic way to express solidarity with the group, potentially multiplying the number of Pussy Riot members exponentially. The gesture resonates powerfully with some feminist discourses that seek to avoid movement ‘rock stars’. Indeed, this discourse has been mobilised by alleged members of Pussy Riot who disavowed Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina in an open letter published in The Guardian in part due to the participation of the latter in a ticketed Amnesty International concert. Speaking to the use of balaclavas, members state: ‘We are anonymous because we act against any personality cult, against hierarchies implied by appearance, age and other visible social attributes. We cover our heads because we oppose the very idea of using female faces as a trademark for promoting any sort of goods or services’ (Anonymous Members, 2014). ⁴

While Pussy Riot ‘proper’ has variable membership, it is loosely comprised of about eleven women; yet, through the media coverage of the collective, Tolokonnikova, Alyokhina, and, to a lesser extent, Samutsevich, have come to stand in for the group as a whole. The documentary, Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer (2013), is exemplary of this individualisation. A parent of each member who was arrested is interviewed; a biographical sketch of each member emerges, complete with childhood photographs, as each parent narrates the trajectory of how their child came to be a member of a radical feminist performance art collective, commenting, when prompted, on their relative approval or disapproval. In this sense, the documentary participates in ‘girling’ the participants; indeed, they are referred to as girls repeatedly (Tasker and Negra, 2007: 18). But, moreover, through the documentary lens, the specialness of the three arrested members is revealed and their celebrity status as extraordinary individuals is constructed.

But, can anybody be Pussy Riot? Are we all Pussy Riot? While the solidarity marches that have featured participants wearing colourful balaclavas of their own have been effective in building a visible feminist response to the trial and incarceration of Tolokonnikova, Alyokhina, and Samutsevich, there may be a difference between wearing a colourful balaclava in solidarity with and wearing a colourful balaclava to be Pussy Riot. That is, the suggestion that anyone can be Pussy Riot seems to radically decontextualise the protest itself. The colourful balaclavas worn by the group are about more than injecting a little fun into political protest (although that is part of it) or trying to invite others to also put on colourful balaclavas and call themselves ‘also Pussy Riot’. The balaclavas also help Pussy Riot members avoid identification and arrest by the Russian police. ‘We are all Pussy Riot’ thus elides the specificities of Tolokonnikova’s and Alyokhina’s incarceration in two separate penal colonies, Tolokonnikova’s subsequent hunger strike, and her transfer to another prison during which time her whereabouts were unknown to friends and family. Statements like ‘We are all Pussy Riot’ and news stories that seek to link Pussy Riot and Riot Grrrl rely on Pussy Riot’s relatability: they are both ‘just like “us”’ and just different enough. This critique is not intended to single Kathleen Hanna out for criticism. Her comments are not exemplary, but rather they are representative of the media coverage on Pussy Riot, which is structured by a kind of yearning for identification.

It is possible that the desire for identification with Pussy Riot, to be Pussy Riot, is partially enabled through the white femininities of Tolokonnikova, Alyokhina, and Samutsevich; that is, their whiteness is part of what helps allow Pussy Riot to be seen as ‘just like’ Riot Grrrl. Despite the anonymity that the balaclavas afford members of Pussy Riot, media coverage of the Pussy Riot event has increasingly focused on its ‘unmasked’ members. Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina have received more media attention than Samutsevich who was incarcerated for a shorter period of time; Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina are also arguably the two more conventionally attractive of the three unmasked collective members. As Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina move from anonymity to celebrity, their appearances have increasingly become praiseworthy for their ‘great hair’ (Carmichael, 2014) and Tolokonnikova’s ‘Angelina Jolie cheekbones’ (Nicholson, 2014) and ‘Angelina Jolie lips’ (Vasilyeva, 2012), as well as their charm (Wiener-Bronner, 2014). In 2013, The Moscow Times reported that Russian officials debated Tolokonnikova’s beauty on Twitter and askmen.com claimed that she ‘may be Russia’s sexiest inmate’.

The white femininities of these members of Pussy Riot are also shaped in the media coverage by a girling of the protest participants, as seen in the Pussy Riot documentary. Further, in her study of Pussy Riot’s arrest and subsequent trial, Anya Bernstein has written about the sexualised way in which the bodies of both Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina have been drawn into a ‘discourse of desire’ (2013: 225). As Bernstein argues, in Russian news media, the repeated references to ‘spanking the girls’ or giving them a ‘fatherly pinching’ as punishment for their actions ‘delegitimized the women by infantilizing them, portraying them as children who committed a prank that should be at best ignored’ (2013: 224). Viewing the members of Pussy Riot as not fully adult or as wayward children effectively depoliticises the protest, regardless of whether the tenor of the coverage is supportive or negative.

The intersection of gender and race in the Pussy Riot meme event can be productively analysed through its comparison to two other instances of hashtag activism: #BringBackOurGirls, which emerged in response to the abduction of Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram in 2014, and the #WeAreTrayvonMartin campaign, which responded to the shooting of the African American teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012. In her analysis of #BringBackOurGirls, Meredith Loken argues that the spreadability of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign was partially constituted through infantilisation; that is, the ‘our’ of our girls resonates with a troubling discourse through which women’s value is placed in ‘relationship to a more privileged agent’ (2014: 1100). But, moreover, the campaign ‘reconstitutes the figure of “Third World Woman” as a person accessible (and therefore less dispensable) to the West by claiming her as ours. She becomes our girl’ (Loken, 2014: 1101). The media coverage surrounding the abduction of the Nigerian schoolgirls and that of the incarceration of Pussy Riot are similar in that they have both relied on the girling of their subjects to produce public sympathy and media spreadability. Where they differ is that, while #BringBackOurGirls relies on the homogenising colonial gaze (as Loken notes, the campaign frequently used unsourced images of African women who were not related to the kidnapping), #freepussyriot and #weareallpussyriot have helped to produce Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina as celebrity figures. This difference speaks to the ways in which the youthful white femininities of Pussy Riot’s incarcerated members have helped generate specific forms of sympathy and celebrity that are marked by gender, race, and culture.

The #weareallpussyriot hashtag shares clear similarities with the syntax of #WeAreTrayvonMartin. As Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa argue, this campaign emerged as an important ‘tool for contesting victim-blaming or respectability narratives rooted in the belief that one can control the perception of one’s body and the violence inflicted upon it’ (2015: 8). #WeAreTrayvonMartin emerged as a site for developing a larger conversation about criminalisation and blackness in the United States. It also spurred a parallel campaign on the social media site Tumblr called ‘WeAreNotTrayvonMartin’. Participants in this Tumblr wrote narratives explaining why they could not claim to be (like) Trayvon Martin. As one poster to this Tumblr explains, ‘We are not Trayvon Martin and we cannot change our whiteness but we can make a commitment to work towards stopping racially based violence in our communities’ (Co-Chair, WAAPC, 2014). ⁵ The fact that a ‘We are not Pussy Riot’ campaign has not emerged in tandem with #weareallpussyriot is revealing of the ways in which the youthful white femininities of the incarcerated members may be seen as more generalisable and universal than the black racialised identity of Martin.

That Pussy Riot has garnered widespread support through the currency of white femininity has received some commentary from feminists online. Writing under the hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen (a feminist meme event of its own), Solé comments: ‘#solidarityisforwhitewomen when PussyRiot gets all of the attention and no one even blinks at the rising number of WoC [women of colour] being incarcerated’ (2013). Similarly, another feminist commentator wrote of the freepussyriot hashtag that has been attached to tweets almost every day for the past year and a half: ‘Free Pussy Riot, but also #FreeManning, #FreeCece, #FreeMarissa, #FreeTinleyPark5 (and so many more). Because the United States has its own political prisoners. Because the United States also harshly penalizes those who fight patriarchy, racism, and militarization in the best ways they know how. Do not forget them’ (Suzy X, n.d.). Listing the US imprisonment of Chelsea Manning, Cece McDonald, Marissa Alexander, Dylan, Cody, and Jason Sutherlin, and Alex Stuck and John S. Tucker, simply as ‘manning’, ‘cece’, ‘marissa’, and ‘tinleypark5’, also assumes a sense of familiarity with these cases, and perhaps incites a reader who is unfamiliar with these names to research them or to reflect on why that might be the case. These commentaries critique the discourse by which some politicised bodies become more easily mournable, more easily the source of sympathy and public outrage about their treatment, than others. They also nicely undercut the exceptionalist discourse that has framed the Western media coverage of the incarceration of Pussy Riot, particularly in the United States.

Exceptionalism

While white femininity has contributed to the currency of Pussy Riot, the perceived non-Westernness of its members has also played an important role in framing the injustice of their arrest, trial, and incarceration for a Western audience. Bernstein notes that Russian media commentary ranged from outright condemnation to a strong sense of ambivalence toward the group and their actions (2013: 221), while coverage by Western media outside of Russia tended to frame the issue in terms of free speech and fell along more traditional binaries, designed to self-construct the West as more liberated, more modern, less corrupt, and more accepting of difference than Russia.

This exceptionalist discourse has surfaced within the solidarity statements made by celebrities, politicians, and feminists alike. For example, at her Moscow concert in August of 2012 (just prior to performing a dirge-like version of ‘Like a Virgin’ in a black balaclava), Madonna expressed her now widely publicised solidarity with Pussy Riot.

Now, I come from a country – America – where we are free to express ourselves, to express our point of view. As an artist and as a human being, as a woman, I have the freedom to express my point of view, even if other people don’t agree with me, even if my government doesn’t agree with me. I have the right to express my point of view. I have the freedom to express my point of view. This is democracy, OK?

Similarly, after meeting Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina, Hillary Clinton tweeted, ‘Great to meet the strong & brave young women from #PussyRiot, who refuse to let their voices be silenced in #Russia’ (2014), a caption for a photo of the three women that was widely viewed and circulated, ‘favourited’ over 13,000 times and retweeted over 11,000 times. On a smaller scale, one Pussy Riot solidarity rally participant is quoted in a New Yorker article stating, ‘Here in America, we can sing about anything we want’ (quoted in Friedman, 2012).

There are a number of striking similarities across all three solidarity statements, despite coming from different milieus. In all three, freedom of speech is emphasised as the primary value that has been violated. Further, by framing the Pussy Riot protest as solely a matter of freedom of expression, the actual content of Pussy Riot’s critique is sidelined. Through the trope of freedom of speech, the US and Russia are framed by a binary relationship through which Russia is constructed as repressive and the US’s long history of portraying itself as a nation of freedom and democracy is reasserted. However, the United States has political prisoners of its own, as the feminist critics cited above point out, and has had at least one questionable political election. In light of the history of defunding feminist and queer performance artists in the US during the ‘culture wars’, one wonders how the Pussy Riot action in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour might have been covered in the press had it taken place in a church on US soil.

The discourse of women’s empowerment is also invoked in the above statements, particularly by Clinton through her valuing of Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina as ‘strong and brave young women’. In Madonna’s speech, her phrase ‘as a woman’ helps frame the suppression of Pussy Riot as a women’s issue, while the rally participant’s ‘we’ could be read as either gender-specific ‘we’ as in ‘women’ or more generalisable to all citizens of the US. These expressions of empowerment and global sisterhood become troubling when they combine with the exceptionalist nationalism discussed above, particularly in a context in which the mobilisation of ‘women’s rights’ as a discourse is frequently invoked as a justification for perpetuating US imperialism. The Pussy Riot story, therefore, not only gains currency through the white femininities of Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina, but also through their non-Westernness; both characteristics shape the amenability of the Pussy Riot story to statements of solidarity from Western women. ⁶

Conclusion

According to Thrift, ‘a feminist approach to eventfulness means adopting a more flexible and attentive vantage point from which to view history in order to discern that which is unexpectedly transformative and significant’ (2012: 416). Extending the work of Thrift, this article has argued that a feminist approach to eventfulness must also consider what events resonate within both feminist and mainstream media networks, and why. Feminist eventfulness, therefore, does not always resonate and sometimes becomes memetic outside of a socio-political context; rather, feminist events emerge out of and are shaped by these contexts, while also having the potential to reshape the socio-political landscape. In the case of Pussy Riot, the narratives that have shaped Western media coverage of this feminist event frame the story as one of renewal and resurgence, in ways that elide the incredible amount of feminist work that is happening in the world already that is often much less publicised and often decidedly unspectacular and possibly even boring or mundane. These are also feminist activisms.

While this article has been framed as a feminist killjoy perspective on the media coverage about the potential for Pussy Riot to ‘reignite’ feminism, it does not seek to dismiss or diminish the activism of Pussy Riot because its members are young-looking, conventionally attractive, white women, nor the feminist activisms that have taken inspiration from Pussy Riot following their ‘Punk Prayer’. However, it does seek to examine the ways in which the currency of the Pussy Riot story and the claims to solidarity, identification, and feminist renewal have been partially enabled through the white femininities of its members and their perceived relatability. It also advocates for much more self-reflexivity in regard to what kind of feminism commentators are advocating a return, when Western progressive media sources suggest that feminism has been renewed through Pussy Riot.

To work from a feminist killjoy perspective means learning, as Susana Loza has argued, ‘to see the potential of anger’ (2014). While I have argued that many of the media commentary pieces responding to the trial and incarceration of Pussy Riot fed into an exceptionalist discourse and uncritically heralded a return of (white) feminism, the engagement of online feminists with the Pussy Riot story reveals a richer dialogue. By linking the visibility of the Pussy Riot case with the relative invisibility of incarcerated women of colour and trans people in the United States, some online feminists sought to undercut this exceptionalist discourse and to highlight the ways in which white femininity helped shape the eventfulness of the Pussy Riot story. These mediated responses indicate a productive conflict among different kinds of feminisms. Feminist media activisms must cultivate these productive conflicts, amplify the voices of feminists of colour, and make space for the ‘bad’ feelings of anger and discomfort.

To that end, this article does not dismiss the political force of ‘We are all … ’solidarity statements, which can serve as powerful ways of linking violence and/or injustice towards individuals to larger structural inequities and/or histories of oppression. However, it is worthwhile asking what characteristics of events enable these kinds of statements, these feelings of outrage and sympathy. If statements of feminist solidarity rely on the premises of relatability and identification, which are implicitly coded through the tropes of youthful white femininity, as well as the non-Westernness of the figures with whom solidarity is claimed via an exceptionalist discourse, then solidarity really is for white women, as the ironic feminist Twitter hashtag claims. That is, the subject who claims ‘solidarity with’ is coded as a Western white feminist subject who bestows solidarity upon others and is therefore not decentred in any way. The subject who claims ‘solidarity with’ is coded as having agency, whereas the figures with whom solidarity is claimed have little. Therefore, this article calls for greater attentiveness to context, to narratives of feminist return, and to the grounds upon which claims to solidarity are made.

Because we are not all Pussy Riot – nor should we be.