Digital Voices, Other Rooms: Pussy Riot’s Recalcitrant (In)Corporeality

Abstract

The international attention surrounding Pussy Riot’s performance of their “Pank-moleben” (“Punk prayer”) has perhaps understandably focused largely on the manifestly political aspects of this act, due in part to both the specific sociocultural-historical context, and the very lyrics of the song itself—including the invocation of the term “feminist” (which is arguably inherently political in nature). In this article, however, I approach the subversive nature of Pussy Riot’s performance not via recourse to lyrical content (or political ideology), but by attention to the human voice and the often overlooked fact that the actual act for which the women were arrested, tried, and convicted was largely devoid of (musical) sound. With attention to several of Pussy Riot’s musical actions, and situating the group in relation to both earlier Russian performance practices, as well as performance and sound arts in general, I argue that their complex protest performances and artifacts function as de facto interrogations of the very status of the female body. The group’s performative highlighting of the liminality of corporeality, related to several “post-”s (-human, -feminist, -modern) may, depending upon geo-socio-cultural and ideological location, be experienced either as offering exhilarating new possibilities or threatening a vertiginous and terrifying sense of dislocation. In relation to a central “post-,” however—specifically, the post-Soviet—I suggest that this fundamental destabilization of supposedly foundational (biological) “realities” accounts for some of the overwhelmingly negative reactions that the group’s performances have engendered among Russian citizens.

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