In the 1980s,
the Guerrilla Girls (an anonymous feminist punk protest group) put posters with statements like "
Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?" on the sides public busses; they have used shocking and humorous imagry to challenge and unsettle. They protest sexism, racism and corruption--particularly in the art world and in visual culture, but also more broadly. They are still
active.
The Pussy Riot group, founded in 2011, consisted of about 12 members, who protected their identity by wearing brightly colored clothing and balaclavas during public performances; they modeled some of their protest strategy and their identification with
superheroes after the Guerilla Girls. The superhero theme comfortably travels accross cultural borders, and supporters held "superhero flash mobs",
performances and
protests organized on
facebook and elsewhere, after members of the band were arrested by Russian authorities. Their superhero identity has clearly been adopted as
girl-empowering in the US and western Europe; big-name
musicians, local
artists, and even politicians have joined the global outcry. A German town even nominated the band for the
Luther Prize, in honor of the Martin Luther, the man who protested the linkages between Catholic Church and state, leading to the Protestant Revolution.
Reactions inside Russia are far more mixed. In fact, there is strong resistance to the idea that western style feminism is even needed in Russia; the group's song was
more than a song about girl-power: it took on the Russian Orthodox Church, social conservatism, and the growing linkages between church and state. Everything about the band is confrontational, squarely in the punk-protest tradition.
These kinds of protests bring up questions about how to approach problems in society, how to advocate for change. People disagree about the distance between aspirations and what "really" can be attained; they disagree about how to fight for that change. The choice of confrontational protest like that of Pussy Riot illustrated this tension for our group: there is an ongoing challenge for feminists and for human rights advocates who must dance the line between integrating into the system (in order to advocate change) and being ghettoized (and therefore shut out of
mainstream political discourse). To integrate into the system, groups have to be in for the long-haul; they must be able to stay on-message; they must find ways to re-define the terms of the game. Protest movements like Pussy Riot are not taking this kind of strategy, but they might help jump-start certain issues from the outside. And they might just end up being absorbed or ghettoized.
Human Rights Watch was there for the
verdict that sent two members of the band to prison and released on on probation. Particularly disturbing and important for those concerned with the future of feminist thought and political action are the conclusions of the Russian courts in this case:
"The judge also argued that feminism, ultimately, was at the core of
the “religious hatred” charge. “Feminism is not a violation of the law
and is not a crime,” the verdict stated. “Although feminism is not a
religious precept, its proponents cross the line into the spheres of
decency, morals, family relations.”(HRW October 2012)
In other words, instead of ignoring Pussy Riot's feminist claims, the court decided to redefine feminism as a hate-based, anti-religion ideology. This allowed the court to redefine the Pussy Riot protest as hate crime, and not political protest, which would be protected under free speech laws. In doing so, the judge put feminist thought ("ideology") in the same category as hate groups that attack people on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, language. This is a dangerous and troubling redefinition of hate crime, and in spite of the obvious theoretical and practical idiocy of the claim, the strategy is potentially devastating.
