Pussy Riot and the Western Gaze: Punk Music, Solidarity and the Production of Similarity and Difference

Wiedlack, Katharina

doi:10.1080/03007766.2015.1088281

Cited by 12 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 5 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…It is there as both an abstract force and a concrete national narrative, woven together by multiple symbolic references, from pioneer scarves to zinc coffins. This art is distinctly Russian, but it resists any attempts to interpellate it into any of the subject positions readily offered by the police, be it “cultural sovereignty” or “Western modernity” (Biasioli 2021; Wiedlack 2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“F*** tha police!” à la Russe: Rancière and the Metamodernist Turn in Contemporary Russian Music

Morozov

Reshetnikov

Gaufman

2022

Nationalities Papers

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The nationwide prominence of Russian oppositional artists has inspired a fair number of studies analyzing the political aspects of their creative output. We argue that the new generation of Russian musicians, whose art became popular in the end of 2010s, brings political engagement to a qualitatively new level. Following Jacques Rancière, we reject the assumption that critical art can bring about political mobilization by exposing social evils. Instead, we juxtapose politics and police, distinguishing between transformative moments of discursive confrontation and the mundane activity centered on distributing places and roles. In this article, we look at three popular Russian musical collectives – IC3PEAK, Shortparis, and Monetochka – whose art disrupts the police order in a novel and subversive manner. Some of their works became even more timely with the outbreak of Russia’s large-scale aggression against Ukraine. We have performed multimodal discourse analysis of their audio and video clips, aimed at identifying the ways in which these artworks create the conditions of possibility for new politics by re-articulating the connection between the political and the universal.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“F*** tha police!” à la Russe: Rancière and the Metamodernist Turn in Contemporary Russian Music

Morozov

Reshetnikov

Gaufman

2022

Nationalities Papers

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Studies examining how religious, national, ethnic, regional, gender, linguistic, geographical, economic, and aesthetic exclusions are generated by and reflected in the performance, production, and distribution of music have expanded the field of the cultural study of music, while other studies have focused on the critical part played by sound and music in blurring boundaries and enhancing collectivity, social harmony, solidarity, and cohesion (see e.g. Elder, 2014; Jaji, 2014; Johnson, 2013; Seeger, 1987; Webb & Webb‐Gannon, 2016; Wiedlack, 2014).…”

Section: Boundaries Borders and Musical Borderscapesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Soundscapes and borderscapes: Music as a counter‐mapping discourse in the Kurdish nationalist movement

Hongur

2022

Studies Ethnicity & National

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article traces the ways in which Kurdish claims to national rights and borders have been structured around transnational and virtual spaces to coalesce into music. It focuses on issues such as migration, diaspora, border, ethnicity, transnationalism, and nation‐building through Kurdish music and Kurdish musicians. The concept of the borderscape provides a theoretical lens through which to understand how music has been politicized and positioned between the non‐existence of a Kurdish nation‐state and the enduring existence of Kurdish as an ethnicity, a language, and a homeland in the Middle East. By giving examples from songs, lyrics, and the virtual world of Kurdish music, the study elaborates on how Kurds reinforce the territorial imagination of ‘Kurdistan’ as the rightful homeland of a Kurdish nation. Focusing on music as a resource for political action, nationalism, and for the identification of national borders, this study thus adds to the border studies and ethnomusicological literatures by linking music to ethnicity, nationalism, and transnationalism.

show abstract

“…However, Katharina Wiedlack emphasises that Pussy Riot do not identify themselves with the punk movement. 44 The influence of Riot Grrrl, a US-based feminist punk movement established in the 1990s, amongst others, on Pussy Riot is well-documented.45 Yet, in line with Wiedlack, I contend that the punk genre was Pussy Riot's means to a political end; invoking Western feminist punk, nevertheless with a distinctly Russian focus, made the Pussy Riot message accessible to a transnational audience.46 However, as was evidenced by the resoundingly negative domestic reaction to the "Punk Prayer," punk had not yet found its way into the mainstream in Russia. Mark Feigin, Nadia's lawyer, acknowledged that punk and performance art had never taken root in Russia and because it was not well understood it was inevitably poorly received.47…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Pussy Power

French

2022

Can.-Am. Slav. Stud.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper examines how feminist protest, specifically in the case of Pussy Riot, contests the power structures that sustain the authority of Vladimir Putin in Russia. I investigate how Pussy Riot engages in revolutionary activity, oftentimes unaccepted in Russia, to expose and subvert the gender dynamics that are foundational to formal and informal institutions in the country. I present a typology, designed to facilitate an understanding of the strategies Pussy Riot utilise to disrupt public life in Russia. This paper addresses how power, and the structures that generate and then sustain it, is contested and re-negotiated, even in oppressive and homogenizing societies. More specifically, I address the androcentric bias of power that is emblematic of Putin’s Russia. Doing so requires beginning from a position that necessarily accepts what Oleg Riabov and Tatiana Riabova termed the ‘remasculinization’ of Russia, a renewed focus on the production of ‘social borders and hierarchies,’ based on conceptualisations of masculinity and femininity. Constructions of gender, in which femininity is subordinate to masculinity, have become essential to the legitimisation of Putin’s position at the apex of the power vertical and the promulgation of images of Russia as sovereign and powerful. The aim of this paper is not to judge the success of the Pussy Riot collective, but rather, to offer insight into the potential for feminist protest, and protest more generally, in the future in Putin’s Russia.

show abstract

Pussy Riot and the Western Gaze: Punk Music, Solidarity and the Production of Similarity and Difference

Cited by 12 publications

References 5 publications

“F*** tha police!” à la Russe: Rancière and the Metamodernist Turn in Contemporary Russian Music

“F*** tha police!” à la Russe: Rancière and the Metamodernist Turn in Contemporary Russian Music

Soundscapes and borderscapes: Music as a counter‐mapping discourse in the Kurdish nationalist movement

Pussy Power

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About