Pussy Riot: Speaking Punk to Power

After their scandalous performance of an anti-Putin protest song in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the imprisonment of two of its members, the punk feminist art collective known as Pussy Riot became an international phenomenon. But, what, exactly, is Pussy Riot, and what are they trying to achieve? The award-winning author Eliot Borenstein explores the movement’s explosive history and takes you beyond the hype.
What made Pussy Riot a global phenomenon? The group has very often been framed in the West in the familiar terms of punk. But this risks obscuring the specific power and wider implications of what they were doing in their “Punk Prayer” in the Cathedral. After examining its roots in Actionism and the Russian protest scene, this book looks at the complicated negotiations between the language of punk and the language of political dissidence, the tensions between live performance and viral video, the group’s commitment to feminism in a decidedly anti-feminist context, and the problem of anonymity in a world obsessed with celebrity.