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The Feminist Citizen-Subject: It’s not About Choice, It’s About Changing It All

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Abstract

This article ties together two different sources related to the Trial of Pussy Riot in Russia in 2012. On the one hand, I consider legal documents, such as court proceedings, police reports, and the sentence. On the other, I analyse a life-history interview with one of the accused, thus giving her a voice that is not mediated by juridical institutions within criminal law procedure. This allows an analysis of two different subject positions produced by these texts: a conformist citizen and a feminist activist-citizen. I pay more attention to the latter. I conclude that in order to retain an activist position, the feminist subject has no option but to resist.

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Notes

  1. Videos are available on Pussy Riot’s blog: http://pussy-riot.livejournal.com/ (Accessed 24 January 2015). This page still belongs to anonymous participants of Pussy Riot, while those whose personal data was revealed during the hearings were blamed for breaking the solidarity of the group once they started the attempts to participate in capitalist production using Pussy Riot as a brand name (this at least regards Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova).

  2. All documents in Russian are given in my translation.

  3. See, http://pussy-riot.livejournal.com/12442.html (Accessed 24 January 2015); http://youtu.be/GCasuaAczKY (Accessed 24 January 2015). The appeal to the Virgin Mary was hardly so well-thought of by participants of Pussy Riot. As my interviewee said, none of them was religious, and generally they did not expect this particular action would provoke such a huge attention. Yet, in terms of gender, motherhood, and religion, the figure of the Virgin Mary seems to be important and will be discussed further.

  4. In Russia, a criminal offence committed by a group in conspiracy leads to an increase in sentence. Though the actual deed or consequences of the activity remain the same, the law dictates that having criminal accomplices renders all of those involved somehow more responsible for their actions.

  5. Ambo is a space in front of the central doors of iconostasis, and solea is a walkway in front of the iconostasis (central wall full of icons in an orthodox church).

  6. This action was staged at the Biological Museum in 2008 and was supposed to show that the presidential candidacy of Dmitry Medvedev was a mockery of the political process. Critical commentators would agree that the performance used patriarchal and homophobic images so far as the sexual intercourse represented that just like a man penetrates a woman in her anus, the people of Russia were penetrated by the authorities when the Kremlin introduced Medvedev as future president. In Russian language, derogatory terms “ebat’” (to fuck) and “naebat’” (to cheat) have the same grammatical root. In imperative form (“ebis’”) this verb is used for the title of the performance.

  7. Public process refers to a situation when criminal case is opened without a victim’s plea, because the case endangers other people (the public). Private–public processes are those that are opened by a victim’s official plea to the police, though they are not closed even if the victim changes her/his mind.

  8. USSR legacy of atheist policy dictates that people are not born into religion but they choose to become or not a member of a church later in their life. People are thus distinguished between those who are ‘in-church’, and those who are outside. This word conveys the status of being ‘in-church’.

  9. This is given to outstanding students in the Russian school system who have achieved the best marks for all subjects.

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Acknowledgements

Some ideas presented in this article were previously discussed at the Congress of the ISA Committee on the Sociology of Law “Law and Political Action” (University of Toulouse, France) and the workshop “Religion, Law and Policy Making” (University of Tartu, Estonia). The author would like to thank anonymous peer-reviewers and the editors of the Journal for their valuable comments, Matthew Blackburn for his help with English, and Ekaterina Samutsevich for her openness and valor.

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  1. Department of Political Science and Sociology, European University at St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Alexander Kondakov

  2. Centre for Independent Social Research, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Alexander Kondakov

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Kondakov, A. The Feminist Citizen-Subject: It’s not About Choice, It’s About Changing It All. Fem Leg Stud 25, 47–69 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-017-9341-4

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