I’m very interested in the significance of Pussy Riot both in and outside of Russia. Last class, we discussed the reductive and paternalistic “Western gaze” on Russia. Is effective diplomacy possible when the West continues to hold Russia to its own liberal democratic values? If the U.S. is really concerned with human rights, perhaps it’s time to stop tying them exclusively to Western ideologies.
Pussy Riot became fairly popular in the U.S. for a time, and I can’t help but wonder why that might be. It seems to me that the West so readily embraces Pussy Riot predominantly because it’s thought that Pussy Riot is responding to a problem that the West doesn’t have. Identities are always relational – Westerners portray Russia as a backwards country, as an exaggerated caricature of itself antithetical to all things Western, in order to construct the West as the purveyor of “good” values. There needs to be an “other” in order for there to be a self.
Are Americans fascinated with Pussy Riot because it is thought that they represent Western values, solely because they are against the Putin regime? Below is a link to a correspondence between one of the members of Pussy Riot, who was jailed for a time for her protests, and Žižek. Reading this article, it seems clear to me that what Pussy Riot is advocating for is incompatible with norms in both the U.S. and Russia. I think that Pussy Riot is really important even beyond Russia, and not just as a mode of comparison. Pussy Riot’s thoughts on capitalism and society in general are important for reflecting on our own situation and on the West’s hypocrisy, and make visible the ways in which Russia and the U.S. are actually not all that different.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/nov/15/pussy-riot-nadezhda-tolokonnikova-slavoj-zizek
I think your article provides a fascinating look at the way in which the West and America has been treating Pussy Riot, and how the liberal Western gaze is determined to incorporate and realign ideologies and movement into its own worldview. I think that Western media and Westerners were absolutely comfortable cheering on Pussy Riot as they, for example, denounced political oppression before the Olympics, but “the moment it became clear that you rejected global capitalism, reporting on Pussy Riot became much more ambiguous”. I think Pussy Riot reawakens the same kind of feelings Americans must have when the CIA-funded Congress of Cultural Freedom to perform behind the Iron Curtain, in that it satisfies their knowledge that Russia is not ‘stable’ or homogenous. So while I agree that the Westernizing gaze is primarily comfortable with protests and dissidents more for the fact that they are anti-Putin than anything else, my question is: whose responsibility is it when something deeply in violation of ‘western human rights’ happens, like the recent roundup of gay men in Chechnya? Is it hypocritical and paternalistic (for any Western country) to monitor and call Russia out on these things?