Like a Prayer: The Dissensual Aesthetics of Pussy Riot

Abstract

Using Jacques Rancière’s notion of dissensus and Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptualization of the carnivalesque and heteroglossia this article focuses on how Pussy Riot’s use of different speech types and variable modes of aesthetic practice are marshaled to challenge systems of exclusion legitimized in contemporary Russian political life. Within this framework, aesthetics refers to the meeting place between art practices and political practices; it is a space of the sensible in which the common boundaries between art and politics are broken down and Pussy Riot’s work operates in this space of dissensual aesthetics.