Pussy Power

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Abstract 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.