Are we all Pussy Riot? On narratives of feminist return and the limits of transnational solidarity

Groeneveld, Elizabeth

doi:10.1177/1464700115604134

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 10 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Three of the five women masked by colorful balaclavas were arrested and jailed. A global movement in solidarity with Pussy Riot reenacted the mockery of authority with the colorful balaclavas as their symbol (Bruce 2015; Groeneveld 2015). This form of political participation builds on carnival traditions dating back to ancient Rome.…”

Section: Anonymity In Different Modes Of Political Participationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As after their arrests, the media revealed personal details about band members and stylized them as celebrities, anonymous Pussy Riot members protested: “We are anonymous because we act against any personality cult, against hierarchies implied by appearance, age and other visible social attributes. We cover our heads because we oppose the very idea of using female faces as trademark for promoting any sort of goods or services” (cited in Groeneveld 2015, 10).…”

Section: Anonymity's Contradictory Freedomsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Anonymity and Democracy: Absence as Presence in the Public Sphere

Asenbaum

2018

Am Polit Sci Rev

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Although anonymity is a central feature of liberal democracies—not only in the secret ballot, but also in campaign funding, publishing political texts, masked protests, and graffiti—it has so far not been conceptually grounded in democratic theory. Rather, it is treated as a self-explanatory concept related to privacy. To overcome this omission, this article develops a complex understanding of anonymity in the context of democratic theory. Drawing upon the diverse literature on anonymity in political participation, it explains anonymity as a highly context-dependent identity performance expressing private sentiments in the public sphere. The contradictory character of its core elements—identity negation and identity creation—results in three sets of contradictory freedoms. Anonymity affords (a) inclusion and exclusion, (b) subversion and submission, and (c) honesty and deception. This contradictory character of anonymity's affordances illustrates the ambiguous role of anonymity in democracy.

show abstract

Section: Anonymity In Different Modes Of Political Participationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Anonymity's Contradictory Freedomsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anonymity and Democracy: Absence as Presence in the Public Sphere

Asenbaum

2018

Am Polit Sci Rev

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Alongside the accompaniment activities geared towards actualising women's legal right to abortion are the professionalisation activities aimed at supplying activists and workers in the organisation with the language and expertise of transnational feminism. In her analysis of global feminist networks, Annelise Riles describes how they are composed of 'institutions, knowledge practices, and artifacts thereof that internally generate the effects of their own reality by reflecting on themselves' (2001: 3; see also: Alvarez, 1999;Groeneveld, 2015). This is an apt description of many of the professionalisation activities that the women in the Paulina Network value very highly, but at the same time Riles' narrow focus on the reflexivity of knowledge practices obscures the potential action involved in feminist activism (Day and Goddard, 2010;Grewal and Bernal, 2014).…”

Section: Reproductive Labour and The Time Of Mortalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The ephemeral politics of feminist accompaniment networks in Mexico City

Krauss

2018

Feminist Theory

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article examines the tension in Hannah Arendt's thought between the creativity of political action and the worldlessness of labour in light of fieldwork with feminist activists in Mexico City. Drawing from my ethnographic research, I explore how labour and action are knitted together in the feminist practice of accompanying women who seek safe abortion in the city. Bringing Arendt's thought into dialogue with anthropologies of illness experience as well as the reflections of my interlocutors in the field, I shift from an approach to the situation of abortion as a decision-making event, to ask other questions about autonomy and dependency, freedom and necessity, mortality and political life. I argue that what is interesting about Arendt's conceptualisation of the labouring body is not that she separates 'bare life' from the political sphere of 'men', but rather that it alerts us to the uncertain way our life is implicated with others. In conclusion, I argue that feminist accompaniment networks foster an ephemeral relation of care between activists and women in situations of abortion, one that invites us to re-imagine the temporality of political action and to ask, again, what it is to make a new world versus make this world livable.

show abstract

“…A growing body of feminist, social science, and area studies scholarship has shown how Pussy Riot's punk prayer and its aftermath illuminated key tensions that animated Russian politics and activism in 2012, in particular the repressive power of the Putin-era state, the influence of conservative Russian Orthodoxy and its relationship with state nationalism, and the central roles of gender and spectacles of gendered violence in the Putin government's consolidation of authoritarian power (Bernstein, 2013;Johnson, 2014;Rourke and Wiget, 2016;Schroeder and Karpov, 2013;Shevzov, 2014;Sperling, 2015;Tolstaya, 2014). Scholars have also examined what the Pussy Riot case reveals about new forms of feminist protest in Russia (Johnson, 2014) and globally (Baer, 2016) and how local feminist organising is transformed through transnational solidarity efforts and the circulation of prominent cases like that of Pussy Riot (Channell, 2014;Groeneveld, 2014;Wiedlack and Neufeld, 2014). These studies have underscored the remarkable ability of the Pussy Riot case to clarify key values in Russian and Western societies that are contested in contemporary politics.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Complete Issue

Office¹

2018

Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture a

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Founded in 2017, Feminist Encounters is a journal committed to argument and debate, in the tradition of historical feminist movements.In the wake of the growing rise of the Right across the world, openly neo-fascist national sentiments, and rising conservative populism, we feminists all over the world are needing to remobilise our energies to protect and advance gender rights.Feminist Encounters provides a forum for feminist theorists, scholars, and activists to communicate with each other, to better educate ourselves on international issues and thus promote more global understanding, and to enhance our critical tools for fighting for human rights.Feminism is an intellectual apparatus, a political agenda, and a programme for social change. Critical analysis of how gender discourses produce cultural identities and social practices within diverse lived realities is key to this change. We need to think more sharply in order to strategise well: as the discourses of conservatism renew and invigorate themselves, so we as feminist scholars need to be refining our amazonic swords in order not just to respond effectively but also to innovate our own ideas for equality and social justice.We are, of course, committed to intersectionality, a vital lens through which to see the contours of race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, age/ability, and explore how gendered scripts get lived, and filtered through these specificities of cultural organisation. Lived experience is never codified in terms of gender alone, and so our research will always be sensitive to the nexus of lived oppressions.The journal has a large editorial board and journal team, consisting of over forty scholars in twenty countries. This is deliberately inclusive in order that we can promote diversity and engage with different concerns from across the world. Our aim is not to simply talk to ourselves, reconfirming our localised assumptions, but to generate feminist encounters across regions, even if this is sometimes uncomfortable. Globalisation has been a triumph of neoliberalism, but digital technologies have also flattened and reduced the distance between us in dramatic ways, so that now we can talk to each other with unanticipated ease. This new access to each others' voices has also brought challenges to the way we think and do things, so that being a feminist today might be quite a different prospect to a person living in China, Iran, Norway, South Africa or the UK. Second Wave Feminism used the idea of 'sisterhood' to invoke solidarity between women. I've always rather liked Andrea Dworkin's claim, though, that: "Feminism is a political practice of fighting male supremacy in behalf of women as a class, including all the women you don't like, including all the women you don't want to be around, including all the women who used to be your best friends whom you don't want anything to do with anymore." The notion of sisterhood was challenged by Black feminists in the 1980s as being too conceptually white, thus bell hooks' trenchant critique that: "the idea of 'co...

show abstract

Are we all Pussy Riot? On narratives of feminist return and the limits of transnational solidarity

Cited by 7 publications

References 10 publications

Anonymity and Democracy: Absence as Presence in the Public Sphere

Anonymity and Democracy: Absence as Presence in the Public Sphere

The ephemeral politics of feminist accompaniment networks in Mexico City

Complete Issue

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About