ABSTRACT
The cultural “crimes” and harsh state punishment of Pussy Riot , the most famous Russian feminist collective to date, initially prompted our volume’s retrospective investigations into why, how, and to what effect women have been perceived to behave badly in Russia, Poland, and the Balkans. The essays in this anthology argue against the widespread popular perception of Slavic cultures as overwhelmingly patriarchal and women as complicit in their own repression by historicizing proto-feminist and feminist transgression in these cultures. Each essay identifies the various patriarchal obstacles that women confronted in their time and national/regional/ethnic space, regardless of how these obstacles were politically labeled. Each essay offers a close reading of the transgressive texts that women authored or in which they figured, showing how they navigated, targeted, or, in some cases, co-opted these obstacles in their bid for agency and power. While our authors do not argue that each text is explicitly feminist, they construe these texts as cultural sources and/or models for feminist transgression.
