ABSTRACT
While performance studies provides a useful lens through which to look at the group, Pussy Riot must also be examined in the context of critical, oppositional speech in the Russian Federation and its various antecedents. Pussy Riot implicitly poses a crucial question: “How does one say no to power in Russia?” The medieval experience of the skomorokh (minstrel) and the iurodivyi ( holy fool), the nineteenth-century traditions of liberalism and radicalism, and the Soviet phenomenon of dissidence suggest both continuity and novelty here. The explicitly feminist, indeed, female-embodied nature of Pussy Riot in itself is a new contribution, despite the long history of revolutionary feminism in pre-Revolutionary Russia and the first Soviet decade. Finally, the Pussy Riot case is embroiled in competing attempts to locate authorship, responsibility, and conspiratorial intent behind a deliberately anonymous and collective movement.
