Anyone Can Be Pussy Riot - Feminist Anti-Authoritarianism in Putin's Russia & Trump's America

RSVP to ca.harlock@duke.edu by Oct. 3rd for link and advance reading material.

This talk examines feminist engagement with cults of personality and authoritarianism in contemporary United States-Russia relations through the work of the band Pussy Riot. Focusing on the group's transnational critiques of the Putin-Trump coupling, their music videos, and literary publications, Gokhberg dispels the idea that Russia is too enigmatic to engage with, and offer a counter to existing scholarship on Pussy Riot by tracing the complexity of their transmedial strategies in the context of liberalism's international decline.