Blogpost 4
“When he found out I cheated on him the linoleum was covered in blood and the wallpaper and the molding good thing the wallpaper is punk imitation marble I thought at the time the blood won’t show and then when my eyes filled with blue spots when I spat the shards of my front teeth onto the linoleum he threw me against the radiator it was summer so it wasn’t hot he raped me for several hours and then when it was already getting light he brought me a bucket and a rag and told me to clean up the mess I couldn’t stand up for a long time.”
I think, she chose to describe the raw brutal violence in the text to show what it is women experience and not let it be a secret within the four walls of the home as domestic violence often is.
Like Yusupova, she uses repetitions in her text. I interpreted that her repetitions like in Yusupovas “Verdicts” are there to show the absurdity of the justification of gender-based violence and the system’s reaction to the violence, and at the same time a sort of cry for justice. For examples she repeats: “he only beat me once”, which is a sentence the mother of the protagonist has said.
I think it is interesting that Yusupova and Vasyakina make such a big emphasis on the female body and the injustices made towards it in their poems, when other female Russian feminists such as Pussy Riot do everything, they can to separate themselves very actively from the gaze of their female bodies.
According to Lilya Kaganovsky (2018), who is Associate Professor of Slavic, Comparative Literature, and Media & Cinema Studies of University of Illinois, they were extremely sexualized during their trials after Punk Prayer, and sometimes in a sadistic way. I thought that it was interesting what we discussed in class about them maybe intentionally not mentioning that some of them were mothers of young children, because they did not want to be considerated and judged by their gender and motherhood. They also wore masks at their performances to escape the male gaze. In a way you could say that Pussy Riot tried to separate themselves from the gendered body, as it is described in Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble”, but doesn’t succeed because our society is build up on the gendered performance and imitation of other’s imitations of gender, and therefore it is difficult to break the cycle even if you want to.
I think the Pussy Riot performance of Punk Prayer is a very good example of what we also discussed in class about how effect performance can be compared to poems. The Punk Prayer performance didn’t stop after the actual performance but continued into the courthouse. The police, the spectators, the judges and even the people who wrote kind of incel and sadistic comments about them online became a part of their performance.
The question is whether it was intentional of Pussy Riot to in a way show how even when women do performances that criticize power but does not circle around their gender, becomes gendered anyways, because of the society we live in.