Pussy Riot's Punk Prayer; Blasfemie, parrèsia en de strijd om vrijheid

Abstract

On February 21 2012 five members of the feminist and provocative punk-art group Pussy Riot entered The Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow and performed what they said was a ‘punk prayer’ at the place that is considered the most sacrosanct of the Cathedral. This thesis researches three different perspectives that are related to the way in which the punk prayer and the trial that followed on the arrest of three members of the group, were interpreted and evaluated. The thesis also researches how these perspectives relate to each other and how these relations can be explained. An analysis of the perspective of the prosecutors in the light of the mixture of theological, sociological political and philosophical theory on blasphemy from Austin Dacey clarifies and explains the account of blasphemy and culpability in relation to the behavior, attitude and verbal expressions of the women from Pussy Riot as it was posed by the prosecutors. An analysis of the perspective of the three women in the light of (political) philosophical theories on civil society and the ascetic – parrèsiastic – practice, shows not only that according to the women their performance should be understood as an act of political protest and as an attribution to the realization of civil society, but that the performance and the way the women carried themselves during the trial can be understood as parrèsia as it was theorized by Michel Foucault. The presentation, analysis and interpretation of the results of a qualitative research on the coverage and representation of the Pussy Riot case in three Dutch quality newspapers points out that a meta-narrative of suppression and liberation was informative of the news coverage and representation of the case, and that this meta-narrative was made operational by Western concepts of freedom, subjectivity and agency that were present in the frame of reference of the journalists. The thesis argues that the trial of Pussy Riot could be understood as a conflict over different claims regarding the sacred whereby the sacred, following Dacey, is redefined as ‘the domain of objectively vital, inviolable, and incommensurable values.’ It is explained that the different concepts of the sacred that are operated by the prosecutors and the women, are related to the specific frames of reference of the both, in which different types of ethics are dominant that are informative of what Jonathan Haidt calls ‘moral matrixes’. It is concluded that the different interpretations and evaluations of the punkprayer, the trial and the women themselves basically relate to each other as three separate discourses that originated and took place (with)in the separate moral matrixes in which the prosecutors, the three women and the journalists find themselves. The specific setting of the trial and the written press were the reason that the three separate discourses received a place in the public space.