Pussy Riot: "it's different for girls"?

In reading this piece from Sarah Kenzdior, I found myself harkening back to a noted essay I first read in grad school some twenty years ago.  Kenzdior is writing about the Western response to the plight of the Russian rock band Pussy Riot, now sentenced to two years imprisonment for performances/stunts/whateveryouwantocallit  offending both the Orthodox church and the Putin government.

Kenzdior's main point is that the West has misunderstood the various implications of the Pussy Riot story.  In referring to the women in the group as "girls," as "punkettes," the western media are contributing to the same kind of diminuation of the group as the Russian pro-Putin media are doing.  Worse, however well-meaning the support for the group has become worldwide, many of the various "reenactments" taking place strip the original provocative acts by the group from their specific political context.  

These are not "girls" who are "innocent victims" of a repressive regime, Kenzdior says.  These are women who engaged in a deliberately provocative act, knowing there would be consequences for their actions.  But the media response outside Russia has been to diminish their agency. 

The supposition concerning the gender politics Kenzdior raises reminded me of an early essay by the British media scholar Angela McRobbie.  "Settling Accounts with Subcultures" first appeared in Screen Education in 1980; I came across it about ten years later, in Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin's anthology On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word.   Her overall argument concerns the subcultural theorists of the seventies -- especially Dick Hebdige, whose Subculture: the Meaning of Style has remained a classic of academic literature on youth culture. 

McRobbie is dead-on when she claims that writers like Hebdige and Paul Willis essentially reproduce the divide between the public and private spheres characteristic of patriarchial discourses.  The sociologists looking at the youth subcultures of the time did not write about the "lads" as they lived lives in home.   "Only what happened on the streets mattered," McRobbie wrote. 

Many subcultural groups in modernized societies tend to reproduce those societies' divisions of labor, and McRobbie points out that the opportunities for women in the subcultural scenes were often just as limiting as they were in so-called "straight" society.  the idea of a girls' subculture seems inconceivable to the theorists of the time.  And even though punk afforded a space for women that had not previously enjoyed, lines were nevertheless drawn.  McRobbie, responding to Hebdige's notions about how subcultural expressions are incorporated into the society through various ideological means, points out something very important: had the Sex Pistols been an all-female group behaving just as Johnny Rotten, Steve Jones,  Paul Cook, and Sid Vicious did, the reaction would have been much more apocalyptic, a sign of a "major moral breakdown." 

Thirty years later, the case of Pussy Riot resonates through McRobbie's arguments.   This is not to say that Pussy Riot is the band that McRobbie hypothetically described in 1980; Kenzdior points out that it's not accurate to call them a punk rock band.   But the gender-based politics of reactions remains very much the same today as they did in the late seventies.   When faced with a group that so seriously confounds the long-held expectations, society still seeks -- unconsciously, perhaps, but given the GOP War on Women (more on that another day), consciously, too -- methods of reinforcing the "norms."