Pussy Riot

[Moss, Kevin M.]

I'm not sure whether it's my computer or some encoding or what, but Sasha's message came up as below, and Irina's consisted only of question marks.

I too had attempted to respond to the Pussy Riot Rant in a slightly different vein, but my spam filters stopped my message altogether. Editing below, and sticking to English so as not to be turned into question marks:

Since SEELANGS is a group associated with AATSEEL and in order to be maximally clear, I'll respond to the Pussy Riot thread in English.

Pussy Riot is a feminist performance group protesting, in this case, Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church and the close connection between the two.

One of the verses in the song, in which they prayed to the Bogoroditsa to get rid of Putin was
Призрак свободу на небесах
Гей прайд отправлен в Сибирь в кандалах.

Is it really possible in 2012 to claim that the Russian Orthodox Church is somehow really in danger? All because during the Soviet period the church was blown up? Give me a break! Today it is not representatives of the church who are being "persecuted, murdered, and put into asylums," but rather those on the other side.

Furthermore, how can the author in the same diatribe quote Andrey Kuraev in an apparently positive way, without acknowledging that Kuraev is one of the head homophobic ideologues of the church? If colleagues think this is irrelevant, let me point out that Kuraev met with the speaker of the legislature in SPb in November, when that body was considering adopting its homophobic law banning "propaganda of homosexuality," which may very well curtail the research plans and publications of some of us on SEELANGS. In case there is any doubt about Kuraev's position on the new law, google "Андрей Кураев: В законе о запрете пропаганды гомосексуализма есть демократичность" [sic]

So who, pray tell, is exactly in danger? The feminist and anti-homophobic Pussy Riot are being held in prison for a political demonstration in a church.

To claim that the Orthodox Church is in real danger is as ludicrous to me as the complaints from fundamentalist hate groups in the US who whine that they are being persecuted, just because people call them bigots when they act like bigots. Nobody is closing down Orthodox Churches (though the recent moves have prompted Alekseev to create a movement to rebuild бассейн Москва). Meanwhile, the government and the priests are indeed interfering with the lives of gay people in Russia and potentially in the lives of those who study and write about gay Russia.

Of course Russia is no stranger to Orwellian arguments, but really. I fail to see how anyone with pretensions to academic credentials can support such nonsense.

Kevin Moss
Middlebury College


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