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This thesis examines the evolution of feminist praxis within the riot grrrl movement, focusing on two specific riot grrrl demographics - founding riot grrrls in the early 1990s and currently active riot grrrls in southern California. This thesis argues that riot grrrl activism is still thriving but in diverse, strategically modified ways. Using José Muñoz’s concept of “disidentification,” it analyzes how contemporary riot grrrls have appropriated and adapted the original movement’s tenets to allow for greater accessibility and diversity.

There is a consistent thread throughout Russian history of governmental management of culture. Tsars and Communist bureaucrats alike have sought to variously promote, censor, or exploit writers, filmmakers, and musicians to control and define the country's cultural content. Often, these measures were intended not necessarily to cultivate Russia's aesthetic spirit, but to accomplish specific policy goals. The promotion of a State ideology and other efforts to stave of social unrest were chief among them. With the fall of Soviet power and the loss of an official ideology promoted by the state, the concept of cultural politics fell to the wayside. It has remained largely ignored ever since. Despite numerous high-profile incidents of persecution of the creative class, analysts have not linked them together as part of an overarching cultural policy. However, the Russian government under Vladimir Putin has faced consistent policy challenges since the beginning of the 2000s that could be mitigated through the implementation of such a policy. In some ways, the breadth and character of State involvement in the cultural sphere follows the pattern of the country’s autocratic past. In others, it demonstrates that it has adapted these policies to function in the hybrid regime that Putin has created, as opposed to the totalitarian ones that preceded it. A recent case that exemplifies this new breed of cultural policy is the persecution of the radical feminist punk band Pussy Riot. While largely unknown to many Russian citizens, the group’s overt opposition to the patriarchal model of rule established by Putin with the help of the Russian Orthodox Church was met by the most comprehensive crackdown within the cultural sphere since perestroika. Examining this case in detail can reveal the extent to which the Russian government is concerned about its ability to maintain popular legitimacy. The fact that it has continued to try to manage the cultural sphere may indicate the level of democracy that has or has not been established in Russia so far today. / text

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In 2011 five days of rioting spread across many English towns and cities. David Cameron, then UK Prime Minister, described these events as ‘criminality, pure and simple’, inhibiting serious examination of what happened and justifying harsh punitive sentences for rioters. This thesis explains and counters the naïve individualism that underpins the discourse of ‘criminality’; but further argues that such discursive acts are representative of a broader problem within the social order that is causally implicated the violence in 2011. In contrast to the popular and sociological approach of analysing the singular ‘riot’, ‘riot actions’ are conceptualised as the foci of analysis, and in turn argued as acts of resistance generated by the organisation and practice of power within the social order. Thus riot actions are conceptualised and function as a symptom and entry point by which analysis can better get under the skin of the social order and understand its failing. Arguing for violent acts against the police as symptomatic of the social order’s failure, the thesis examines instances of these in the 2011 and 1980s riots. The thesis explores and compares the involvement of race, exclusion, social identity, and police during and across these periods. It further examines how neoliberal forms of exclusion have shaped the possibilities of riotous actions, before performing a situational analysis of video footage of the 2011 riots. To facilitate this approach the thesis develops a theory of action/resistance through an account of the production of agency. The theory connects Bourdieu’s theorisation of habitus and disposition, utilises an expressive understanding of shame and self-esteem, and Butler’s notion of performativity. Thus we seek to understand how structured experiences, in particular social and economic exclusion, become meaningful to those excluded, and how this shapes violent acts as meaningful performances. The thesis argues that resistance is generated through power relations, which amongst many rioters, are failing to reproduce the sense of self-worth required for identification with and engagement in, the social order. From this standpoint, then, riotous resistance cannot be explained as distinct from the social order, which shapes agency’s ‘necessary scene’, but as rational and emotional responses to it. The emergence of neoliberalism and individualism in the 1970s and 1980s created an epistemological and thus ontological shift, reshaping how disrespect and disempowerment is experienced and understood by excluded groups. These shifts or emergences have diminished the capacity of socially and economically excluded groups to generate Politicised identities and forms of resistance. Consequently, rather than ‘criminality’ - a moral condemnation - the 1980s and 2011, saw an increasing emergence of individualised - rather than Politicised - forms of resistance against the social and political order. Individualised resistance to power within the social order is ‘performed’ through short-term goals that momentarily re- arrange these power relations with regards to the self and police. In these behaviours, structurally produced shame and anger are expressed, social identities are formed and realised through a common complaint and goal, and the self achieves value through attacking or confounding the police.

Orientador: Maria Suely Kofes / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciencias Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-15T23:17:41Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Camargo_MichelleAlcantarade_M.pdf: 6248732 bytes, checksum: 56a5a0af8521170ace87098b58ebaa14 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010 / Resumo: Esta dissertação tem o objetivo de construir uma interpretação do processo pelo qual se construiu o estilo das minas do rock, no período de 1995 a 2008, expresso no espaço público, por meio de shows, oficinas e produção de fanzines de papel. As minas do rock, tem um feminismo polifônico como tema central de seu estilo, que se constrói por meio da escrita de fanzines, do comportamento e da estética corporal. Com o transcorrer deste processo, há uma redução da capacidade deste estilo em produzir interferências na cena do underground paulistana, denominado nesta dissertação de deffusion em que o estilo das minas do rock passa a ser um estilo consumido em shows e festas. / Abstract: This thesis aims to offer an interpretation of the process by which the minas do rock ("rock chicks") style is built, during the period of 1995 to 2008, expressed in the public space, by means of concerts, workshops and fanzines de papel ("paper fanzines"). The minas do rock have a polyphonic feminism as a central theme of their style, which is constructed throughout the fanzines writing craft, their behavior and their body aesthetics. In this process, there is a decrease of the capacity that this style has to interfere in São Paulo's underground scene, here named as deffusion, and the minas do rock style becomes a style consumed in concerts and parties. / Mestrado / Identidades e Diferenças / Mestre em Antropologia Social

One of the most significant acts of protest against the rule of Vladimir Putin was staged by the punk group Pussy Riot in Christ the Saviour’s Cathedral in Moscow in February 2012. The protest was one of several actions during the last decade where Russian artists had questioned the role of the Russian Orthodox Church, but this time the role of the Church in relation to the State rule was directly highlighted. This caused strong reactions internationally and in Russia, and there is a need to look into the arguments used in the debate in detail, using discourse analysis. This thesis, therefore, investigates what discourses the most prominent stakeholders – the Church, the State and Pussy Riot – rely on in the public debate around the Pussy Riot performance and the trial. Interconnections between different discourses are also investigated in order to gain a better insight into how religion, politics and popular culture interact in Russia today. The most important conclusion in this thesis is that religion and religious discourse affect legal and political practices in Russia today in ways that are not normally expected in a modern and secular state.

The aim of this study is to describe and analyse how young men who have participated in a riot describe their life-situations regarding to their relations to the police, their neighbourhood, employment, the background to the riots and how they use hip-hop as a resistance to subordination. The study is conducted through three semi-structured qualitative group interviews and to some extent field studies. The theoretical points of departure are Slavoj Zizeks theory of violence, which is divided into subjective, symbolic and systemic violence, and subcultural theory. The results of the study show that the young men in their daily life are exposed to by both systemic and symbolic violence, feel secure within their neighbourhood and find themselves harassed by the police. A major finding is that the riot primarily can be understood as an act to get society conscious of their situations, while they found themselves marginalised, lacking employment and youth club. Another finding is that the hip-hop-group “Kartellen” describes how the young men experience their life-situations and that they e.g. are used as a “resistance through ritual” and to get society aware of their life conditions.

This thesis examines the recent emergence of corporeal protest art in Russia. Through analyses of cultural, social, and economic shifts in the post-Soviet Era, I observe how this corporeal turn reflects a significant cultural transition away from the literary text, which has traditionally held a role of major importance in Russian culture. Detailed analysis of the contemporary performances of Pussy Riot and Petr Pavlensky are conducted in order to elucidate the social and political causes and implications of such a shift. Manifestation of oppositional discourse on the site of the human body is understood theoretically through Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitics, Mikhail Bakhtin’s grotesque body, and Inke Arns’ and Sylvia Sasse’s theory of subversive affirmation. Interestingly, this artistic divergence has coincided with the rise of relative economic and social wellbeing in Russia – conditions that tend to foster the development of a burgeoning public sphere, now standing at odds with an increase in political repression. Oppositionists and protest artists are, therefore, exploring new and unconventional ways of expressing dissent. My study contextualizes these new methods of expression within the larger tradition of the cultural expression of political will, examining the ways in which these works are readable through Russian cultural norms and to whom they speak. / Graduate

Riot Grrrl, Girls Rock camps and Ladyfest as social movements act as intermediaries in cultural production spaces, where music focused artefacts are made, collaborations forged, distribution networks established and reception practices enacted to create new conventions which can be understood as feminist art worlds. The growing literature on gender and cultural production, particularly in music communities such as Riot Grrrl, frequently speak of networks in qualitative narrative terms and very little is known about Ladyfest as a feminist movement and as a distribution network. This thesis offers an original contribution to cultural sociology by: employing a novel participatory action research approach to gathering social network data on translocal feminist music based cultural organisations; exploring how these networks can challenge a gendered political economy of cultural production in music worlds; understanding who participates and why; investigating how network structures impact the personal relationships, participation and collaboration opportunities for those involved. Engaging with Howard Becker’s Art Worlds theory as a framework, this thesis explores how music and art by women is produced, distributed and received by translocal networks. It takes into account contemporary issues for feminist music-based communities as well as the historical and international context of these overlapping and developing social movements. The literature suggests that one of the most pressing tasks for a sociology of the arts is to understand how organisational structures negotiate the domains of production, distribution and reception, with distribution modes being the most the most under-researched of the three. By focusing on UK Ladyfest festivals as case study sites, this research serves to address these gaps. Primary data sources include on-line social media, surveys, documents, focus groups and multi-mediainterviews. Findings indicate that those involved with Ladyfest tend to be motivated by a desire to challenge gender inequalities at a local level whilst drawing on local and international movements spanning different time periods and drawing on the works of feminist musicians. Homophily and heterophily both have important roles to play in the longitudinal development of Ladyfest networks. Participants show an awareness of intersecting inequalities such as ethnicity, class and disability with sexuality playing an important underlying role for the development of relationships within the networks. For some, Ladyfest involvement is a gateway into feminist activism and wider social and cultural participation, and for many it leads to lasting friendships and new collaborative artbased ties.