From Cathedral to counterpublic: translating Pussy Riot and the mediation of Russian feminist discourse

This article investigates how the texts of Russian punk-feminist collective Pussy Riot have been translated and mediated for transnational circulation. Produced from the group’s formation in 2011 through their incarceration following the February 2012 ‘Punk Prayer’ protest performance in Moscow, their writings – including songs, poems, courtroom statements, and letters from prison – present a locally embedded feminist discourse deeply entangled with post-Soviet authoritarianism, Orthodox religiosity, and gendered modes of resistance. The subsequent English translations, initially produced by an online network of volunteer translators and later consolidated and published by the Feminist Press as Pussy Riot!: A Punk Prayer for Freedom (2012), offer a compelling site for examining the translational afterlife of local feminist narratives under conditions of cultural asymmetry. Drawing on scholarship in feminist translation studies, this study employs close comparative textual analysis of selected Russian source texts and their English translations to examine what dimensions of Pussy Riot’s locally situated feminist interventions are reshaped as they are made intelligible within a broader transnational feminist circuit. In doing so, this study contributes to broader debates on the politics of feminist translation, illuminating what is at stake when resistant, non-Western feminist voices are mediated for and circulate within Anglophone public spheres.