The Return of the Russian Leviathan by Sergei Medvedev

The Return of the Russian Leviathan by Sergei Medvedev

Author:Sergei Medvedev
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2019-11-27T16:00:00+00:00


THE ‘MISS PRISON’ CONTEST

Another notable chapter has been written in the annals of Russian judicial practice. The Supreme Court of the Republic of Mordovia refused to grant Nadezhda Tolokonnikova early release from prison. Nadezhda is a member of the feminist protest rock group Pussy Riot, and was sentenced to two years’ detention for singing a punk prayer in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. She was refused early release for a curious reason: the court deemed her unworthy of such clemency because she had refused to take part in the ‘Miss Charming’ beauty contest that was held in correctional colony No. 14 in Mordovia, and therefore they could not say that her behaviour in the colony had been exemplary.

Nadezhda refused to take part in the beauty contest not as a protest against the rules of the camp, but because she was taking a principled civil position. As an activist in a feminist group, she cannot by conviction take part in a sexist ritual dreamt up by a patriarchal society; it would be like asking a vegan to join in a barbeque. In her deposition to the court, Nadezhda said that her aesthetic values would not allow her to participate in such a competition. This is the very same reason given by another dissident, the writer Andrei Sinyavsky, half a century ago when he had a ‘stylistic disagreement’ with the Soviet state.10

Feminists the world over should applaud the Mordovian court for uncovering the truth: it actually acknowledged that women were obliged to take part in the beauty contest, and that a refusal to do so would bring disciplinary sanctions. According to this logic, the whole world is one big women’s prison colony, in the middle of which there stands a catwalk on which the entrapped women are required to show off their charms so as not to be penalized. In a patriarchal and sexist society, a woman is imprisoned in her own body from the very beginning, in a cage of social norms and male expectations. She is controlled far more than a man is by the discipline of her body, the dictates of physiology and the battle with age. Throughout her whole life, a woman has to walk a particular line; and beauty contests simply take to extremes the stereotypes of gender slavery.

Criticism of beauty contests has been growing around the world as being one of the more odious institutions of the patriarchal society, a symbol of exploitation, standardization and commodification of the female body; and it’s not just feminists or left-wingers who protest about this. Even organizers of beauty contests themselves have been trying to adapt to the new mood, doing away with the line-up in bikinis, as the Miss World competition has done. Another approach has been for the women taking part to answer questions to show how bright they are. The supposed value of these tests was shown up by the Mrs Russia competition in 2012. In conversation with a correspondent from Russian television, Inna



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