Feminist Pornocracy?Femen and The Politics of Resistant Nudity

A scene at the April 2013 Hanover trade fair illustrates the peculiar symbiosis of pornocratic rule and struggle for celebrity enjoined by a global economy of sovereign subjectivity. Homogenizing market logics expressed as private sentiment and empowered agency feed the pornocratic economy by inflating and innovating the disciplinary imaginaries some mistake for liberty and sovereign intimacy.

It was, recalls Shevchenko, a 24-year-old business studies graduate from … western Ukraine, "a very intimate moment." … "Suddenly there I was, looking into Putin's eyes, he into mine, just a metre between us before one of his men lunged to shield him from me and in those seconds I was just thinking to myself: "What a funny botox face—because of all the snips and tucks it's endured, it can't properly express what he's feeling." Alexandra Shevchenko (cited in Connolly)

Femen activist Alexandra Shevchenko here gazes at the mirror image of a potential future self, one reflecting every surgical stay of mortality and of our being in common. As a major player among the "shock troops" of sextremism known as Femen, Shevchenko and the pornocrat share a moment of recognition in the public eye as she launches herself topless upon the Russian president in full view of the assembled media throng and to the contagious surprise of Europe's most powerful woman and national leader, German chancellor Angela Merkel. Cementing the public disclosure of their relation, the eye lock can be read as an index of a postsoviet identity in crisis, where personality and celebrity are sought as the other side of real poverty and an ossified gender system, conduit of trafficking and sex tourism without end by Femen's account.

Cut off from its own expressive lexicon, the pornocrat's face beams back only images of bloated obscenity and grotesque invitation as Putin "seems to push his chest out, raise his eyebrows and purse his lips, producing a double chinned smirk, while Merkel puffs out her cheeks and frowns as bodyguards pounce on Shevchenko and her four fellow Femen members, tackling them to the floor" (cited in Connolly). If Femen nudity primly stops at toplessness, their public materializations unleash the farcical element only ever loosely held in check by public figureheads who contend with the rigorous body discipline of public appearance. The Femen intervention exposes this fact before the cameras: "I had observed from a distance a group of suited men. The closer I got to them, I recognised the really small one amongst them was Putin. He was so puny, not like the macho pictures you see of him riding a horse bareback, or fishing barechested," she said. "And that was when I realised: now is the moment and started to charge. … I jumped over the fence, pumping my elbows out at my sides and undressing as I ran towards him, screaming: 'Fuck the dictator'" (cited in Connolly).

Alternately tumescent and shrinking, fearsome yet fading, Putin appears less formidable when measured against the beauty system's exacting standards, and this fragilized masculinity, by turns ridiculous and obscenely leering, invigorates the Femen-ist who, seizing the opportunity to launch the insult, claims equality although only in the terms of erotic bondage. As one Femen-ist puts it, "We use women's sexuality as women's weapon" (Hutsol and Svyatski). Logics of saturnalian reversal or Bakhtinian carnivalesque fail to capture the restricted economy of Femen's pornocratic intimacy with heteropatriarchal power and the figures of sovereignty who front for it; for this we must reach into Achille Mbembe's notion of "commandment," a cycling entanglement of desire for glory wedded to a demand for absolute power, wherein the dominated "clothe themselves in cheap imitations of power to reproduce its epistemology … [while] power, in its own violent quest for grandeur, makes vulgarity and wrongdoing its main mode of existence" (133). Femen-ist nudity mirrors pornocratic vulgarity and machismo by borrowing its cheap lineaments to reproduce its logic of spectacular individuality, absolute agency, and freedom understood as the media capture of subjective singularity.

Yet a Femen-ist is no libertine. "We were invited to Germany...