Coura­geous fem­i­nist punk band Pussy Riot has received more pub­lic expo­sure than they ever could have hoped for since three mem­bers were arrest­ed after a Feb­ru­ary 21^st per­for­mance at Moscow’s Christ the Sav­ior Cathe­dral and charged with “hooli­gan­ism.” The band formed last Sep­tem­ber in direct response to Vladimir Putin’s deci­sion to seek the pres­i­den­cy again in March 2012, and they have demon­strat­ed against his rule ever since, stag­ing con­fronta­tion­al, but non-vio­lent, protest per­for­mances in Red Square and oth­er Russ­ian land­marks. They draw much of their ener­gy and inspi­ra­tion from work­ing-class British Oi! bands of the 80s, the Amer­i­can fem­i­nist punk of the 90s Riot Grrrl move­ment, and from the stal­wart Son­ic Youth, whose three decade run has put singer/bassist Kim Gor­don in the spot­light as a musi­cian, artist, and icon.

In the video inter­view above from Explod­ed View, Gor­don offers her take on Pussy Riot’s sig­nif­i­cance and their rel­e­vance to the polit­i­cal strug­gles of women in the U.S.. Gor­don reads Pussy Riot as “dis­si­dent art… tar­get­ed as a weapon” against a sys­tem, and its author­i­tar­i­an leader, that has wide­ly sup­pressed dis­sent. Like the noto­ri­ous online col­lec­tive Anony­mous and their end­less­ly pro­lif­er­at­ing Guy Fawkes masks, Pussy Riot eschews the trap­pings of indi­vid­ual fame, wear­ing bal­a­clavas to obscure their iden­ti­ties. As they state in a Vice Mag­a­zine inter­view before the arrests, “new mem­bers can join the bunch and it does not real­ly mat­ter who takes part in the next act—there can be three of us or eight, like in our last gig on the Red Square, or even 15. Pussy Riot is a pul­sat­ing and grow­ing body.” The band keeps its focus on the body, as a grow­ing col­lec­tive or as a sym­bol of resis­tance to patri­ar­chal con­trol. One mem­ber explains the band’s name in the Vice inter­view:

A female sex organ, which is sup­posed to be receiv­ing and shape­less, sud­den­ly starts a rad­i­cal rebel­lion against the cul­tur­al order, which tries to con­stant­ly define it and show its appro­pri­ate place. Sex­ists have cer­tain ideas about how a woman should behave, and Putin, by the way, also has a cou­ple thoughts on how Rus­sians should live. Fight­ing against all that—that’s Pussy Riot.

The choice of name—which has forced dozens of news­cast­ers to say the word “pussy” with a straight face—is, in all seri­ous­ness, a point­ed ref­er­ence to what Gor­don calls a “fear of women,” which may explain what near­ly every­one who has an opin­ion on the case char­ac­ter­izes as an extreme­ly dis­pro­por­tion­ate sen­tence for the three con­vict­ed mem­bers. As Gor­don says above, “Clear­ly Putin is afraid.” Relat­ing the events in Rus­sia to the back­lash against women’s leg­isla­tive gains in this coun­try, Gor­don says, “what’s going on in Wash­ing­ton is real­ly indica­tive of that [fear],” and she won­ders “why there aren’t more men who aren’t con­cerned about it or bring­ing it up. It’s beyond a women’s issue.” Nev­er­the­less, she strong­ly implies that the U.S. is ripe for a “pussy riot”—a new punk-rock women’s movement—since “women make nat­ur­al anar­chists and rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies because they’ve always been sec­ond-class cit­i­zens and had to claw their way up.”

Pussy Riot has cit­ed Son­ic Youth’s “Kool Thing” (above) as an influ­ence, a taunt­ing fem­i­nist retort to male come-ons that asks its tar­get “are you gonna lib­er­ate us girls / From male white cor­po­rate oppres­sion?” The unstat­ed answer is, no, he isn’t. As Gor­don implies above, and as Pussy Riot explain in an inter­view with The Guardian below, the only response to so-called “wars on women” every­where may be a “fem­i­nist whip”:

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.