Jennifer, as I read your post I couldn’t help but compare Cyrus’s banality to the principled dissent of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a member of the Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot who this week began a hunger strike to protest conditions in the penal colony where she is incarcerated. In March 2012 she and two other members of the band were jailed, ostensibly for “hooliganism aimed at inciting religious hatred,” after they leapt onto the soleas of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow and performed an anti-Putin song (see video of the performance here). Like Cyrus’s VMA performance, Pussy Riot also garnered a lot of criticism, some for their blasphemous disrespect for the Orthodox Church and some for their questionable musical talents. But nobody could claim that their performance was inauthentic, nor that it was made in the name of crass commercialism.

In July Tolokonnikova was denied parole. The official reason was that she refused to take part in a prison camp beauty contest, thus showing her lack of a “positive attitude” toward her rehabilitation. Her response to that charge demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of the role of aesthetics in constructing identity, and of the way that women in Russia are sexualized and marginalized in that process. Although the context is very different, this seems to directly respond to what you say about Cyrus’ cultural “borrowing.”

Here is a brief excerpt from Tolokonnikova’s statement: “The style of the Putin regime is a conservative, secret-police aesthetic…. This aesthetic persistently samples and recreates the principles of two previous regimes…: the czarist-imperial aesthetic and the … aesthetic of Socialist Realism…. This worthless aesthetic is lovingly recreated by each and every state institution in Russia, including, of course, the prison colonies, which form such an important part of the repressive machine of the state. And so, if you are a woman and, what is more, if you are a young woman and even the slightest bit attractive, then you are basically required to take part in beauty contests. If you refuse to participate, you will be denied parole based on your disdain for the ‘Miss Charm’ event…. In boycotting the beauty contest I express my own principled and painstakingly formulated ‘positive attitude.’ My own position, in distinction from the conservative, secret-police aesthetic of the camp administration, consists in reading my books and journals during moments that I extract by force from the deadening daily schedule of the prison colony.”