As a student at the Moscow State University, Nadya Tolokonnikova, founding member of the feminist punk band and art collective Pussy Riot, wrote a note on the ancient female philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria (355–415 CE), adding that she was “brutally murdered by Christian fanatics.” Later, these words came to haunt Tolokonnikova as her philosophy notes were used in her criminal record as “evidence” of plotting against the Russian Orthodox Church. She was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for “hooliganism on the grounds of religious hatred” after Pussy Riot had performed the protest song Punk Prayer in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 2012.
Using her stage name Nadya Riot, the Russian artist and activist discusses her relationship to Hypatia in Brooklyn Museum’s podcast series The Dinner Party Today, which explores the present-day significance of Judy Chicago’s landmark feminist artwork The Dinner Party from 1979. Chicago’s installation highlights the lives and achievements of hundreds of women who have mostly been excluded from dominant historical narratives. Alongside Hypatia, Chicago’s artwork names several other ancient female philosophers who still today remain highly marginalized or completely absent from standardized accounts of ancient history. Hipparchia of Maroneia, whose name is included in the heritage floor section of Chicago’s spatial artwork, is another such philosopher.
It would be fascinating to hear Tolokonnikova comment on Hipparchia as her story bears striking resemblance to Pussy Riot’s explicit social criticism. Indeed, I do not find it farfetched to align a contemporary feminist art group with an ancient female philosopher, and I claim that this comparison both reveals essential aspects of Hipparchia’s Cynic philosophy and draws attention to the power of social and artistic movements to give expression to philosophical ideas.
The first resemblance concerns the role of the public realm. The ancient Cynic philosophers scorned property and idealized poverty as a way leading to good life. In accordance with this ascetic ideal, Hipparchia lived and practiced her philosophy in the streets of Athens. This brought her activity into the agora, a public space that her contemporaries reserved for male citizens. Sources reveal that she attended gatherings (symposia) and practiced her free speech (parrhêsia).
When challenged by a male philosopher, Hipparchia asked trenchantly: “Do you think I deliberated badly on myself if, instead of wasting time upon the loom, I dedicated it to education (paideia)?” (DL 6.98).
In this ancient society, wool-spinning was a typical female labor conducted inside of the male-governed household (oikos), in an area called “the women’s quarters” (gynaikôn). Hipparchia reversed the juxtaposition between the private and public spheres, with their accompanying gender-specific tasks, and claimed her place in the public realm, which was closely associated with freedom and power (Grahn-Wilder 2024).
In the Brooklyn Museum’s podcast, Tolokonnikova describes how Punk Prayer was filmed on a church altar, an exclusively male space, as a protest against the Russian orthodox church’s conservative views on gender and their endorsement of Vladimir Putin’s re-election as president. The philosopher and the punk feminists both challenge the male-centered power dynamics of their contemporary societies, which both constrain women to the domestic sphere of life.
The second similarity is action itself. Ancient Cynicism was first and foremost a lived and embodied practice, and the Cynics’ aspiration to live in accordance with nature (kata fysin) intertwined with their contempt for the beliefs and values of the surrounding society. The Cynic way of life was the most important expression of their philosophy, and thereby also our information on Hipparchia’s action is the key to understanding her philosophical commitments. According to ancient testimony, she chose to marry the Cynic Crates of Thebes, dressed in a similar raggedy attire as him, and decided to practice philosophy with him. All of these are acts of dissent and yet give a consistent expression to some of the ancient Cynics’ core beliefs.
In his article “Cynics and Punk,” Gregory Blaire fittingly compares the ancient Cynics to the 1980’s punk rock movement, discussing the American punk band Black Flag as a case-in-point, suggesting that both the Cynics and punks ultimately challenge people to think for themselves rather than uncritically following the modes of living and chasing after the values dictated by their contemporaneous societies. He suggests that Black Flag’s social criticism particularly targeted the “shiny and happy façade of the Reagan era milieu,” which simultaneously concealed the prevailing racial and class disparities.
Similarly, Hipparchia radically challenged the gendered expectations of her time with her “errant body” which she refused to contain within the private (male-dominated) home (Blaire 2018: 13–24).
And obviously, Pussy Riot’s social criticism is expressed precisely through dissenting bodily action, like playing punk rock on an altar wearing colorful balaclavas.
Third, both Pussy Riot and Hipparchia oppose the sexual norms of their contemporary societies. As Dorotha Dutsch aptly points out, the famous story of Hipparchia and Crates’ public lovemaking exemplifies the Cynic virtue of shamelessness or “unabashedness” (anaischyntia) and provides a positive proposal for Cynic sexual ethics (Dutsch 2018: 245–255). For the Cynics, the emotion of shame (aischynê) is nothing but a cultural artefact instilled in our minds by misguided cultural beliefs. Furthermore, the cosmopolitan Cynics declared that their home was the entire kosmos rather than a private dwelling in a particular place, and thus they did not need the privacy of a house for fulfilling their natural needs.
Likewise, Pussy Riot’s music video Straight Outta Vagina (featuring Desi Mo and Leikeli47) confronts the shame associated with female sexuality. Like the Cynics who emphasized the naturalness of sexuality (“if animals can copulate without shame, why cannot we?”), Pussy Riot de-mystifies the vagina (“Don’t play stupid, don’t play dumb / Vagina’s where you’re really from”). It should be noted that from early on, Pussy Riot has explicitly included LGBTQ+ rights to their feminist agenda, and Tolokonnikova points out in an interview from 2018 that having a vagina or clitoris is by no means a prerequisite for female gender.
In her own way, Hipparchia, too, breaks again the gender binary, and shows that a consistent Cynic would consider it a cultural artefact just like shame or private property, an erroneous belief which is utterly irrelevant for good Cynic life.
Tolokonnikova’s reflections on Hypatia are a captivating example of how a female philosopher from the past might inspire an artist and activist of today (or in this case, shockingly, even affect their criminal sentence). With the vaginally shaped place-seatings and the hundreds of female names history books leave unmentioned, Judy Chicago’s Dinner Table makes a significant statement. Exclusion of thinkers like Hypatia and Hipparchia narrows our understanding of what ancient philosophy was all about, what the figure of a philosopher might have looked like, and how philosophy was practiced. Hipparchia’s story exemplifies that western philosophical tradition includes dissenting thinkers who expressed and created their philosophies through bodily actions. Centuries before punk, she and the other Cynics recognized bodily performance and lifestyle as methods of conveying one’s philosophical message. And the punkers, on the other hand, do not have to identify as philosophers or theoretically analyze their action for giving powerful expressions to philosophical ideas. Tolokonnikova shows how ancient female thinkers’ legacy can live on in a present-day artists’ activity.
Dr. Malin Grahn-Wilder is a postdoctoral scholar at the department of social sciences and philosophy at University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and principal investigator of the four-year research project Origins of Racializing Thought, funded by the Kone Foundation (2022–2026). Grahn-Wilder has specialized on the topics of gender, sexuality, race, and (dis)ability particularly in the context of ancient philosophy and is the author of Gender and Sexuality in Stoic Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and several articles. Grahn-Wilder also has extensive professional background in arts education.
Bibliography:
Gregory Blaire: “Cynics and Punks”, in Errant Bodies, Mobility, and Political Resistance, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R.D. Hicks, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995 (DL).
Dorota Dutsch: ”Dog-love-dog: Kynogamia and Cynic sexual ethics”, in M. Masterson, N. Rabinowitz and J. Robson (ed.) Sex in Antiquity – Exploring Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World, London and New York: Routledge, 2018: 245–259.
Grahn-Wilder, Malin: “Wives or Philosophers? Hipparchia and the Cynic
Criticism of Gendered Economics”. In The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy, S. Brill & C. McKeen (eds.), Routledge, 2024.