“Our God is Woman! Our Mission is Protest! Our Weapons Are Bare Breasts!”

Femen deploys specific rhetorical and performative strategies that, while invoking revolutionary movements such as second-wave feminism and the historical avant-garde, normalize and universalize Eurocentric beauty myths as a standard of value and locus point of agency. Emerging in an era of media exposure, this privileging constellates around their trademark strategy of engagement, the circulation of images from their topless protests privilege whiteness, beauty, and youth. Using a critical media literacy framework to read the rhetorical performances of such bare-breasted bodies, I offer an analysis of Femen’s form of pop feminism, “sextremism,” that finds that, although their protests foreground performance, procedure, and action, the group fails to substantively critique and challenge the commodification of expression, desire, and political interaction in their representations and circulation. Despite such failure, Femen illustrate three characteristics of a feminist rhetoric of unruliness: appropriation of the revolutionary avant-garde, a parrhesiastic and agonistic tone of discursive delivery, and the strategic mobilization of material bare bodies in public and digital spaces. I conclude by offering a reading of Femen as a form of biopolitics, a praxis of bare literacies that realize radical openness or vulnerability by way of public exposure to powerful hegemonic patriarchal systems. Ultimately, this analysis is informed by Agamben’s central question in Homo Sacer: In what way does bare life dwell in the polis?