Abstract

Femen is a feminist group who critics and parodies the Christian practices through the use of mediatised scenographies, inscribed in the so-called «happening» artistic tradition. One of the Femen's founding acts was, in August 2012, the chainsaw slaughter of a monumental Christian cross located in Kiev. Such an act - an attack made against the physical dimension of a medium in order to eradicate what this medium refers to - is akin to iconoclasm. However, Femen's anticlerical aim is not limited to voluntary destruction acts. These political forms of religious iconoclasm and semioclam can be examine with a pragmatic approach which places the theories of reference at the centre of the analysis: What do the Christian images refer to for those who worship them, for those who strike them and for those who parody them?