Gendered Tropes, Threats, and Postcolonial Entanglements across the Baltic Sea

• In Event: Reimagining the Baltic Sea in Cultural Productions

Abstract

Sofi Oksanen, one of the most celebrated and translated contemporary authors in Finland,
addresses in several of her novels the history of Estonia and Eastern Europe during the twentieth century. With the goal of making “Russian colonialism,” as she puts it, and its persistent threats to the security in the Baltic Sea region more visible, Oksanen constructs storylines that feature Eastern European women in Soviet-occupied or post-Soviet spaces, often crossing borders between Finland and Estonia. While much of scholarship on Oksanen has focused on her novel Puhdistus (Purge, 2008) and its depictions of sexual violence and victimized women in Soviet and post-Soviet Estonia, this paper will take a closer look at the most recently published Koirapuisto (Dog Park, 2019) that tells the story of a Ukrainian-Estonian woman who has escaped to Finland after complications in her work on the global fertility market in Ukraine. While the trope of the victimized Eastern European woman has largely disappeared from the Nordic imagination (Hedling 2018) in the last decade, the threats to safety and well-being around the Baltic Sea in Sofi Oksanen’s literary worlds continue to be portrayed through gendered tropes that, I will argue, draw from the “lagging discourse” that, as Redi Koobak argues in her analysis of postsocialist feminist imaginaries, “places the former Eastern Europe, including its feminist endeavors, in a perpetual ‘catching up’ mode” (41). This paper will also demonstrate that Oksanen’s novels are informed by postcolonial entanglements that go beyond depicting the politics of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia as the oppressor that Oksanen is interested in. Her novels tell us at least as much (or even more) about the position of Finland and the Finnish author in constructing stories of reproduction and the commodification of women’s bodies across the Baltic Sea.

Author

• Liina-Ly Roos, University of Wisconsin-Madison