"I Am Now a Knife": Counter/insurgencies for Unmaking the Vulnerable Female Subject: War and Rebellion in Soviet and Contemporary Ukrainian Art

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

This roundtable identifies points of insurgency/counterinsurgency in discourse on emancipation versus feminine subjectivity identified with passivity, vulnerability, pacification, and/or absence. Kateryna Ruban provides the early historical roots for our conversation by looking at how female doctors in the postwar USSR were first presented in film. Local doctors were paving the way for knowledge about the body and the self as their patients were becoming Soviet, leading to a new general vision of female emancipation in the USSR that continued well after WWII. Sandra Joy Russell brings to the dialogue embodied performance in women’s film and literature under perestroika, showing how concepts of the body and emancipation are symptomatic of the ways in which political and administrative state power rely on gendered subjectivity to maintain authority, often to oppressive and even violent ends. Jessica Zychowicz contextualizes the discussion in depictions of feminism in media and activist circles since the mid-2000s in Ukraine, especially where Western hegemony and local decommunization processes in tension with deeper orientalist discourses around femininity and power. Olenka S. Dmytryk situates the discussion in today’s Ukraine by examining discourse on sexual/bodily shame, imaginaries of nonnormativity, and dis-identification with modernity and ‘traditions’ in artistic works, posing in response to the development of the far right and anti-gender movements. Iryna Shuvalova brings to the discussion examples of how emerging female performers on both sides of the Ukraine-Russia front line disrupt existing narratives of a vulnerable femininity through their songs, and through their stage personae.

Sub Unit

• Gender/LGBTQ Studies

Chair

• Jessica Zychowicz, U of Alberta (Canada)

Roundtable Members

• Olena Dmytryk, Independent Scholar

• Kateryna Ruban, New York U

• Sandra Joy Russell, U of Massachusetts Amherst

• Iryna Shuvalova, Independent Scholar

• Jessica Zychowicz, U of Alberta (Canada)

Session Manager

• Alicia Baca, Ohio State U