| 1. |
- Boyko, Kateryna
(författare)
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Valkyries and Madonnas : Constructing Femininity During the Russo-Ukrainian War
- 2023
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Ingår i: Post-Soviet Women. - Cham : Palgrave Macmillan. - 9783031380655 - 9783031380686 - 9783031380662 ; , s. 203-224
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- ‘We are the Kyiv Valkyries and we will send you all to hell’. This is how armed young women in camouflage from a female territorial defence unit video-addressed the Russian military in late February 2022. The rapid intensification of the Russo-Ukrainian War, ongoing since 2014, to a full-scale invasion, not only posed multiple new challenges for Ukrainian women but also became a moment of crisis that has led to rearticulating of the current femininity models.The chapter focuses on the visual representation of women’s war experience in Ukraine and the implications it had for Ukrainian women’s identity. In particular, it discusses how femininity is constructed through images disseminated via social media during the wartime and what cultural references have been applied, contested and rearticulated there.Semiotic analysis of the visuals shows that Ukrainian women are usually portrayed as a triad—three characters with different functions. First of all, the aggressive, militarist and simultaneously eroticised Valkyrie; then Madonna—a protective figure; third is the Witch—a chthonic entity with supernatural powers able to rule the fate. All the three roles merge in metaphoric visual depictions of Ukraine itself making women a symbol of Ukrainian resistance. The images tend to redefine traditional female roles and emphasise women’s agency and empowerment in the times of crisis.
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| 2. |
- Brankova, Alexandra
(författare)
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Being a Woman and Russian National Identity : Discourses and Representations Through the Lenses of Russian Conservative and Nationalist Organizations
- 2023
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Ingår i: Post-Soviet Women. - Cham, Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan. - 9783031380662 - 9783031380655 ; , s. 159-179
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The Russian conservative turn and the masculinization of Russian national identity have affected women’s positions and their roles in the imagined community of the nation. The chapter explores how Russian nationalist organizations portray women and womanhood within Russian national identity discourses and representations. The study compares four nationalist and conservative groups: the Eurasian Youth Union, the Izborskii Club, the Russian Imperial Movement, and the Russian National Unity. The cases selected juxtapose more imperially oriented nationalists (the Eurasian Youth Union and the Izborskii Club) with their far-right, ethno-nationalist counterparts (the Russian Imperial Movement and the Russian National Unity). Digital media enhances the visualization of national identity discourses and the reach of nationalist media production to wider audiences. National identity discourses are critically analyzed within Russian nationalist new media ecologies focussing on their web channels, blogs, and social media. While far-right groups depict women through anti-abortion discourses and in terms of their reproductive functions for society, imperial nationalists have more complex and multi-layered notions of womanhood in terms of cultural, social, and political roles.
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| 3. |
- Gradskova, Yulia, 1967-
(författare)
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From Defending Women’s Rights in the “Whole World” to Silence About Russia’s Predatory War? : The (Geo)politics of the Eurasian Women’s Forums in the Context of “Traditional Values”
- 2023
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Ingår i: Post-Soviet Women. - Cham : Palgrave Macmillan. - 9783031380655 - 9783031380662 ; , s. 29-49
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this chapter is to explore certain similarities and some differences between the Soviet women’s organizations on the one hand and state supported women’s organizations in Russia now on the other. The Soviet propaganda was well known for presenting Soviet women as fully enjoying equal rights with men. Ideas on equality were used to create a positive image of the country abroad, as well as to gain alliances for the Eastern bloc. This chapter also explores the work of the contemporary pro-governmental Women’s Union of Russia (heir of the Committee of Soviet Women) — and the new institution promoted by Russia that was declared to enable international cooperation around women’s issues: the Eurasian Women’s Forum. In this chapter I show that in the context of international sanctions due to the annexation of Crimea, international condemnation of Russian authorities’ attacks on LGBTQ+ rights and women’s NGOs, and in particular, after the beginning of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian government once again attempted to use women’s organizations as an important (geo)political instrument.
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| 4. |
- Kott, Matthew, DPhil, 1974-
(författare)
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Why Was There No FEMEN in the Baltic States? : Some Preliminary Observations
- 2023
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Ingår i: Post-Soviet Women. - Cham : Palgrave Macmillan. - 9783031380655 - 9783031380686 - 9783031380662 ; , s. 135-156
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- From 2008 to 2015, the FEMEN movement emerged from post-Soviet Ukraine to become a phenomenon recognised worldwide and inspiring local offshoots in a dozen countries, first in Eastern Europe, then Western Europe, and eventually as far afield as North Africa and the Americas. Throughout this period, however, no real attempt was ever made to establish a local FEMEN branch in any of the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania, even when many of their neighbours had them. This chapter seeks to explore why this was so when many of the preconditions that led to the foundation of FEMEN in Ukraine seemed also to exist in the post-Soviet Baltic societies as well. What made the Baltics different from both those post-socialist and those Western European societies where certain women felt the need to embrace the techniques and ideas of FEMEN? Both socio-political developments in the Baltic States, as well as the under-researched aspect of the underlying ideology of FEMEN shed light on why Baltic societies did not join the “new” feminist activism embodied by FEMEN and Pussy Riot. By presenting three cases that compare and contrast with FEMEN’s activities, some preliminary explanations are offered for why this could be.
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| 5. |
- Shrubok, Aliaksandra, 1989-
(författare)
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Women Cultivating Love in the Belarusian Countryside
- 2023
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Ingår i: Post-Soviet Women. - Cham : Palgrave Macmillan. - 9783031380655 - 9783031380662 - 9783031380686 ; , s. 225-244
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This chapter discusses ethnographic material obtained during research in a rural, relatively depopulated area in Central-North Belarus. Older women make up the majority of residents there; many live alone, since their spouses—if any—have passed away, and their children have migrated to bigger cities in search for prosperity. Being in many ways bereft of social networks of mutual care and support, the women concentrate on the (re)production of vegetal life. The careful management that gardening requires enacts local values and meanings of what it is to be a virtuous and self-fulfilled woman. This paper shows the implications of the relations between rural women and plants which reveal the women’s critique of the social changes they encounter and the negotiation of their agency in the situation of overall structural neglect in the post-Soviet time.
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| 6. |
- Sätre, Ann-Mari, et al.
(författare)
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Post-Soviet Women : New Challenges and Ways to Empowerment-Introduction
- 2023
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Ingår i: Post-Soviet Women. - Cham : Palgrave Macmillan. - 9783031380655 - 9783031380686 - 9783031380662 ; , s. 1-26
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This volume explores the challenges that women face, their positions in changing societies, the negotiation of their roles and their responses to change and ways to achieve women’s empowerment. The regional focus is on countries in the territory of the former Soviet Union. With this volume, we fill a gap in the published knowledge on recent politics, ideology, identity and activism in relation to gender and to women that have been seriously impacted by conservative politics and resurgent nationalism.
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| 7. |
- Vladimirova, Vladislava, 1975-, et al.
(författare)
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‘They Beat Us, We Fly’ : Indigenous Activism Among Women in the Russian North
- 2023
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Ingår i: Post-Soviet Women. - : Palgrave Macmillan. - 9783031380662 ; , s. 247-269
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This chapter describes how Indigenous Sami and Nenets women from the Russian North join in different kinds of civic activism in order to resist structures of state power. Such structures are the ground of both economic underprivilege and cultural marginalization. Soviet policy of forceful collectivization of Indigenous economy was justified with representations of Indigenous people of the North as occupying lower evolutionary stages of a linear historical development. In correspondence to this image, the emancipation of Soviet women condemned and criminalized a number of widely spread social practices where women were presented as suppressed and victims, like polygamy, bride kidnapping, and bride wealth. In its effects on indigenous population, Soviet emancipation policies have similarities to Western strands of feminism, despite USSR’s rejection of the latter. Indigenous feminist studies provide critical perspectives that illuminate these similarities and their long-standing destructive outcomes for indigenous communities. Nenets women from Yamal Peninsula and Sami women from Murmansk Region have played a significant role in the movement for Indigenous rights at regional and national levels. While Sami people also engage in women activism, Nenets still lack women’s organizations. The chapter analyzes this development within the context of Soviet gender policies applying perspectives offered by Indigenous feminist studies and critical social theory.
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