Superfluous Women: Art, Feminism, and Revolution in Twenty-First-Century Ukraine

421 Pages·2020·18.468 MB·English

by  Jessica Zychowicz

SUPERFLUOUS WOMEN
Art, Feminism, and Revolution in
Twenty-First-Century Ukraine

JESSICA ZYCHOWICZ
Superfluous Women
Art, Feminism, and Revolution in
Twenty-First-Century Ukraine
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press 2020
Toronto Buffalo London
utorontopress.com
Printed in the U.S.A.
ISBN 978-1-4875-0168-6 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-4875-1375-7 (EPUB)
ISBN 978-1-4875-1374-0 (PDF)
Publication cataloguing information is available from Library and Archives
Canada.
Publication of this book was made possible, in part, by the financial support
of the Shevchenko Scientific Society of Canada.
Наукове товариство ім. Шевченка в Канаді
Shevchenko Scientific Society of Canada
Société scientifique Ševčenko du Canada
This publication was made possible in part by the financial support of the
Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts
Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.
This book is for
my grandmothers
who were barred from attending university
the women of my generation
and for authors and artists anywhere
made invisible for seeking a voice
but especially those in Ukraine and Poland
before our time who disappeared
despite or because of their dedication to their talent
– and for those who did not –
whose words survive in our words
so that we do not perish.
There are important moments of apprenticeship.
The first moment of writing is the School of the Dead,
and the second moment of writing is the School of Dreams.
The Third moment, the most advanced, the highest, the deepest, is the School
of Roots ...
It’s the book stronger than the author: the apocalyptic text,
whose brilliance upsets the scribe.
How can it be written? With the hand running.
Following the writing hand like the painter draws:
in flashes.
– Hélène Cixous, Wellek Lecture, 1990
Maidan is a School.
– Nikita Kadan, interview with the author, Kyiv, 2019
Contents
List of Figures xi
Acknowledgments xv
Note on the Translation and Transliteration of Terms xix
Introduction 3
The Orange Revolution 8
“The Collective” 13
Methodology 21
1 Performing Protest: Sexual Dissent Reinvented 27
I. Introduction 27
II. Protest after 2004: Beyond Orange 32
Who Is Femen? 32
Staging Transgression – Initial Critical Receptions 34
Soviet Precursors – Happenings 38
Design of the Colour Revolutions 43
III. Archetype and Caricature: The Prostitute 46
Capitalism and the USSR – The Natasha 47
Enlightenment Fashionings of “The East” – The Amazon 49
Romanticism and Taras Shevchenko – The Serf 56
IV. The Mass Subject and the Public Sphere 63
Pop Culture Contexts: Chervona Ruta, Ruslana, Serduchka 63
Anachronism 65
Cultural Hybridity 66
V. East/West Cultural Stereotypes: A Parody of Media
Consumption 69
VI. Conclusion: Double Parody 73
viii Contents
2 An Anatomy of Activism: Virtual Body Rhetoric in Digital
Protest Texts 76
I. Introduction 76
II. Internationalization: The State and Pussy Riot 81
Virtual and Real Spaces 87
III. The Body and the Information Commodity 89
Feminist Media Performance 95
Overidentification 100
IV. Rhetorical Scripts 104
Genre – Dystopian Satire 104
Semblance and Rebellion 108
V. Representation and Circulation 110
Exposure and Desire – Mediating the Gaze 110
Image / Counter Image 114
VI. Critical Receptions: “Dissidence” East/West 120
VII. Conclusion 122
3 The Image Is the Frame: Photography and the Feminist Collective
Ofenzywa 127
I. Introduction 127
II. The Many Faces of March 8: The State and “The Woman
Question” 132
III. Rhetorical Contexts 142
Ofenzywa’s Manifesto 142
The Politics of “Everyday Life” 145
IV. Time in the Photo Series 32 Gogol St. 146
Form and Subjectivity 146
Ruin, Materialism, Memory 152
V. 32 Gogol St. as Allegory 159
Spatial Textures – The Soviet Communal Apartment versus the
Post-Soviet Tenement Home 159
Ontology and Representation – Civil Imagination 169
VI. Depictions of Home: A Room of One’s Own 176
Citizenship and the Private Sphere 176
Normative versus Non-Normative Time 181
VII. Resignifying Gender in Kyiv’s Urban Environment 184
VIII. Conclusion: Ethics and Competing Rhetorics 188
4 Museum of Congresses: Biopolitics and the Self in Kyiv’s HudRada
and REP Visual Art Collectives 193
I. Introduction 193
II. Art and the State 199
III. Censorship and Negative Space 204
Materialist Aesthetics and the Notion of Freedom 206
Recodings 213
Contents ix
IV. Inside the Assembly: Marginality in Draftsmen’s Congress 215
Towards “Agoraphilia” 217
State and Nation in (Anti)Representational Art 225
V. Biopolitics in Disputed Territory 230
Transparency versus Invisibility 237
VI. Conclusion: The Politics of Display 240
5 Bad Myth: Picturing Intergenerational Experiences of Revolution
and War 243
I. Introduction 243
II. Urban Space as Medium for Aesthetic Experiment 248
The School of Kyiv – Monuments, Museums, Soviet Architecture 248
Data and Knowledge 253
III. Nonconformist Women – an Unofficial Archive 261
Maidan: Rough Cut 261
The Drawings of Alevtyna Kakhidze 265
The Paintings of Vlada Ralko 268
IV. Decolonizing Political Creativity 274
V. Conclusion: The Interrevolutionary Generation 281
Conclusion 287
Notes 299
Bibliography 351
Index 381