Superfluous Women: Gender, Art, and Activism After Ukraine's Orange Revolution.

Abstract

Analyzing firsthand interviews, visual art, literature, manifestos, official speeches and other materials, I demonstrate how several contemporary collectives in Kyiv reject past Soviet and Western connotations with feminism in the local context by exercising the democratic principles of freedom of speech and assembly to advance a number of human rights issues. I draw points of connection across art-activists’ experiments in their appropriations of 19-20th century canonical Slavic and Soviet literature, painting, and photography. While these groups agitate for diverse causes, most tied to gender and sexuality, my project’s central concern is the question of how protest becomes meaningful. The aesthetic exchanges between activists and their audiences rhetorically frame the body as a figure for public speech. Thus, the works in this study comprise protest “texts” that reveal how aesthetics evolve through social interaction, and how images come to acquire collective historical meaning.

Each chapter illustrates how artists employ creative media (visual, performance, literary, digital) to expose gendered paradoxes by putting on display the enduring cultural mythologies that shape public discourse, wherever those discourses come to bear upon the body in imaginings of the nation and notions of progress. The results comprise a genealogy of local women’s experiences that challenges more conventional historiographies of the Soviet era. Combining approaches from literary and art criticism, history, and anthropology, I investigate the migration of gender between cultures, tracing how artists mediate rhetorical frames. Chapter One supplies a local history of public dissent and examines parody in performances by the group Femen. Chapter Two traces the role of medium and message in the global media production of protest by analyzing the body in digital environments. Chapter Three explores the work of one photographer from the group Ofenzywa as a critical representation of everyday life among tenement residents and LGBT couples in Kyiv. The final chapter focuses on the collectives R.E.P. and HudRada in the context of the state and its changing relationship to public art. This study thus offers a transnational critique of how aesthetics and politics come to be inscribed in civic vocabularies on gender that translate unevenly and shift over time.