Two Bad Words: FEMEN & Feminism in Independent Ukraine

Abstract

Context"Now when people in America think of Ukraine they will add Femen to their list of vodka, snow, and the Orange Revolution," my friend Lilya sighed in disappointment, "I'm embarrassed of them."The Ukrainian women's protest group Femen has been described in reports throughout western media over the past three years, including NPR, BBC, and The New York Times, as a new democratic initiative resonant with the Orange Revolution.Femen's formula is at once simple and spectacular: scantily clad topless women stage highly theatrical demonstrations to draw attention to various facets of gender inequality in Ukraine.For example, in early 2008 they protested sexism in universities by re-enacting x-rated scenes of inequality in the classroom.Media reports have seized upon these street protests as the advent of a new kind of feminism.However, this may be an overestimation of the situation and a gross mishandling of the complexity of gender issues and their development over the course of Ukraine's independence.While the group's leader, Anna Hutsol, has publicly stated that Femen's main motive is to spotlight the negative impact that sex tourism and prostitution have on Ukraine, this message often seems to get overshadowed by photos highlighting the "showier" elements of the group's nude protest tactics.As distracting as such media reports may come across, Hutsol claims that Femen's topless protests are absolutely necessary as the quickest way to draw attention to the exploitation of Ukrainian women.Towards these ends, the group maintains a broad campaign across Russian, Ukrainian, and English language social media sites.Given the urgency and breadth of their campaign, it hardly comes as a surprise that Hutsol hopes to form Femen into a parliamentary party by 2013-Europe's "first all-women party."Tracking Femen in the media and on their own sites since their formation in 2008, I have observed the creative methods with which the group satirizes symbols tied to post-soviet and post-orange discourse in unexpected ways.I believe that to categorize Femen as a simple ricochet of the Orange Revolution would be to severely limit their story.In thinking best how to research the group, I decided I needed to consult with them and other feminists in Ukraine in order to better understand the landscape of their movement in light of broader gendered discourses.Through my efforts, I hope to offer a new probing of recurrent issues for feminisms of many stripes, centering my inquiry on questions concerning equality and difference.The following are my initial postfieldwork notes toward a deepening transnational feminist discussion.During summer 2011 I was able to devote six weeks to full-time research in Ukraine in the cities of Lviv, Kyiv, and Kharkiv thanks to support from the Ann Arbor Center for the Education of Women, the U-M Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies and the Department for Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan.I split my time between four weeks in Kyiv and two weeks in Kharkiv interviewing leaders in the academic, NGO, and social sectors on how they view feminist work in contemporary Ukraine; Femen's impact on this work (if any); and in which directions future possibilities for women's activism might go.I conducted a total of 14 face-to-face interviews with 12 individuals.Many of our discussions ended up being informal conversations in which my informants shared information about themselves as both activists and scholars.A few of our conversations also took place in small group settings due to the fact many of the women I spoke with knew each other as colleagues and, in some cases, as members of the same activist groups and/or NGOs.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 37 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.