EMBODIMENT AND GENDERED SUBJECTIVITY IN UKRAINIAN WOMEN’S FILM, POETRY, AND PROSE DURING PERESTROIKA (1985-1991)

Russell, Sandra J

Publication:
EMBODIMENT AND GENDERED SUBJECTIVITY IN UKRAINIAN WOMEN’S FILM, POETRY, AND PROSE DURING PERESTROIKA (1985-1991)

dc.contributor.advisor	Catherine Portuges
dc.contributor.advisor	Jessica Barr
dc.contributor.advisor	Julie Hemment
dc.contributor.advisor	Angela Willey
dc.contributor.author	Russell, Sandra J
dc.contributor.department	University of Massachusetts Amherst
dc.date	2024-03-27T18:25:13.000
dc.date.accessioned	2024-04-26T15:57:57Z
dc.date.available	2024-04-26T15:57:57Z
dc.date.submitted	September
dc.date.submitted	2022
dc.description.abstract	In this dissertation, I look to Ukrainian women’s literary and filmic contributions in the final Soviet years of perestroika to recontextualize and reconsider feminist and gendered epistemologies in Eastern Europe. I view the last Soviet Ukrainian filmmakers, writers, and artists as groundbreaking in their conceptualization a new, more “liberal” vision of nation, especially through their increasingly open and subversive critiques of the Soviet state. I locate perestroika as a powerful moment in Ukraine’s histories of resistance to the weaponization of colonialist and imperialist mythologies, past and present. For women in particular, the stakes of this shifting articulation of nation became part of a bolder and more visible feminist consciousness, although not necessarily named as such. I contribute critical insight to the ways in which gender operated in dialogue with the idea of Ukrainian nationhood during perestroika and glasnost, while at the same time, considering how the works under examination have contributed to contemporary discourses of gender, violence, and nation within and beyond Ukraine. By giving new attention to Ukrainian feminist engagement with queer and transnational feminisms, I challenge narrow and incomplete, and thus colonialist, narratives about gender and sexuality in Ukraine and Eastern Europe more broadly, bringing visibility to feminism’s development not as a corollary of or in relation to Western discourses, but as a product of its own cultural, political, and ideological conditions. In so doing, I situate Ukrainian feminist critiques within broader transnational feminist discourses, especially regarding women’s ties to the idea of the nation, both materially, through their bodies, and psychically, as an imagined intimacy, constituted through a sense of belonging.
dc.description.degree	Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
dc.description.department	Comparative Literature
dc.identifier.doi	https://doi.org/10.7275/31057994
dc.identifier.orcid	https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6731-7833
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14394/19079
dc.relation.url	https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3798&context=dissertations_2&unstamped=1
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
dc.source.status	published
dc.subject	Ukraine
dc.subject	Soviet Union
dc.subject	perestroika
dc.subject	women
dc.subject	gender
dc.subject	feminism
dc.subject	Comparative Literature
dc.subject	European Languages and Societies
dc.subject	Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
dc.subject	Film and Media Studies
dc.subject	Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies
dc.subject	Modern Languages
dc.subject	Modern Literature
dc.subject	Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
dc.subject	Slavic Languages and Societies
dc.subject	Visual Studies
dc.subject	Women's Studies
dc.title	EMBODIMENT AND GENDERED SUBJECTIVITY IN UKRAINIAN WOMEN’S FILM, POETRY, AND PROSE DURING PERESTROIKA (1985-1991)
dc.type	openaccess
dc.type	article
dc.type	dissertation
digcom.contributor.author	isAuthorOfPublication\|email:sandra.joy.russell@gmail.com\|institution:University of Massachusetts Amherst\|Russell, Sandra J
digcom.identifier	dissertations_2/2719
digcom.identifier.contextkey	31057994
digcom.identifier.submissionpath	dissertations_2/2719
dspace.entity.type	Publication