Authors

Oleksandr Chertenko¹;  ¹ Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany

Discussion

From the very beginning of the mass protests in Belarus, various gendering procedures aimed at rethinking and rewriting the entire “Belarusian identity” under the sign of the crisis were one of their central elements. Determined by the initial unwillingness of the Belarusian special police force OMON to use excessive violence against women demonstrators and the protest practices that emerged from it, such as the “women’s marches”, but also by the “female trio of the Belarusian revolution”, consisting of the presidential candidate Sviatlana Tikhanovskaia, Maryia Kalesnikava, and Veranika Tsapkala, the cliché of the “female revolution” and an alleged “Belarusian female identity” became popular already during the protests. The academic solidification of this cliché didn’t take long, either. As early as 2021, the Belarusian philosopher and feminist activist Vol’ha Shparaha, referring to Svetlana Aleksievich’s seminal documentary book “The Unwomanly Face of War” (1983), wrote a treatise on the “womanly face” of the Belarusian “revolution”. First published in German, it was thus clearly aimed primarily at a the Western audience.
This trend toward feminization, which stands in marked contrast both to Aleksievich’s book and to the general tendency of violent crises and wars to produce Manichean and nationalist masculine rather than “peaceful” feminine identities, is definitely in need of explanation. In order to understand this paradox, I will first briefly analyze Shparaga’s (but also more recent Shchyttsova’s) account(s) on the Belarusian “revolution” and its specifically gendered practices—and compare them with literary responses to mass protests (i.a., by Krystsina Banduryna, Hanna Komar, Iulia Tsimafeieva, Hanna Seviarynets, and Alhierd Bakharevich), which offer a far more differentiated picture of gendered “identities in crisis”. In a second step; I will confront the Belarusian “revolutionary” feminization strategy with the somewhat similar strategy of gender hybridization that was typical of the early stages of the Ukrainian war in the Donbas, culminating in the specific “feminine masculinity” of the Ukrainian female pilot Nadiia Savchenko. Basing on this, I will project the subsequent “masculinization” of the crisis narrative back onto the Belarusian gender discourse around 2020. Finally, I will briefly analyze the external—Polish—perspective on the Ukrainian war after 2014, which, as the volumes of interviews with Ukrainian cultural figures indicate, includes at least some elements of postcolonial gaze, and then use this analysis as a prism to look upon the role that the “export orientation” of Belarusian intellectuals’ descriptions of the revolution may have played in establishing “Belarusian femininity” as the central gender framework of mass protest.