Superfluous Women: Art, Feminism, and Revolution in Twenty-First-Century Ukraine by Jessica Zychowicz (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Superfluous Women: Art, Feminism, and Revolution in Twenty-First-Century Ukraine by Jessica Zychowicz Kathleen Mitchell-Fox Zychowicz, Jessica. Superfluous Women: Art, Feminism, and Revolution in Twenty-First-Century Ukraine. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, Buffalo, NY and London, 2020. xx + 399 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $93.00. In Superfluous Women, Jessica Zychowicz presents a detailed interpretation of the protest and countercultural activities of Ukraine's inter-revolutionary generation, the generation who came of age in the decade between the Orange Revolution (2004–05) and Euromaidan (2013–14). Zychowicz's title is an ironic reference to the lishnii chelovek of nineteenth-century Russia. In her usage, it alludes to the initial dismissive response towards the feminist and anti-establishment movements as a superfluous generation protesting for protest's sake. Thus, the aim of Superfluous Women is two-fold: firstly, to demonstrate and decode the significance of inter-revolutionary protest in Ukraine, thereby reclaiming its 'superfluous women'; secondly, to provide a nuanced perspective on Ukrainian art and protest between 2004–14. The latter balances the decentring of Western liberal assumptions that all protest is a cry for closer European ties with a renegotiation of the Soviet past's relevance to the 'decommunizing' present. From the start, Zychowicz positions herself as a peer of the inter-revolutionary generation, united with them not only by time or space, but by the problem of navigating a Soviet past they did not experience but that remains a part of their lives and symbolic economies. Zychowicz writes: 'Each of us has found ourselves at a crossroads with no signposts' (p. 3). Superfluous Women represents an innovative work which illuminates the multiple crossroads that inhabitants and scholars of the post-Communist political, aesthetic and physical landscape must confront. These intersecting pathways are illustrated [End Page 171] with apt theoretical, analytical and primary source materials, accompanied by thorough visual examples. Superfluous Women is as much about Ukraine as it is about protest. While many of the questions posed in the text's introduction are those broadly associated with the study of protest (the commodification of protest, the instantiation of a public, the intersection of feminism and nationalism, and the degree to which art and activism are connected), these questions are always couched in the local context of Ukraine, Kyiv or Maidan Nezalezhnosti. Throughout Superfluous Women, Zychowicz examines the public square (Maidan) as both a physical landscape that enables protest, and the abstract potential public to whom it gives voice. The public square represents continuity not just between the Orange Revolution and Euromaidan, but between all the groups and individuals under discussion. Who occupies Zychowicz's 'square'? The first two chapters are dedicated to the best-known and most controversial feminist group since Ukraine's independence, Femen (2008–13). Of these chapters, the first dissects Femen's topless protests as a parodic strategy critiquing the fetishization of individuality on the Eastern front. Zychowicz stresses the dangers of parody, and her second chapter exposes the realization of these anxieties, detailing Femen's aesthetic shift into a problematic portrayal of Islam. In this chapter, Zychowicz also provides crucial insight into the relationship between protest and commodification by examining the exchanges between Femen and Pussy Riot, which have, so far, largely been neglected by scholars. In her third chapter, Zychowicz turns to the largest Ukrainian feminist group since 1991, Ofenzywa (2009–14), giving a close reading of the visual strategies of the affiliated artist Yevgenia Belorusets. Zychowicz compares Belorusets's photography with that of the Soviet Avant-Garde pioneer, Aleksandr Rodchenko, examining how the shift between a Soviet belief in the capacity of space to create political subjectivity and the impetus for post-Communist subjectivities to mould old Soviet space is articulated aesthetically. The problems and possibilities posed by the Soviet past are explored further in the fourth chapter's discussion of HudRada and REP. Here, Zychowicz emphasizes that unofficial Ukrainian art is more than a third Avant-Garde, by concentrating on the fetishization of the public square as a manifestation of freedom as negative space. The final chapter concerns contemporary artists such as Vlad Ralko and Alevtyna Kakhidze, who appropriate the Soviet aesthetic legacy and symbolic...