Women and Resistance: Ukraine, Belarus,

A graduate seminar which invites students to re-read contemporary history of Eastern Europe through the lens of women’s resistance. Women are no less effective history agents than men, but they usually act outside of dominant power structures, opposing and subverting them through imaginative strategies of resistance in the everyday. Focused on the Soviet Union and the contemporary states of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, this course explores female resistance channeled through visual and performance art, fiction and documentary, poetry and film. Structured in reverse chronological order, it begins with current manifestations of women’s resistance, from artistic interventions in the War in Ukraine to Pussy Riot’s punk performances and the political activism of the Belarus Free Theater. It then investigates the genealogy of these contemporary forms of resistance in underground feminist and dissident activism during the late Soviet period, a whole range of resistance articulations through the female experiences of WW2, the GULAG and Stalinist purges, and female agency in subverting gender norms since the Bolshevik sexual Revolution of the 1920s. All reading will be available in English.

Open to graduate students. Advanced undergraduates can register with instructor’s permission. No Russian, Ukrainian or Belarusian required.