“According to Michael Freeden’s morphological analysis of ideologies, the peculiarity of nationalism is that its narrow semantic and political agenda (as compared with ideologies involving a broader agenda, such as liberalism, conservatism, and socialism) renders it incapable of maintaining itself as a long-term project independently of other ideologies”
“But if, as Freeden argues, the ideology of nationalism is “incapable of providing its own solution to questions of social justice, distribution of resources, and conflict-management which mainstream ideologies address,”5 what enabled it to act as a powerful resource for popular political mobilization in the two Maidan revolutions?”
“The Bolshevik government also sought to employ Ukrainian nationalist ideology as a resource for an alternative, anti-bourgeois political mobilization and the establishment of Soviet power in Ukraine, pursuing for this end the so-called “Ukrainization” or “korenization” [“nativization”] policy of the 1920s and 1930s”
“The Twelfth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in April 1923 launched the total Ukrainization of public administration and local public organizations, the army, etc., while simultaneously granting Ukrainian the status of the official language in Ukrainian territory”
“The fundamental differences between the two strategies of Ukrainization were manifested, in particular, in gender policy”
“While bourgeois Ukrainization was informed by a patriarchal ideology and the patriarchal construction of female subjectivity typical of traditional nationalism, Bolshevik Ukrainization focused on women’s liberation, giving rise to a specific mixture of nationalist and feminist discourses”
“The basis of the Bolshevik gender policy in Ukraine was women’s political subjectivation—namely, the strategy of so-called activation and transformation, that is, the involvement of women as a new, transformed workforce at the front, in the factories, and in the countryside”
“The biggest hindrances to progress on this front were bourgeois family legislation and religious-based moral restrictions”
“So, when solving the so-called women’s question, the Bolsheviks from the very beginning focused on combating religion and abolishing bourgeois family laws. In the Ukrainian SSR, the marriage and divorce procedures were drastically simplified, and legal differences between legitimate and illegitimate children were abolished”
“In addition, emancipated Ukrainian women sought as quickly as possible to replace church weddings with civil ceremonies. Consequently, although a majority of the population of the former Russian Empire was not ready for it, a sexual revolution kicked off in the Ukrainian SSR”
“in the new Soviet Ukrainian literature devoted to revolutionary love, novel bodily sensations and objects that have not previously had erotic connotations are associated with sexual feeling. The poeticization and eroticization of tractors and tractor manufacturing, which was of particular importance for the development of agrarian Ukraine, attains the greatest poetic expressiveness in “Songs of the Female Tractor Driver,” by the Soviet Ukrainian poet Pavlo Tychyna”
“When the women of western Ukraine, which was part of bourgeois Poland, who had built their identity in keeping with the traditional notions of the feminine, first saw the nomadic inflows of Soviet Ukrainian women arriving from the east after the west’s occupation by Soviet troops in 1939, they experienced an identity shock. They were faced by a radically transformed feminine”
“Activists from the Union of Ukrainian Women who had to go to a Soviet women’s rally recalled feeling incredibly shocked by the “proletarian look” of the Soviet Ukrainian women. They were “terribly frightened,” unwilling to face the prospect of undergoing a similar transformation, which violated the rationale of their bourgeois identities”
“since nationalism defines feminine particularity exclusively through the concept of nation or, per Nira Yuval-Davis, as a “naturalized symbol of the nation,” then western Ukrainian women, as the modern Ukrainian writer Mariia Matios argues in the short story collection Nation, each “in her own way tries to save, to win back, her kind, her nation, her land, and herself from outsiders.””
“all the stories of women in Matios’s book, without exception, indirectly confirm the old structural paradox that the tragic consequence of the notion that “the nation is bigger than ourselves” is tantamount to a broken life for women”
“Cyborg feminist theory conceives the feminine subject, by analogy with the cyborg, as a semi-organic, semi-cybernetic hybrid. It functions as a “new kind of integrity,” as a “mobile alliance” that realizes the “capacity to construct one’s own freedom, love, and desires, to reinvent them, to cyberize them.” Cyborg feminists have called for a new, “irresponsible” feminism, arguing that the category of female is accidental and that there is a multiplicity of women’s experiences. The goal of this new feminism is not to become a subject, but to become a monster, a virus, an animal, a slime mold, an avatar. As Donna Haraway has written, “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.””