Toward a Ukrainian Feminist Poetics: The Last Soviet Poetry of Iryna Zhylenko, Natalka Bilotserkivets, and Oksana Zabuzhko (1985-1991)

Ukrainian feminisms, and East European feminisms more generally, have often been evaluated in relation to those of the so-called West, wherein Western feminisms are (often implicitly) viewed as progressive, and those of Eastern Europe are seen as underdeveloped and/or emerging only after independence. This article resists such neocolonial framings by arguing that the poetic contributions of Ukrainian women writers in the period of perestroika (1985-1991) holds significance for understanding a longer Ukrainian feminist genealogy. As the 1980s brought forth new political and ecological realities, especially the Chornobyl (Chernobyl) explosion in 1986, the stakes of this shifting articulation of nationhood became especially high for women, as the concerns were tied directly to women’s sexual and reproductive bodies and futures. To that end, this article positions the work of Iryna Zhylenko (1941-2013), Natalka Bilotserkivets (1954-) and Oksana Zabuzhko (1960-) during perestroika as integral to the emergence of a more visibly subversive feminist rhetoric in Ukraine. While not always ‘feminist’ in name, women’s perestroika poetics, specifically through their representations of embodiment, yielded sharper and more vulnerable articulations of their gendered subjectivities, including the performances of sexual, maternal, and national identities.