‘To Serve like a Man’ — Ukraine’s Euromaidan and the Questions of Gender, Nationalism and Generational Change

Abstract

On 8 March 2013, International Women’s Day, with the motto ‘Reforms are no women’s business! Revolutions are!’ a group of young feminists was making fun of (then) Prime Minister Asarov’s explanation for why there were almost no women in his cabinet. Asarov had justified this fact with the first half of the statement. Less than a year later, both Asarov and Yanukovych had been toppled – but was the ‘Maidan revolution’ (Bartkowski, 2014, p. 11) really ‘women’s business’? Many participants – especially the younger ones – saw the Euromaidan as ‘a revolution against an old Ukraine, for a new Ukraine’ (Shekovtsov, 2013) and used abstract concepts such as democracy, freedom, universal human rights and the European Union (EU) accession process in their discussions (see Rjabtschuk, 2014, p. 40).1 According to various studies (Anderson, 2006, Gray et al., 2006), aspirations to join the EU create ‘a favorable political context for the emergence of a strong women’s movement and for increasing women’s political influence’ (Hrycak, 2007, p. 164). Thus, the above-mentioned young women should have played a major role in the pro-European protest movement. Instead, however, the troika Klitschko, Yatsenyuk and Tyahnybok and mostly dangerous looking men in camouflage and protective vests took centre stage in the media coverage. Was the revolution anything but women’s business? Was it, on the contrary, ‘made solely by men’ (Shevchenko in Moskvichova, 2014)? What role did women, and especially young women, play in the protests? What did the gender order look like during the Euromaidan? Just as nine years before, during the ‘Orange Revolution’ – where more than half of the protesters were under 30 (see Bredies, 2005) – so now again young people were taking on the main initiative, fulfilling their ascribed role as ‘formidable agent[s] of social and political change’ (Braungart, 1975, p. 255). In contrast to the peaceful and short-lived ‘Orange Revolution’, however, the three-month Euromaidan movement was soon mainly composed of 30–54-year-olds, making up between 49 per cent and 56 per cent of the total number of protesters.2 Another thing that ‘Orange Revolution’ and Euromaidan have in common is that patriotism and nationalism were on the rise since the protests started. Because of the gendered nature of nationalism this creates ‘a particularly difficult situation for women’ (Evangelista, 2011, p. 101). Regardless of whether the nationalism is more civic or more ethnic, it tends ‘to embrace tradition as a legitimating basis for nation-building and cultural renewal’ – and this (whether real or invented) tradition is ‘often patriarchal’ (Nagel, 1998, p. 254). This can lead to a maternalistic–nationalist discourse and, through it, to a ‘retraditionalization of gender ideals’ (Males in Phillips, 2014, p. 416) and a rejection of gender equality and feminism (see Shevchenko, 2014). According to polls conducted on 7 and 8 December 2013, 57.2 per cent of protesters in Kiev were male; on 20 December their number on the barricades had risen to 85–88 per cent.3 After the first violent riots women were only admitted in exceptional cases to the barricades at night and, in mid-February, as the situation was getting out of control, ‘womenandchildren’ (Enloe, 1990) were called upon to leave the fighting zone for good. Did the pro-European Euromaidan movement nevertheless manage to challenge existing gender relations and stereotypes? Did it contribute to the strengthening of a new feminist generation? Or did the new national revival, on the contrary, have an opposite and regressive influence on gender concepts in Ukraine? These questions will be touched on in this chapter.