ABSTRACT
FEMEN was founded in 2008 as a grassroots organization pitted against the exponential growth of the sex industry in Ukraine, mainly led by university-trained young women such as Anna Hutsol, who, together with Inna and Sasha Shevchenko, has led FEMEN up to the present period. As Marian Rubchak ( 2012 , 56) notes, the foundation of FEMEN was part of a new gender activism in post-Soviet countries, such as Ukraine, in which a rhetoric and cultural legacy of the ancient “hearth mother” Berehynia (protectress) informed a post-Soviet interpretation of femininity and visualized Ukrainians as heirs to a unique and ancient matriarchal society. According to Rubchak, FEMEN was one of the groups that denunciated this legacy by advocating “Western-style oppositional gender discourses,” changing the nature
ABSTRACT In this article, we investigate how FEMEN employs female nudity to raise public attention in their mediatized strategies and how this form of naked protest is represented and interpreted in German media discourse. We will show that the signifi cant media presence of FEMEN’s naked protest actions and its self-portrayal as the new feminism of our days have become increasingly ambivalent over time. As this is of great importance with regards to public perceptions of feminism, feminist activists, and feminist agency in general, our analysis provides a detailed investigation of the processes of appreciation and devaluation of FEMEN as an expression of contemporary feminists and feminism. Employing a qualitative discourse analysis, the article highlights the interwoven processes of contextualization and decontextualization in FEMEN’s self-mediation and news coverage in Germany. It is shown that FEMEN’s protests from 2008 to 2013 materialize in “local” actions, but are increasingly constructed and interpreted on a transcultural level. In this analysis, we identify the core interpretative scheme of decontextualization that becomes apparent in three forms of detachments. As we show, these forms of detachment are a core issue in the media’s devaluation and depolitization of FEMEN and feminism in general.
