ABSTRACT

This chapter presents closing remarks on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The Ukrainian nation is often depicted as a woman, vulnerable to Russia's "male" power. Researchers Olga Onuch and Tamara Martsenyuk as well as Sarah Phillips discovered through survey, interview, and focus group data that Ukrainian women were key organizers of Maidan, and that the protests began with equal numbers of men and women on the streets. The rise and fall of communism was one of the defining events of the twentieth century. Soviet authorities devoted more attention to the social position of women than of men, heightening the visibility of gender as a system of social organization and control. The intersectional analysis of the transnational social fields of exile and exodus help us see what Putin intuits: Ukraine is being reinvented transnationally and this places Ukraine on a trajectory toward Europe.