Nationalist-Masochist Woman, Impotent Man, and Counter-Erotics: Pol′ovi doslidzhennia z ukraïns′koho seksu [Fieldwork in Ukrainian sex]

This chapter explores the first work in Ukrainian literature written by a woman, Oksana Zabuzhko, who positions herself as an autonomous subject of erotic desire. The author investigates the traumatogenic effects of history and oppressive politics of the body under Soviet totalitarian rule on the development of Ukrainian sexual subjectivity. She maps the violent topography of colonial eroticism, which draws on contorted power dynamics and those mechanisms by which cultural models of domination and subordination are formed and projected onto heterosexual gender roles, thus feminizing, effeminizing, and emasculating colonized men and forcing subaltern women to acquiesce to male compensatory brutality toward them. Consistently conflating eroticism and violence, which reveals itself on multiple levels, the chapter demonstrates how Zabuzhko turns representation of the explosively desiring female body into a volatile cultural site of politically radical transgression.