ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with Valeri Shevchuk’s neo-Baroque transhistorical eroticism, which challenges the confines of the inherited Soviet canon and concept of history by engaging with a period that was virtually erased by totalitarian censorship. While employing the transmutable and unstable Baroque body, Shevchuk turns it into a contemporary instrument of cultural revision and renewal, and a site of political and cultural construction and contested meaning. Since the sexuality of his demonically pornographized women, who instill phallic panic in men, borders on anomalousness, this chapter examines his work through the lens of the monstrous-feminine, with attention to traditional Christian misogynistic doctrines of dangerously powerful female carnality, to demonstrate how the writer’s evocation of Baroque legacies introduces both a different view of the history of cultural expression in Ukraine and this once-stigmatized subject matter.
