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Oleksandra Tarkhanova
Title
Dr.
Last Name
Tarkhanova
First name
Oleksandra
Email
oleksandra.tarkhanova@unisg.ch
ORCID
Phone
+41 71 224 2521
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Publication"Essentializing motherhood: The Ukrainian woman in policy debates"( 2018-10-25)In the last two and a half decades, the expectations of motherhood and the understanding of women’s reproductive choices in Ukrainian state policy discourses have been changing. Nevertheless, the regime of »compulsory motherhood« has remained dominant, stating that reproduction is what makes a woman. In this paper, I explore how the norm of traditional »natural« motherhood is constructed in labor and welfare policy so that it holds through the policy changes influenced by the ideologies of state paternalism, neoliberalism, and conservatism. In the policy discussions from 1990 to 2015, women’s bodies are constructed as vulnerable, particularly in terms of their fertility, as a result of poverty, excessive working responsibilities, or societal moral »decay.« The goal of this paper is to grasp the regime of »compulsory motherhood« and to understand how the subject of voluntarily childless woman becomes unthinkable in these conditions due to the construction of mothering as a biological function of the female body.Type: journal articleJournal: InterDisciplinesVolume: 9Issue: 1
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PublicationCompulsory Motherhood, Paternalistic State? Ukrainian Gender Politics and the Subject of WomanThis book examines Ukrainian state gender politics and considers how the relations between the state and woman-citizen are changing: from socialist paternalism to nationalist affective bond and neoliberal sacrificial citizenship, which conceals women within families but also deeply relies on their unpaid work. Set against the backdrop of the post-Soviet transformations, nation-building, neoliberalization, and post-Maidan political transformations, policy and discursive changes reflect and reproduce the gender norms that not only derive from these ideological processes but also actively legitimize and enable them. The book brings the Ukrainian case into the European debate on conservative neoliberal transformations and anti-gender political sentiment, and by doing that, advances the feminist theorization on neoliberalism.