Learning Activities:

Session 1. Essence of women’s movement in socio-cultural and national context.

Post-feminists women’s movements theories; concepts of "personal as political" and "the claim that can never be successful”; the gap between Real and Symbolic in the context of the women's movement; strategies of new political subjectivation in Ukraine; politics of identity in the women's movement; the “performativity” of Ukrainian women's movement; constant changes of the liberal image, including how gender undermines traditional ideological bases of authority – such as the political unbelonging to traditional social-symbolic order and realizations of personal as political as example of women's movement experience.

Activities:

1st hour: Lecture/discussion about essence of a women’s movement as a phenomenon of feminist theory in the national context.

2nd hour: Small group work, answering the following questions:

• Each person in the group should consider how history and culture affects the value of women’s participation in social life.
• Each person in the group should explain the meaning of the paradox in the new Ukrainian woman’s identity as “Femina Postsovietica” model (as woman’s identity of the post-Soviet social community).
• Each person in the group should understand what kind of gap exists between the real and symbolic in Lacanian interpretation of the women’s movement in Ukraine and strategies of new political subjectivation as “active” based on Foucault’s theory.
• Each person should consider women’s movements in their national and social contexts. Based on the performativity law of interpretation of gender in terms of power (J. Butler conception), students should analyze concrete practices of the women’s movement and answer the question: What does the “performativity of gender in the former USSR” mean?

As a group, students will compare their answers to the following questions:

• Based on the readings and what we have discussed today, what processes do you think are most critical to the construction and deconstruction of sex and gender categories?
• How are the constructs of gender identity and woman’s subjectivity used in these processes?
• What does Lacanian thesis “subject more than he is” mean in relation to the women’s movement in post-Soviet Ukraine?
• Explain the value of the concept of “doing gender” in this context. Explain what is the meaning of the “logic of impossible requirement” (or requirement that never can be executed) based on S. Zizek and R. Salecl’s theories.