Can War Be Feminist?

 When, after February 24, 2022, the first news began to arrive from Ukraine about the Russian invasion and the disasters for the Ukrainian population under the attacks of the Russian army, the international feminist community immediately focused on the need to prioritize support for Ukrainian women as the most vulnerable social group in the situation of war. Feminists from different parts of the world, declaring their transnational solidarity with Ukrainian feminists (which can be called truly affective solidarity, using the concept by Clare Hemmings[i]), emphasized that Russia’s war against Ukraine is a war of a country with a “gender-repressive politics” against a country with a “gender-progressive politics” and, therefore, it is an anti-gender war against Ukrainian feminism, which is vulnerable and threatened in the situation of war.[ii]

But, unexpectedly, these words of solidarity and support of transnational feminists addressed to Ukrainian women were met not only with misunderstanding, but even with objection from Ukrainian feminists. Some Ukrainian feminists read in the emphasis on the vulnerability of Ukrainian women and Ukrainian feminism in a situation of war a manifestation of the discourse of victimisation and a desire to inscribe Ukrainian women in the figure of a female victim, to impose a suffering identification on them  presenting Ukrainian women as unfortunate and helpless refugees with children incapable of an act of resistance to the aggressor, i.e. the strategy of a discriminatory Western view (“Westplaining”) and even the Orientalization of Ukrainian women.[iii]

Thus, the leading Ukrainian women writer Oksana Zabuzhko recalls that when, at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, she, as a Ukrainian writer, was especially popular with journalists at the 2022 Frankfurt Book Fair and gave many interviews, German feminist journalists constantly asked her the same question: “Is everything over with feminism in Ukraine now?”  Zabuzhko showed journalists a photo of young and beautiful Ukrainian female soldiers confidently marching, returning from Russian captivity after an exchange of war prisoners with Russian army: “there is not a victim, not a fugitive with children, but a warrior maiden of whom the Motherland can be proud – a beautiful proud march”.[iv] According to the Ukrainian writer, with this performative gesture of demonstration of a picture of marching Ukrainian female soldiers, she convincingly proved to Western feminists that Ukrainian feminism not only does not fade away, but, according to her, “looks very bright in Ukraine during the war and it is very worth selling Ukraine to the West under this issue. … And real working feminism is what women in the Ukrainian army are doing and the attention of the whole world should be drawn to this”.[v]

Today, many Ukrainian feminist researchers agree with Zabuzhko’s thesis that Ukrainian feminism is confidently developing and “progressing” during the war. In response to questions from the Feministische Studien journal, they claim that the Russian-Ukrainian war has become not only a reason for grief and despair for Ukrainian women, but, on the contrary, has opened up new opportunities for the development of gender equality and empowerment of women in Ukraine, as well as new career opportunities both in Ukraine and abroad.[vi]

First of all, as the Ukrainian feminist researchers, in particular Tamara Martsenyuk and Maryna Shevtsova argued, as a result of the war in Ukraine, there have been significant positive changes in the field of legislation, which has become more gender and LGBTQ+ sensitive[vii] and, as a result, according to sociological surveys, support for LGBTQ+ people has doubled.[viii]

Secondly, the war, according to the sociologist Olena Strelnyk, contributed to the growth of career opportunities for women, providing women with more independence and possibilities for self-realisation, unlike Ukrainian men, for whom “war has created certain challenges to hegemonic masculinity”[ix] due to a ban on leaving the country, forced mobilisation and the mass death toll on the front.

Thirdly, and most importantly is that during the war, as Martsenyuk claims, Ukrainians developed a progressive, anti-authoritarian European-oriented national identity (“Values of dignity and equality  connected with the European vector of the so-called “civilizational choice” (between Europe and “Russkiy mir” (“Russian World” )), that includes, the recognition of gender equality and tolerance of LGBTQ+ identity, and that is why, according to her, the Ukrainian “people with strong national identification that are supporting ideas of gender equality and rights for LGBT people”.[x] According to Martsenyuk, such a paradoxical combination of nationalism and gender tolerance “In Western sociological theories on gender, nationalism and war, these issues are difficult to reconcile”.[xi] Therefore, from her point of view, the war in Ukraine, and especially women’s participation in the war, must convince Western feminists that it is absolutely necessary “to rethink Western concepts of the relation between gender and nation-building, or gender and war”.[xii] The Ukrainian feminist researcher and activist Tamara Zlobina agrees with Martsenyuk on this, arguing that the “Ukrainian reality shows that that we need to be critical to the Western ideas, that war always leads to conservatism and traditionalization. In Ukraine, the opposite happened.”[xiii]

However, Ukrainian anti-nationalist feminists, trans-feminists and non-nationalist leftists do not agree with these optimistic theses of Ukrainian mainstream feminists.  They strongly criticise Ukrainian nationalist feminists and nationalist civil society for supporting the anti-democratic and discriminatory, in their view, politics of the Ukrainian government in a situation of war and claim that in fact there is actually no real progress in gender equality in Ukraine in recent years. On the contrary, as the Ukrainian writer and publicist bigender Vadym Yakovlev claims, Ukrainian elites after the Euromaidan, “came to the idea of creating a monoethnic national state”, in which democratic mechanisms are suspended and the rights of minorities, including sexual minorities, are infringed upon and violated.[xiv]

As for the new career opportunities that allegedly open up for Ukrainian women with the beginning of the war, these opportunities, according to Ukrainian anti-nationalist feminists and leftists, are not actually opening up for the majority of Ukrainian women, but only for representatives of the Ukrainian elites and the so-called civil society, who are direct beneficiaries of this war, in which neither of them really participates nor their men, who are exempt from military conscription and limit their participation in the war to fundraising and organising charity cultural events in support of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

According to the Ukrainian anti-nationalist left, the war in Ukraine has revealed that behind the ethnic division of Ukraine into the Ukrainian-speaking west and the Russian-speaking east, there is, according to the Ukrainian sociologist Volodymir Ishchenko, a more fundamental division – class divisions and class contradictions that divide both Ukrainian women and their war-related activism.[xv] Thus, a smaller part of Ukrainian society, associated with the Ukrainian authorities and the so-called civil society, practice activism, which, in the words of the Ukrainian historian Marta Havryshko, “promote Ukrainian nationalism, support merciless ‘decommunisation’ and ‘decolonisation,’”.[xvi] The other part (representing the majority of the population of both the East and West of the country) is forced to engage in a different kind of activism and solidarity in order to prevent the forced mobilisation of their men – fathers, husbands, sons, who do not have the privilege of exemption from military service, unlike the men of the Ukrainian middle class – government officials, policemen, professors, actors, musicians, athletes, etc. As  Yakovlev argues, “such a movement will most likely not find strong support in the West, which, like Russia, is participating in destruction of Ukraine and its population”, in addition, “Ukrainian women are also betrayed by Ukrainian feminist movement, which has become a collaborator of Ukrainian militarism, nationalism and authoritarianism”.[xvii]

What do these polemical statements by Ukrainian feminists and their directly opposite assessments of the situation with gender equality and feminism in Ukraine in the context of Russian-Ukrainian war indicate?

First, these contradictory statements reveal that contemporary Ukrainian feminism is not homogeneous, that there are disagreements and internal contradictions in it, and there is not only unanimous nationalism and rejection of the leftist agenda. Second, they testify that today, in a situation of the global right counter-offensive and the wars of extermination (in the words of Étienne Balibar),[xviii] the front of the right forces is expanding, the right are building wider chains of equivalences (in the terms of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe), which include and mobilise a variety of politics, including “progressive” ones, together with feminist politics. The right-wing exclusive solidarity directed against the left and minorities is now crossing borders, becoming transnational, which previously used to be characteristic mainly of inclusive solidarity of the left.

In this context, in the condition of the global rise of the right, the main question of left-wing theorists today is this: why are the left losing more and more to the right? Why is the right-wing solidarity growing stronger and the left-wing solidarity weakening? What ensures the global success of the right’s counter-offensive, up to and including the rehabilitation and legalisation of neo-fascism and neo-Nazism in the world? And what can the left and feminists do today to counter this growing onslaught of the reactionary forces?

Back in the mid-1980s, Ernesto Laclau and Shantal Mouffe, reflecting in their legendary book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics on the possibility of effective political strategies for the left in the context of the decline of Soviet-style socialism, warned that hegemony in contemporary politics could only be ensured by populism, which relied on the maximisation of affects and post-Marxist anti-essentialist identity politics necessary to achieve mass political mobilization. Today, their thesis about the populist nature of contemporary politics and the decisive importance of the affective dimension in politics is receiving more and more evidence.

William Connolly wrote during the years of Trump’s first presidency that since the contemporary political field of America is determined by populism, the most politically successful in this field is Trumpism, which is characterized by the skilful use of 1) mass affects and 2) the exciting rhetorical tools of authoritarian leaders. On the other hand, left-wing intellectuals, who tend to underestimate the role of rhetoric in politics and are accustomed to resisting rhetoric organised around authoritarian leadership, are doomed to lose to Trumpism, which Connolly calls aspirational fascism because of its ability to inspire and excite the masses.[xix] Therefore, it is important, according to Connolly, for the left, to include some populist elements in pluralistic, egalitarian democracy and, in particular, to include in democracy certain modes of affective communication, agitation and activism.[xx]

Today, these theses of Connolly are repeated by Wendy Brown, who calls on the left in their political competition with the right to 1) boldly use the affective dimension in politics and 2) not to be afraid to use the techniques of charismatic leadership. The left and feminists are losing to the right, according to Brown, because they are afraid of using affects, passions and charisma in politics. Instead of trying to avoid it as a threat of despotism, and the legitimisation of uncontrolled power, in the eyes of many leftists and feminists, “[o]ur task, as Brown puts it, is to use charisma with its ability to initiate, excite, inspire and mobilize”.[xxi]

But what affects can the left and feminists bet on today so that these affects can compete with the mobilised by right-wing affects of hatred of the other and fear of the other?

Wendy Brown suggests that the left, unlike the right, should try to mobilize not destructive, but positive, caring affects and desires for democratic political purposes, such as: a) the desire to live in comfort in order to build an order that supports rather than destroys lives (human and non-human); (b) caring for innocent lives to protect vulnerable lives of all kinds; c) the desire for respect and belonging to resist the forces of subordination, humiliation and rejection; d) educational desire, including the desire to teach democracy, etc., which, in her opinion, can help counter the agitating mass mobilisation by irresponsible demagogues with the help of gigantic state and economic machinery and often calls for war.[xxii]

Nonetheless, is the intensity of these positive humanitarian affects sufficient to counter the brutal affects of the intense racist, nationalist, and sexist hatred used for purposes by the mass political mobilisation of the right, or aspirational fascists, as Connolly calls them? Judith Butler, following Freud, believes that the sufficient force of an affect capable of resisting the affects of hatred and the desire to kill and to die in times of wars can be… mania, understood as a protest of a living organism against its destruction or self-destruction.[xxiii] Mania, which manifests itself in the maniacal desire to live, is, in Freud’s opinion, a cipher that opens up a new possibility: after all, mania asserts the desire to exist and endure, which has no real basis within the framework of a particular political regime.

Of course, Butler says, mania can never become so-called realpolitik. Yet, without becoming a dangerous form of destruction, it brings the stimulating elements of the imaginary into the forms of solidarity that seek to dismantle violent regimes, insisting against all odds on the “other reality.” Therefore, if modern feminism finds forms of educating people in a certain (“manic”) way, then they can develop, according to Butler, a maniacal aversion to violence and war as ways of destroying organic life.

Mania in Butler’s interpretation is a kind of “anti-fascist passion” that they oppose to “fascist passions” that mobilise the forces of racist, nationalist, and sexist hatred in order to expel or even eliminate the groups that are imagined to threaten the existence and privileges of their race, nation, class, or gender.[xxiv] The fascist passions, according to Butler, can take many forms, and certainly one of their forms is the desire to strip people of their rights – their rights of citizenship, rights of belonging to a particular country, rights of self-determination.[xxv] And they also include one perverse passion – the passion for anti-intellectualism which is enjoyed by the right and neo-fascists obsessed with a hatred of intellectualism and critical theory, which is today being extensively spreads and institutionalized at the level of neoliberal governments and academia.[xxvi] Therefore, driven by anti-fascist passions, the left and feminists must, in opposition to the right, remember and renew their claim for political intellectualism, which has always given precedence to the left and feminists and which is especially relevant to them today, when the right, celebrating the second coming of Trump, not only ceases to be ashamed of demonstration of stupidity, but even finds stupidity desirable.

Today, when, as Butler writes, Trump delivers a series of devastating and appalling executive orders and public pronouncements every day, the affect that overwhelms us and grips us again and again is anger and outrage, a just and justified condemnation of shameless sadism of those who celebrate his return. [xxvii] But what happens if our morality and our politics are not limited only to acts of condemnation? – Butler asks.[xxviii] After all, by limiting ourselves to condemnation, we limit our politics, firstly, by the impossibility of understanding how the violence against which we protest is organised and how it operates. Secondly, a politics limited to condemnation does not reach the point of reflecting on the question of what form of social life can redeem us from state of war and violence. And finally, being reduced to anger and condemnation, our ethical position becomes limited, based only on the feeling of our own rightness, as well as the position of our opponents. But let us not forget Michel Foucault’s words that a truly non-fascist ethics, of which he considered Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus to be a pattern, is not limited to the critique of great historical fascism, fascism in the other, but is always also focused at critique of  internal fascism “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” [xxix] And such a critique of fascism requires much greater intellectual effort from us.

Hence, what lessons can the Ukrainian left and feminists learn from the critical analysis of the right-wing populism and the fascist passions by contemporary feminist and left-wing theorists? First of all, probably the one that, despite the offensive and current victories of the right, the left and feminists continue their struggle for a more inclusive and just society and do not stop looking for new opportunities for their recovery and empowerment. And, secondly, that in order to effectively confront the right and nationalists in Ukraine, the left and feminists need not to limit themselves to the condemnation and indignation of the right, but also to strengthen the intellectual component of their theory and practice.

In other words, it is important for Ukrainian left and feminists not to limit themselves intellectually to empirical research and knowledge, but to boldly include critical theory, including philosophy and psychoanalysis in their theoretical apparatus (let’s note that Chantal Mouffe considered the rejection of psychoanalysis a big mistake of many leftists).[xxx] Under these conditions, they might be able to discover new ways to counter the right-wing nationalist ideologies that can only simulate intellectualism – under the guise of philosophy, literature, gender studies, etc., which, in fact, are reduced by the right to nationalist ideology. Otherwise, Ukrainian left and feminists will face despair and impotence, or a path to the abyss, as predicted for Ukraine by those Ukrainian leftists who, like classical Marxists, believe only in objective economic interests and underestimate the potential for democratic political imagination and the strength of the left and feminist political passion.

Notes:

[i] Clare Hemmings. “Affective Solidarity: Feminist Reflexivity and Political Transformation”. In Feminist Theory. Vol.13(2), (2012), 147–61.

[ii] Petr Kratochvíl and Míla O’Sullivan, “A war like no other: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a war on gender order”. In European Security. Vol. 32(3), 2023, 350.

[iii] Janet E. Johnson, “How Russia’s war in Ukraine can change gender studies”, in

Front. Sociol. 2023, 8.

[iv] Oksana Zabuzhko. “On feminism, Russian studies, relations with Poland, and imperialism (in Ukrainian”, in Ukraїner Q. YouTube channel. 2024, February 17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S–4oklQiQE

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Feministische Studien (Feminist Studies). Vol. 42 (1), 2024, 20 – 37. https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/fs/42/1/html

https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/fs/42/1/html

[xiii] Tamara Martsenyuk. “Interview with Tamara Zlobina about the popularization of feminism and gender disintegration” (in Ukrainian). In Gender in Details. 2024, June 3. https://genderindetail.org.ua/spetsialni-rubriki/bezstrashni/tamara-zlobina-pro-hendernyi-rozpad.html?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1OZ_tUHgqh5p3x6jD-yTq0VnhtDSwQ8vR-qxKCFDpr716qFevfNz1OcCc_aem_AdqIpF_HOUu_fWfjKX6Mp8h2fdwy9NUhFRegGzV2J5lvAKzs59J7BuKt6U9dUxtZL3QTAieccCveaCBSuqm9C6hk

[xiv] Vadym Yakovlev. “Posthistorical Archaic, Ukrainian Homonationalism, and the End of the Post-Soviet Era” (in Ukrainian). In Sygma. February 3, 2024. https://syg.ma/@fursof1/postistorichna-arhayika-ukrayinskiy-gomonacionalizm-ta-kinec-postradyanskoyi-epohi?fbclid=IwY2xjawEVfPhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHWi3WIpb55Vqh1EiFCNAHPWq83yGNsHS42eHICNYKuq3bxNUF1peVcqAaw_aem_3ka6AEKts10sgoUkQkG71Q

[xv] Volodymir Ishchenko. Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War. (London, New York: Verso, 2024), 100 – 105.

[xvi] Marta Havryshko. Post in Facebook. 2024, October 27. https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=122193127394219118&id=61556573562972

[xvii] Vadym Yakovlev. Post in Facebook. 2024, December 22. https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2499823460470691&id=100013291847024

https://aurdip.org/en/bisan-lecture-series-etienne-balibar-palestine-ukraine-and-other-wars-of-extermination-the-local-and-the-global/

[xxii] Ibid.

[xxiii] Judith Butler. The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political (London, New York Verso), 2020, 155.

[xxiv] Judith Butler & Ferenc Laczó. “Judith Butler on the Anti-Gender Ideology Movement, Current Theories of Gender, and Their Ideas of Radical Democracy”. In The Review of Democracy. May 13, 2024.  https://revdem.ceu.edu/2024/05/13/judith-butler/

[xxv] Ibid.

[xxvi] Éric Fassin. State Anti-Intellectualism and the Politics of Gender and Race: Illiberal France and Beyond  (Central European University Press, 2024), 1-22.

[xxvii] Judith Butler. “Trump is unleashing sadism upon the world. But we cannot get overwhelmed”. In The Guardian. February 6, 2025.

[xxviii] Judith Butler. “The Compass of Mourning”. In London Review of Books. Vol. 45. No.20. 19.10.2023 https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n20/judith-butler/the-compass-of-mourning?fbclid=IwAR24vUAr2Up8JPPKNReZTI-ZBi1_KMt54A1DqX0afungehu5upr7ssLuh64

[xxix] Michel Foucault. “Preface” to Anti-Oedipus. In  Gilles Deleuze  and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated from the French by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), xiil.

[xxx] Chantal Mouffe. For a Left Populism (London, New York: Verso, 2018), 72.