Ukrainian Erotomaniac Fictions: First Postindependence Wave

First Postindependence Wave

Maryna Romanets

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351022163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Ukrainian Erotomaniac Fictions explores the aggressive sexualization of the Ukrainian cultural mainstream after the collapse of the USSR as a counter-reaction to the Soviet state's totalitarian, repressive politics of the body. While the book's introduction includes concise sections on such pornified cultural forms as advertising, mass media, visual art, and film, its major focus is on textual production that has contributed significantly to the literary explosion in Ukraine, which began in the 1990s. Drawing on cultural, postcolonial, feminist, and gender theories, the book examines transgressive potentials of the erotic under postcolonial, postcommunist, and post-totalitarian conditions. It offers insight into the convoluted dialectics between the imported conventions of Western "porno-chic" and the received oppressive Soviet gender and sexual ideologies. Within a broad historical and cultural framework, the study considers writers' engagements in dialogues with their own tradition and colonial legacy, as well as with a variety of transcultural flows. By bringing together diverse erotomaniac fictions, Maryna Romanets charts the ways in which they are embedded in the processes of Ukraine's cultural decolonization.

1 Introduction to Erotomaniac Fictions

“We shall abolish the orgasm,”¹ the political imperative that proclaims a bleak dystopian future in 1984, materialized into the obscene reality of the Soviet regime, and became invested with a tremendous, concentrated state power. If in Orwell’s nightmarish, totalitarian world, it is neurologists who are tasked with obliterating excessive orgasmic “dysfunction,” the refurbished Russo-Soviet Empire, from the early 1930s onward, successfully exterminated unregulated, hedonistic, and “bourgeois” individualistic orgasm through unfailing instruments of “social engineering” such as forced labor camps, artificially engineered famines, political repressions, unrelenting surveillance of the population by the secret services, and crowded communal living, to name just a few. Integral to the state’s invincible control over its subjects, dictatorial body politics and repressive sexophobia “systematically and ruthlessly eradicated everything related to sexuality, whether it was sex research, sex education, erotic art, or erotic literature.”² It is noteworthy that, in keeping with restrictive state regulations and official discourses, Soviet reference literature published from the 1960s through the 1980s contains no articles on sex. A 1983 biological encyclopedic dictionary stands alone as an exception since it includes entries on “sexual reproduction,” “sexual maturity,” “sex dimorphism,” “sexual cycle,” “sex hormones,” “sex organs,” “sexual reflexes,” and “sex chromosomes.” There, humans are treated in strictly biological terms as any “other animals,”³ essential for the reproduction and functioning of the system. Deployed by means of militant moralism and prudery promoted by the state for its own political purposes, the strategically delimited domains of Soviet-style bodily “pleasure” were scrupulously policed by Communist Party committees as the sole custodians and caretakers of a “communism builder’s moral code.” This decades-long, methodical repression unwittingly reached its enunciatory climax during one of the first USSR–USA TV-bridges that took place amidst Gorbachev’s perestroika in the 1980s, when it was declared famously, “There is no sex in the USSR.” This declaration, encapsulating a unique communist Geist, thus epitomized the radical exclusion of the sexual from the firmly established identity of the quintessential Homo sovieticus.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine became an arena of intense discursive and conceptual activity aimed at liberation from different forms of oppression, the systematized social repression of the body being one of them. The proliferation of discourses on sexuality and the upsurge and incorporation of sexually explicit imagery and iconography into wide-ranging popular cultural forms were concomitant with the rise of a new social identity that was being shaped in accordance with the changing social structure. The employment of symbols, codes, and signifiers, largely appropriated from Western culture, in the newly emerging, multifarious representational field was instrumental in counteracting and subverting the prescribed prudery of sanitized Soviet society and the ideological “kenosis” that was persistently promoted by socialist realist cultural politics. Both profoundly eroded, in the sphere of representations constituting social identity, any comfortable sense of the body. Manipulated, split, desexualized, and contorted, the body of Soviet citizenry was constituted through historically distinct technologies of power, since, according to Michel Foucault, the body is “directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immense hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs.”⁴ Furthermore, when theorized in postcolonial terms, the body as a site of struggle and discursive contest is always “simultaneously (if conflictually) inscribed in both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of discourse, domination and power.”⁵

With the body eliminated from the picture for the benefit of the “soul” for a lengthy period of time—taboo in the official socialist realist canon, it was also excluded from Ukrainian dissident cultural production, which was preoccupied above all with political issues—Ukrainians seemed to subscribe to the definition of a “spiritual” nation. As such, Ukrainian society was deeply disoriented by the overwhelming plethora of Western sexualized signs and images that had invaded its cultural space after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989. Being one of the constitutive dilemmas of contemporary culture in general, the confusion that was brought to Ukraine together with freedom coincided with the conflicting attitudes and fierce debates about sexuality, censorship, and pornography that rocked Western cultural life, pushing pornography, as the issue of feminism, to the “ruling place in the sexuality debate.”⁶ The Western feminist pornography debate, also dubbed the “sex wars,” split its actors into anti-pornography and pro-pornography factions that viewed pornography, respectively, as an instrument of patriarchal oppression that causes violence against women and harms them, or as an important form of sexual expression that has liberatory potential for women’s sexual agency.⁷ However, in the case of postcolonial and largely sexophobic Ukrainian society of the late 1980s–1990s, the binary logic of conservative and liberal attitudes toward “scandalous” subject matter was complicated by the fact that the systems of codification of Western postmodern culture were often misread and misinterpreted in the process of their decoding by Ukrainian traditionally conservative, patriarchal, misogynistic, and almost premodern minds, affected by the cultural shock of the post-Soviet era. Ukrainians seemed to be equally dazzled by porno-spectacle, which offered a radical discourse of permissiveness, and repelled by it because it was conceived as alien to the Ukrainian national ethos and mentality by adherents of conservative, traditionalist views on morality, including a certain number of intellectuals. Among the ongoing postindependence debates about Ukraine’s future, the body did matter, and this issue became inscribed in the then current political discourse. Thus, Mykola Tomenko, a Ukrainian political scientist recognized as the best political analyst of 1998 and 1999 in UNIAN (Ukrainian National Information Agency) public opinion polls,⁸ deliberates on the ethnopsychological and sociocultural traditions of Ukrainianness in his Teoriia ukraïns′koho kokhannia [Theory of Ukrainian love] (2002). Juxtaposing them to the expansion of mass culture that “is destroying cultural values and ethics of human relationships,” he writes: “Ukrainians have never been cynics; that is why today’s ‘erotization’ of the nation through mass culture either from the East or from the West is not only anti-political or anti-aesthetic; it is unnatural.”⁹ Whether being influenced by external factors, such as Western commodification of sex in the media or the literary vogue for “erotomaniac” fictions that captured its fin-de-siècle culture in the process of recurrent contestation, rearticulation, and redefinition of gender norms, roles, and boundaries, or internal ones exposing the fictionality of existing moral codes, the “unnatural erotization” had already arrived. Despite the apprehension of the corruption of public morals, Ukrainian erotic heteroglossia could come into play as a force that is capable of undermining certain hierarchical formations inherited from the previous authoritarian regime.

In the face of society’s alleged growing acceptance of titillation, and apparently summing up protracted and muddled legislative deliberations that commenced in 1998–1999,¹⁰ Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada [Parliament] finally ratified, in 2003, Law No.1296-IV, which criminalizes, among other offensive practices, the manufacture and distribution of pornography, and delegates the power to determine whether certain materials are pornographic to the National Expert Committee of Ukraine on the Defence of Public Morals.¹¹ Although the law includes the definitions of “pornography,” “pornographic production,” and “erotic production” (limited to its “aesthetic effect”), the classification of “erotica” itself is omitted. “Pornography” is defined by an assortment of specific adjectives, such as “vulgar and naturalistic,” “cynical,” “obscene,” “offensive,” and “unethical,” which are applied to sexual acts, human dignity, and instincts. It also refers to “sexual deviations”¹² that, quite predictably, are applicable to a specter of the least “normative,” hence the most “offensive,” representations of sexuality that ultimately become the primary targets of censorship. This law has undergone a number of adjustments since it was adopted by Parliament, none of which, unfortunately, have clarified matters: its key concepts continue to be rudimentary and vaguely defined and thus can be applied quite deliberately. On the one hand, they offer weak protection against charges of pornography because what is assumed to be pornographic is not necessarily so but is, more often, a projection onto the images of viewers’ own repressions, cultural preferences, political views, etc., an iconic example being Justice Stewart’s “definition” of pornography in the Jucobellis v. Ohio (1962) obscenity case: “I know it when I see it.”¹³ On the other hand, the abovementioned vagueness allows one to find cracks in the pornography law in order to support such “international publishing projects” as the now defunct Ukrainian–Spanish–Czech magazine Flash that was replete with pornified subject matter categorized as legitimate erotica, according to the earlier taxonomic description approved by the Cabinet of Ministers,¹⁴ which evidently was also taken into consideration when the law “On the Defence of Public Morals” was being formulated.

Whether this is pure coincidence or not, it is not surprising that amongst all this verbal and visual mystification around formerly illicit cultural technology, combined with constant bombardment by images of unbridled sexual excess, an issue of PiK [Politics and Culture], one of the most reputable Ukrainian weekly newsmagazines of the time, advertised Playboy on its back cover, while a quality television channel, Novyi kanal [new channel], featured late-night porn. Two top glamorous magazines, Ieva [Eve], for women, and Lider [Leader], for men, entertained their readership with glossy, two-dimensional alternative sexualities confronting the traditional heterosexual orientation with the dilemma of sexual freedoms. Lider [Leader] delights quite conventionally in parading provocative lesbian eroticism, whereas Ieva [Eve] features homosexual encounters between gorgeous males. The latter editorial choice might have appeared to represent, for the outsider, a radical step toward questioning homophobia and heterosexism, the traditional models of male sexuality, and conventional gender hierarchy (similar to the erotic appeal found in Western women’s slash fiction that emasculates TV hard men). One can add another spin by considering these images through the concept of gaze, thus referring to hierarchical and ideological ways of seeing and to the nature of male gaze directed at images of women. Consequently, the female readership becomes either empowered by the authority of the gaze, which has been conventionally conceptualized as male, or adopts dual identification with both female (passive) and male (active) positions, or engages in a deliberate erosion of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translation and Transliteration
• 1 Introduction to Erotomaniac Fictions
• 2 Nationalist–Masochist Woman, Impotent Man, and Counter-Erotics: Pol′ovi doslidzhennia z ukraïns′koho seksu [Fieldwork in Ukrainian sex]
• 3 A Guide to the Art of (Post-)Soviet Pleasure: Pokalchuk’s Taxonomies
• 4 Carnivalesque Mystifications, National Icon, and Orientalist Dreams: Zhytiie haremnoie [Life in the harem] as Historiographic Metafiction
• 5 The Monstrosity of Desire and the Delights of Carnal Hell: Shevchuk’s Neo-Baroque Angst
• 6 Indecent Transpositions and Displacements of the National Imaginary by the Kapranov Brothers
• 7 Pornographized Desecration of the Socialist Realist Canon: Poderviansky the Bricoleur
• 8 Postscript
• Bibliography
• Index