Revealing Official and Alternative Gender Discourses: Women’s (Self) Representations in Russia’s Wars, 1914–2024

Application summary

The goal of the project is to demonstrate the cultural-historical interconnection between female images in different wars waged by Russia during the last century and their impact on current Russian aggression in Ukraine. The project will examine the representations created by both men and women in works of literature, film, and propaganda, as well as self-depictions made by women themselves. This dual focus will allow to show the various aspects of the use of female imagery during wartime. The project is limited to studying the cultural heritage of World War I, the Russian Civil War, World War II, the Chechen Wars and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The material for the study consists of official documents and publications from war periodicals, and private letters found in archives, literary works (1920–40s), war films (1940s–2010s), pro-government and antiwar poetry (2020s). The project proposes a new approach linking Russia’s wars of the twentieth and twenty-first century and bringing them together in one sequence. This allows the identification of cultural patterns behind aggression and denotes how symbolic and real femininities are used in Russian war gender discourses. Studying this topic helps explain the origins of Russia’s aggression and sheds light on the stratum of unknown female voices not supporting military hostility. The project is multidisciplinary in its nature, the applied methodology is based on cultural memory studies. The research fills a clear gap in literary studies concerning female images in war literature, which have never been subjected to synthetic research. The results of this research will be journal articles, conference presentations, and public lectures. An edited collection and a monograph are planned for release. The visual material (official wartime posters, illustrations from the press, and private photographs of women) will be used in the exhibition intended for students in history, literature and art, and for a wider audience.