Compulsory Motherhood, Paternalistic State?: Ukrainian Gender Politics and the Subject of Woman

Honorable Mention: 2022 Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies (ASEEES)
This book examines Ukrainian state gender politics and investigates how gendered subject positions and policy discourses are constructed within and through social policies. 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. This book 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. 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.

This book will be of particular interest to scholars in gender politics, sociology of policy, and post-socialist or Eastern European studies.