Considers democratization, privatization, and women's lives in postcolonial Ukraine.

Superfluous Women tells the unique story of a generation of artists, feminists, and queer activists who emerged in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. With a focus on new media, Zychowicz demonstrates how contemporary artist collectives in Ukraine have contested Soviet and Western connotations of feminism to draw attention to a range of human rights issues with global impact. In the book, Zychowicz summarizes and engages with more recent critical scholarship on the role of digital media and virtual environments in concepts of the public sphere. Mapping out several key changes in newly independent Ukraine, she traces the discursive links between distinct eras, marked by mass gatherings on Kyiv’s main square, in order to investigate the deeper shifts driving feminist protest and politics today.

This 'Yearbook' attends to various ways in which women were active and organized themselves in order to question sex and gender related issues in the political arena. Covering a diverse range of cultures and political situations the Yearbook discusses how women protested against perceived religious suppression; actively participated in local democratic political institutions whilst not really changing gender-roles; or discussed experienced discrepancies between socialism and feminism. How do women find their ways in democratic systems of governance? What do these systems offer them in terms of emancipation and involvement in political decision making affecting their lives?

This book addresses class formation and changes in personhood in contemporary Eastern Europe in the context of the spread of a market economy. The authors investigate processes of social closure, marginalization and elite formation, paying particular attention to their cultural expressions and to the legitimizing discourses of nationalist and neoliberal agendas. While individual and collective identities are inextricably linked with the consolidation of global capitalism, external blueprints are everywhere mediated through historically grounded experiences and local social relations. Comprising studies from Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, the volume explores practices, stories, and performances in everyday life worlds. The ethnographies show both individual and collective identities to be emergent projects, constrained by economic processes and state policies but ultimately created by people themselves as they pursue their interests and search for meaning.

Using firsthand interviews, archival documents, and visual analysis, Superfluous Women explores the intersections between art, protest, and feminism in today's Ukraine.

This volume explores how different post-Soviet countries have reinterpreted and diverged from the Soviet gender roles and values. It synthesizes results from multiple empirical studies that attend to increasingly conservative features of political governance in the region, particularly the authoritarian regime in Russia. The authors consider diverse enactments of ideologies, policies and practices of gender equality and women’s rights in crucial areas, such as legislative institutions, media, and social activism. The volume contributes to understanding post-Soviet societal dynamics relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5, which emphasizes gender equality as part of fundamental human rights.

On the Shoulders of Grandmothers is a global ethnography of Ukrainian transnational migration. Gendered migrant subjectivities are a key site for understanding the production of neoliberal capitalism and Ukrainian nation-state building, a fraught process that places Ukraine precariously between Europe and Russia with dramatic implications for the political economy of the region. However, processes of gender and migration that undergird transnational nation-state building require further attention. Solari compares two patterns of Ukrainian migration: the "forced" exile of middle-aged women, most grandmothers, to Italy and the "voluntary" exodus of families, led by the same cohort of middle-aged women, to the United States. In both receiving sites these migrants are caregivers to the elderly. Using in-depth interviews and ethnographic data collected in three countries, Solari shows that Ukrainian nation-state building occurs transnationally. She examines the collective practices of migrants who are building the "new" Ukraine from the outside in and shaping both Italy and the United States as well. The Ukrainian state, in order to fulfil its First World aspirations of joining Europe and distancing itself from all things Soviet, is pursuing a gendered reorganization of family and work structures to achieve a transition from socialism to capitalism. This has created a labor force of migrant grandmothers who carry the new Ukraine on their shoulders. Solari shows that this post-Soviet economic transformation requires a change in the moral order as migrant women struggle to understand how to be "good" mothers and grandmothers and men join women in attempts to teach their children to be successful and honorable people, now that the social rules have drastically changed. Looking at individual migrant women and men and their families in Ukraine allows us to see the production of neoliberal capitalism and new nationalism from the ground up and the outside in for a region that promises to be a flashpoint in our century.