Mor Rusland - tur retur: mellem husmødre og kannibaler

Abstract

The belief in women's "natural" predisposition to motherhood and domesticity was drastically strenghtened during the period of perestrojka, which has been characterized by Russian democratic feminists as "basically a male project". After the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the proclamation of a new Russia, the ongoing search for a national identity continued to nourish what was imagined to be a stable identity, i.e. a female body with a gender-specific mission. So magically promising did this bonding appear that, in 1995, it even influenced the naming of the political party of Prime Minister Chernomyrdin: "Our Home is Russia" ("Nash dom - Rossija"), which clearly links the vision of national identity to the femininity of mothering, nuturing and caring. Behind this image hovers the representation of the Soviet Union as a fallen woman. The article shows how some women internalize the paradigm of the new "mother nation" by constructing prostitutes, homeless women, lesbians, or even unfaithful wives as Soviet "others"; sometimes this deviant is so explicitly ostracized that she is situated beyond the borders, i.e. in the West (or simply in "Europe", i.e. non-Russia). However, this discourse of pathetic and nostalgic womanhood does not stand alone; it is countered by subversive self-representations of domesticity and maternity such as cannibalistic chaos and death (e.g. L. Petrushevskaya's The time - night.) I suggest that both strategies, each in their own way, mirror the collapsing cultural identities which make up the present period of "transition".