FEMEN’s Naked Politics: What Drives them to Disrobe

From bra-burning to baring our breasts-we've come a long way, baby...?   In the least, FEMEN’s recent shock tactics might make early American feminist tactics seem fairly anachronistic.  On the other hand, the idea that any contemporary feminist activist in an increasingly misogynist media culture would voluntarily position her naked body as central to her political platform might seem irreconcilable to the aims of the early women’s movement in the US, who purposely selected as their inaugurating platform a venue that could not have existed without the female body.  What, if anything, do these movements have in common?  Without sounding too Eurocentric, can we say the stakes may ultimately be higher for Eastern European feminist activists?  Could FEMEN be the ideological descendants of the Ukraine Romantics?  They are braless, bold and brazen-their leader, Inna Shevchenko-who may just be more than a titular heir apparent to the Romantics and its political martyr, Taras Shevchenko-having recently stripped off her top during the middle of a televised interview in response to what she believed to be a sexist question by her Al Jazeera interviewer (http://www.interfax-religion.com/?act=news&div=10050).

Like the 1968 American bra-burning (more about that nomer, later) feminists whose movement underscored a corollary between their protest against a sexist society and the resistance against the Vietnam War, the FEMENS are protesting in part in allegiance with Pussy Riot's imprisonment, but are also commenting at the same time on a very corrupt and controversial recent presidential election in October. In this the correlation between feminist activism and  politics of the state (Vietnam/Ukraine) continues to be historically and consistently conjoined.  

 FEMEN’s shock tactics might be summarily dismissed in th­e way that many dismissed the 1968 protest of the Miss America pageant at Atlantic City; criticism that was expressed by most men, and even some women, such as Bonnie J. Dow in her article "Feminism, Miss America, and Media Mythology,"  who suggested that in taking off their bras (and all the other 'torture devices'  they threw into the freedom cans, by the way), the seventies feminists were merely trying to be "trendy…to attract men."    Those early feminist tactics drew criticism from both sides, and they were inevitably accused of impairing the very movement they were trying to strengthen.  Now forty something years later, a similar sentiment can be seen expressed around the world, even by progressive-minded Western Post-feminists who feel all those gratuitous tit images (found most recently on the cover of Paris Match) of dozens of beautiful bare-breasted young women are playing straight into the calloused hands of not just a misogynist patriarchy but an increasingly sexist global media society. 

Yet, the temptation to dismiss the Ukraine feminists for their complicity is much too neat and short-sighted, especially in light of the ongoing stigma the little f word still elicits not just globally, but domestically (http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/scriptorium/wlm/notes/).  Rather, this may be a movement, like the best of them that intertwines intellectualism with activism, as illustrated by Pussy Riot, whose members constantly invoke the names of social theorists and intellectuals in their interviews.  For example, their patron resistance icon is Taras Shevchenko, the 19th century Ukraine poet/painter/writer who was affiliated with the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, a secret circle of Ukrainian intellectuals active in Kiev from 1845 to 1847, known as the Kyrylo-Methodius Society (http://www.ditext.com/luckyj/methodius.html).   It isn’t insignificant to note that these young activists are young, in a parallel to the Kyrylo-Methodius Society, and for most societies whose youth culture often becomes the locus of the youth resistance movements.

Of course, the Kyrylo-Methodius Society were protesting against the absorption of a Ukraine identity, politically, socially, culturally and intellectually by the Russians, who wound up benefitting greatly in the end. We cannot possible say the stakes for protecting a union or state are the same as protecting gender rights, can we?  Or, make a transhistorical, transcultural reductive-sounding connection between such different movements, dare we?    

No matter how much we may try to pretend otherwise, at least in Western rhetoric and discourse, the female body is still subject to a patriarchal gaze, and of course, much more deadly action in other parts of the world.  The impetus of the American seventies bra-burning, the reference itself meant as a slander of the movement was the rejection of male authority over women in American public and private spheres.  The FEMENS in Ukraine have done no less. In a society where the sex trafficking of young women has risen exponentially, these women have dared to bare, so to speak.  Are they complicit, disingenuous, or, are the FEMEN finally the first authentic manifestations of that elusive Post-Feminist ideal?