This chapter examines the discourses of feminist or gendered resistance in Belarus’s 2020 protest movement. Relying on visual and textual material, we outline several semiotic strategies of resistance, grounded in reappropriating and subverting gendered images in the discourse of authoritarian hegemonic masculinity produced by the regime. This yielded a rich textual and visual rhetoric that drew on multiple cultural references anchored in the national or regional post-Soviet legacies as well as in globally known popular imagery. While the ‘feminist’ in these is multidirectional, fluid and often overshadowed by what appears to be ‘patriarchal’ representations, we argue that the strategies observed reflect some of the ways in which gender begins to play a role in regional politics. This includes ways in which the body becomes the site of symbolic/discursive struggles, which, in turn, may be particularly relevant in establishing connections between anti-authoritarian and anti-war forms of resistance.

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‘Pumpkins Only for the Dictator’: Belarus Protests and the Semiotic Strategies of Gendered Resistance

  • Michaela Grančayová,
  • Aliaksei Kazharski

摘要

This chapter examines the discourses of feminist or gendered resistance in Belarus’s 2020 protest movement. Relying on visual and textual material, we outline several semiotic strategies of resistance, grounded in reappropriating and subverting gendered images in the discourse of authoritarian hegemonic masculinity produced by the regime. This yielded a rich textual and visual rhetoric that drew on multiple cultural references anchored in the national or regional post-Soviet legacies as well as in globally known popular imagery. While the ‘feminist’ in these is multidirectional, fluid and often overshadowed by what appears to be ‘patriarchal’ representations, we argue that the strategies observed reflect some of the ways in which gender begins to play a role in regional politics. This includes ways in which the body becomes the site of symbolic/discursive struggles, which, in turn, may be particularly relevant in establishing connections between anti-authoritarian and anti-war forms of resistance.