Compulsory Motherhood, Paternalistic State?

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. 

Oleksandra Tarkhanova makes a significant contribution to the growing body of research on the intersection of neoliberal reforms, conservative anti-gender ideology and women’s status in the countries of Eastern Europe. Her pioneering feminist analysis of the Ukrainian welfare state is based on a thorough investigation of social policy debates and legislation in the country from independence to the post-Maidan era. The current culture war on “gender ideology” makes her findings relevant beyond the Ukrainian case.

-Tatiana Zhurzhenko, Lecturer at the University of Vienna

Essential reading for scholars of gender and social policy studies in Eastern Europe, this book is an exciting intervention in feminist critiques of the effects of neoliberalism on the gender dimensions of social policy debates in post-socialist states. Tarkhanova's diachronic perspective, tracking gender policy in Ukraine from 1985 to 2017, provides crucial insights for understanding "anti-gender," anti-feminist movements in contemporary Ukraine and neighboring countries. Key policy areas under focus are family law and state welfare, the Labor Code, and women's rights and gender equality. Crucially, Tarkhanova draws on her extended Ukrainian case study to engage with broad feminist critiques of neoliberalism, extending the case's relevance far beyond discussions of gender policy in Central and East Europe.

-Sarah D. Phillips, Professor of Anthropology, Director of the Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute, Indiana University, USA

Oleksandra Tarkhanova is Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of St. Gallen, Center for Governance and Culture in Europe, where she works on social rights and citizenship of people in the war-affected regions of Eastern Ukraine.