IN MEMORIAM______________________________________________________________

Oksana Shachko (1987–2018), co-founder

of FEMEN
Gender, feminism, and performative protest
This last July, FEMEN co-founder Oksana (or Oxana) Shachko was found
dead in her apartment in the Paris suburbs from what appears to have been
a suicide.1 Shachko was a revolutionary feminist who offered her body for
her cause; she was also an artist, trained and practiced in painting Orthodox
icons from her childhood. Born in western Ukraine amidst the post-Soviet eco-
nomic devastation, she had wanted to dedicate her life to the church and then
to communism before committing to feminism in her late teens.2 She had been
forced to flee to France in 2013 when Ukrainian authorities (under the admin-
istration of pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych) launched proceedings
against FEMEN for terrorism. They had found some weapons and a portrait
of Vladimir Putin with a target, which FEMEN alleges had been planted. By
most accounts, Shachko was a person whose full-bodied beliefs ordered her
life, leaving little room for self-care. Outside of Ukraine, she seems to have
gotten lost, disconnecting from FEMEN and struggling to find a new role by
returning to her Orthodox-related art. According to one of her closest friends,
it was exile that killed her.3
FEMEN has received a tremendous amount of attention and sparked much
controversy over the last decade, but Shachko’s death is good moment to con-
sider FEMEN from her perspective. Phenomena such as FEMEN have multiple
versions and change over time, and Shachko’s FEMEN is distinct from the
FEMEN we see now. As she described in the 2013 documentary I Am Femen,
in which she actively participated, the group emerged out of her relationship
with Anna Hutsol and Alexandra Shevchenko in Khmeltnytskyi, and their
discussions about the stereotypes about how women should behave and what
roles they should play in life. Shachko says her first action as a feminist was
in protest—with blood and sheets—to mismanagement at the local maternity
hospital that led to the deaths of four women during childbirth in one day.4
Inspired by the attention they received, the three moved to Kyiv and engaged
in their action as FEMEN, the 2008 street protest titled, “Ukraine is not a
Brothel” which Shachko saw as a rebuke to the reputation that all Ukrainian
women were prostitutes.

1. Vladimir Ivakhnenko, “‘Ee ubil Parizh.’ Zhizn΄ i smert΄ Oksany Shachko”

(‘Paris  killed her:’ Life and death of Oksana Shachko), Radio Svoboda, July 28, 2018,
https://www.svoboda.org/a/29395701.html (accessed March 5, 2019).
2. Armelle Leturcq, “A Meeting with Oksana Shachko,” Crash, Interview, Novem-
ber 2017, https://www.crash.fr/a-meeting-with-oksana-shachko/ (accessed November 5,
2018).
3. Ivakhnenko, “Ee ubil Parizh.”
4. Leturcq, “A Meeting with Oksana Shachko.”
Slavic Review 78, no. 1 (Spring 2019)
© 2019 Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
doi: 10.1017/slr.2019.17
In Memoriam 319

Shachko was the first to go topless, at a 2009 demonstration for Ukrainian

Independence Day, with a Ukrainian flower wreathe in her hair. She embraced
the topless protest, making it FEMEN’s signature in some five dozen actions
over the next few years.5 Early on, prominent protests in which Shachko took
part included demonstrating against the former Ukrainian Prime Minister
Yulia Tymoshenko for being “the same as Yanukovych,” and against the 2012
UEFA Euro football championship which FEMEN feared would encourage
prostitution (chanting “fuck Euro” in multiple locations). Other protests—
such as at the Kyiv zoo where animals were dying from the neglect due to the
corruption of Ukrainian elites—are often forgotten. In 2011, Shachko and two
other FEMEN members protested in front of the headquarters of the Belarus
KGB to “save Belarus,” a regime that Shachko saw as a corrupt and abusive
dictatorship. In 2012, chanting “Putin is a thief,” she attempted to abscond
with the ballot box with Putin’s vote for his return to the presidency. She was
one of the protestors that confronted Putin as het met with German Chancellor
Angela Merkel at a trade fair in Hanover. Outside of the region, where FEMEN’s
interventions were more sporadic, she protested the sexism she saw within
Islam in Paris in 2011, at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2012, and
against Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in 2013. Shachko claims to
have left the group a year or so into its expansion-and-then move to Paris.
On the surface, the formula that Shachko honed for FEMEN is “at once
simple and spectacular: scantily clad topless women stage highly theatrical
demonstrations to draw attention to various facets of gender inequality in
Ukraine.”6 Seeing their actions as straightforward and primarily a part of civil
society, analysis and opinions in the popular press have mostly wrestled with
the question of whether a group that protests topless can really be feminist.
Mainstream women’s organizations and many feminists in the region have
been particularly critical, seeing their “actions as simply giving men more of
what they want,” especially when FEMEN relies on women who have bodies
like fashion models (as Shachko did).7 FEMEN was seen as distracting atten-
tion from other feminist groups in Ukraine, such as Ofenzywa, who protest
clothed and whose ideology is more anchored in academic feminism. FEMEN
has also been undermined by allegations in the 2013 documentary Ukraine
Is Not a Brothel that Viktor Sviatsky was the puppeteer of the organization’s
actions, a claim Shachko denies in I am Femen. All these problems led some,
such as Oksana Kis, to see FEMEN as having “nothing to do with feminism,”
even as it is now “unfortunately” associated in Ukraine with feminism.8 In
2017, Emily Channell-Justice suggested that FEMEN is irrelevant to Ukraine as

5. Jessica Zychowicz. “Performing Protest: Femen, Nation, and the Marketing of Re-
sistance,” JUPS—Journal of Ukrainian Politics and Society 1 (2015): 81.
6. Jessica Zychowicz, “Two Bad Words: FEMEN & Feminism in Independent Ukraine,”
Anthropology of East Europe Review 29, no. 2 (2011): 215–27.
7. Emily Channell, “Is Sextremism the New Feminism? Perspectives from Pussy Riot
and Femen,” Nationalities Papers 42, no. 4 (July 2014): 613; Valerie Sperling, Sex, Politics,
and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia (Oxford, 2015), 241–44.
8. Oksana Kis΄: Zhinki chasto maiut΄ alergiiu na feminism (Oksana Kis: Women are
Often Allergic to Feminism). Interv΄iu z Ukraini (Interview with Ukraine), October 29, 2015,
at https://rozmova.wordpress.com/2015/11/02/oksana-kis-2/ (accessed March 5, 2019).
320 Slavic Review

they did not participate in the EuroMaidan protests and discredited because
of revelations that some of their funding came from men who pushed for wom-
en’s topless protest.9
Even from this perspective, we would be remiss not to acknowledge the
high price paid by Shachko (and her fellow protestors), despite their commit-
ment to non-violence. In their early years in Ukraine, Shachko sometimes
faced rough treatment from guards or police officers that would leave bruises
or a bloody nose. In Belarus, she and two others were allegedly kidnapped
for two days, brutally interrogated, forced to undress and pose for cameras
with swastikas, and then left in a forest.10 Shachko was jailed for two weeks
in Russia, interrogated by the FSB and banned from the country for life. In the
years leading up to their exile—especially after the activists from the Russia-
based feminist punk protest group Pussy Riot were sentenced to three years
in labor camps—Shachko was increasingly afraid of being watched. She felt
so terrorized that she broke her forearms getting away from what she thought
were Ukrainian security forces. Her fear must have been acute, as the injury
on her painting arm was so severe she required surgery.
However, Shachko frequently asserted that what FEMEN did was art,
and she composed FEMEN’s actions like feminist performance art. Especially
from her perspective, their actions must be seen as performative, both in the
sense of being theatrical and in Judith Butler’s notion of performance as the
central arena through which gender is defined and redefined.11 As Jessica
Zychowicz has argued, their actions are “spectacle,” made with clever “politi-
cal parody”; using their bare breasts as histrionic weapons, women in FEMEN
“typecast themselves into role-playing an oppressed female ideal in a theatre
of the absurd.”12 Describing herself as an “iconographer,” Shachko created
herself as one of the “iconic images of [the] movement,” topless but wearing
jeans, a power pose more like a modern Amazonian warrior taking on injus-
tice than like the representations of women in most porn, which men can
easily and freely get for themselves these days. FEMEN had emerged within
the changed political context after Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, which,
among a small subset of the somewhat interconnected post-Soviet societies,
energized street theater and the radical left, including feminisms.13 Even for
Shachko, who began with a focus on gender stereotypes, FEMEN evolved to
tackling repression by Putin and other strongmen in the region, who became
more menacing in their fear of such popular uprisings. Women’s civil soci-
ety had been a target, and FEMEN at least implicitly understood that such

9. Emily S. Channell-Justice, “‘We’re Not Just Sandwiches’: Europe, Nation, and Femi-
nist (Im) Possibilities on Ukraine’s Maidan,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Soci-
ety 42, no. 3 (2017): 722n10.
10. Sam Wilson, “Ukraine’s Femen: Topless Protests ‘Help Feminist Cause,’” BBC
News, October 23, 2012, at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-20028797 (accessed
March 5, 2019).
11. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York,
2002).
12. Zychowic, “Two Bad Words,” 217–18.
13. Alexandra Hrycak. “Orange Harvest?: Women’s Activism and Civil Society in
Ukraine, Belarus and Russia since 2004,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 44, no. 1–2
(2010): 165–67.
In Memoriam 321

repression was gendered. As Valerie Sperling argues, Putin especially was

branded as the tough guy that was needed to prevent chaos and then increas-
ingly claimed the moral authority to protect the region from liberal threats
such as homosexuality.14
FEMEN was not alone in their “sextremism,” as FEMEN came to call it.
Pussy Riot too employed female “sexual language and imagery as well as
physical sexuality in protest of [patriarchy and] their current regimes.”15 Both
groups, resonating with the tradition of feminist performance art of the 1970s
and 80s in the West, played with masking and unmasking their faces and
bodies to counter repressive narratives of women’s representation. Nor were
such provocative actions limited to women: in 2013, Petr Pavlensky posed
naked wrapped in barbed wire and later nailed his scrotum to Red Square.16
While some blame FEMEN and Pussy Riot for “provoking” a negative reac-
tion to feminism from the population, the energy of neo-traditionalism was
already being mobilized by the illiberal populism propagated by Putin and
other leaders in eastern Europe and being turned into a coherent “anti-gen-
der” movement.17 In recent years, those illiberal forces have been so power-
ful that even established democracies have been undermined, suggesting
broader economic, social, and political drivers than FEMEN.
Feminists in the region had already tried to be “good girls,” organizing
themselves into non-governmental organizations with staid projects con-
ducted by middle-class, middle-aged professionals. Yes, there had been some
small, notable successes. Alexandra Hrycak highlights how some women’s
organizations in Ukraine became avenues to formal politics or successfully
lobbied for reform against gendered violence.18 There were also some promi-
nent activists, such as Ruslana Lyzhychko, a widely popular singer-song writer,
whose 2008 song “Not for Sale” was an anthem for anti-trafficking efforts.
But, even in Ukraine, where some political parties openly embraced western
norms and were seen as including feminism, this “foundation feminism” was
too much for most people, and the impact was limited.19 The guerrilla femi-
nism of FEMEN and Pussy Riot tackle head-on the deceits and feints of the
informal politics being used by regimes such as Ukraine under Yanukovych

14. Sperling, Sex, Politics, and Putin.

15. Channell, “Is Sextremism the New Feminism?,” 611.
16. Shaun Walker, “Petr Pavlensky: Why I Nailed my Scrotum to Red Square,” The
Guardian, February 5, 2014, at https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/05/
petr-pavlensky-nailed-scrotum-red-square (accessed March 5, 2019).
17. Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk, “Gender as ‘Ebola from Brussels’: The
Anti-colonial Frame and the Rise of Illiberal Populism,” Signs: Journal of Women in Cul-
ture and Society, vol. 43, no. 4 (2018): 797–821.
18. Katalin Fábián, Alexandra Hrycak, and Janet Elise Johnson, “Women’s/Feminist
Activism, Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia,” The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and
Sexuality Studies, Nancy A. Naples, ed., (Wiley Blackwell, 2016): 1–5, available online at
https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118663219.wbegss437 (limited access).
19. Alexandra Hrycak, “Foundation Feminism and the Articulation of Hybrid Femi-
nisms in post-Socialist Ukraine,” East European Politics and Societies 20, no. 1 (February
2006): 69–100.
322 Slavic Review

and Russia under Putin.20 It also seems plausible that FEMEN helped create
space for the variety of feminisms that have emerged in post-EuroMaidan
Ukraine: from those who advocate for legislation, radical feminists who reject
working with the state, and those who attempt to make feminism appealing to
everyday Ukrainian women who might not think of themselves as feminist.21
According to Jacqueline Feldman, who had interviewed and befriended
her, Shachko described her break with FEMEN “in aesthetic terms.”22
Shachko saw herself as an activist but also as one of the “true artists . . .
[whose] main task . . . is revolution.” Those who associated themselves with
FEMEN once it was in exile no longer saw the performativity of their actions.
Inna Shevchenko, who joined FEMEN in 2010 and is now the de facto head of
FEMEN in Paris, denied that what they did was art, declaring breasts literal
weapons. Shachko described FEMEN as the founders’ whole lives while they
were in Ukraine and accused those who were engaging recent actions in the
name of FEMEN of being copycats who are “just manipulating people,” not
challenging the complex problematics that early FEMEN did.
What I find most problematic is FEMEN’s one-dimensional take on patri-
archy within Islam. To be fair to Shachko, most of the FEMEN protests against
Islam happened after Shachko retired, and it is Inna Shevchenko who has
been the most categorical in rejecting the possibility of feminisms within
Islam, calling it “oxymoronic.”23 Shachko’s anti-Islam protest was at the invi-
tation of a French feminist, in which she painted “Naked War” and “I am a
woman and not an object” on her co-protestors’ torsos, which were revealed
under their burkas.24 Shachko was not the movement’s ideologist, but it is her
formula that sets up to see things so simplistically: if undressing is protest,
then being covered up must be compliance. The role of coercion at work when
state, religious, or paramilitary authorities force women to dress or undress,
which I see as the real problem, is rendered invisible.
In Shachko’s retirement from FEMEN, she explored this relationship
between religion and patriarchy more deeply. In her 2016 Paris art premier,
“Iconoclast,” she exhibited fifteen paintings made with the technique and in
the style of the icons she had learned in her youth, but this time she incorpo-
rated “her current convictions to denounce religious power and patriarchal

20. Janet Elise Johnson, The Gender of Informal Politics: Russia, Iceland and Twenty-
First Century Male Dominance (Cham, Switzerland, 2018).
21. Sean Guillory, “Feminists in the Maidan: Interview with Emily Channell-Justice,”
Sean’s Russia Podcast, #55, September 16, 2017, itunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/pod-
cast/seans-russia-blog/id597948126?mt=2# (accessed March 5, 2019).
22. Jacqueline Feldman, “Notes on the Death of Oxana Shachko,” The Paris Review,
August 6, 2018, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/08/06/notes-on-the-death-of-
oxana-shachko/ (last accessed March 10, 2019).
23. Decca Aitkenhead, “Femen leader Inna Shevchenko: ‘I’m for any form of femi-
nism,’” The Guardian, November 8, 2013, www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/08/
femen-leader-inna-shevchenko-interview (accessed March 10, 2019).
24. Dialika Neufeld, “The Body Politic: Getting Naked to Change the World,” Spiegel,
May 11, 2012, www.spiegel.de/international/europe/femen-activists-get-naked-to-raise-
political-awareness-a-832028-2.html (accessed March 11, 2019).
In Memoriam 323

society.”25 Most of the icons stick to Christian themes, pointing out sancti-
mony, for example, with a version of Andrey Rublev’s Trinity but with the
three drinking and smoking. Perhaps most relevant here is her icon of Mary
with Jesus suckling at one revealed breast, but Mary is in a burka, otherwise
completely covered down to her black gloves. As with her apparent suicide,
where her only explanation was a note “You are all fake,” we are left with a
visual riddle about representation, gender, and belief.26

Janet Elise Johnson

Brooklyn College, CUNY

25. Galerie Mansart art catalog, “Oksana Shachko: Icononclaste” (May 12–June 19,
2016), at www.galerie-mansart.fr/iconoclaste--oksana-shachko.html (accessed November
7, 2018).
26. Vladimir Ivakhnenko, “Ee ubil Parizh.”
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and
Eurasian Studies 2019