Written by Leigh Kolb.
As a young girl, Oksana Shachko became enraptured in her iconography classes and painted intricate portraits of religious figures. She even planned to join a convent at one point. In the documentary Je Suis FEMEN (I Am FEMEN), we see Oksana painting a Madonna and child, and we also see her painting what has become her life instead: bare breasts, masks, murals, and enormous protest signs. Oksana is one of the founding members of the Kiev, Ukraine-based protest group Femen.
While her vocations in life might appear contradictory (nun vs. topless activist), perhaps her calling has always been clear–to surround herself by women and effect change in heavily patriarchal spaces. Oksana is the “Je” (“I”) in the film–her story, as a dedicated artist and activist–dominates Swiss director Alain Margot’s film. I Am FEMEN refers not only to Oksana’s journey, but also a supportive and sympathetic point of view from behind the camera.
I Am FEMEN is a lovely, powerful film. It delves into the complexity of the movement, showing protests against coddled rapists, mistreated zoo animals, Ukrainian politicians, international sporting events, and Vladimir Putin. The audience gets a sense of the humanity of the women in Femen; Margot showcases their parents, and often shows the women in the more mundane aspects of their lives/activist work–paintings signs, cooking dumplings, working on the website.
There were a few moments that the film seemed be shot with the male gaze in mind. This is problematically, ironically reflected in a POV review:
“Veteran Swiss director Alain Margot’s vastly entertaining film I Am Femen offers an entrée into the FEMEN movement through a profile of Ms. Shachko. Looking like a cross between Simone Simon in the original Cat People and Anna Karina in Une Femme est une femme, Oksana Shachko combines an aloof beauty with a lithe physique, marking her as a natural fighter who seems to relish her endless skirmishes with the police.”
Yet I Am FEMEN seems to fully understand the contradictory nature of the male gaze in relation to Femen’s activism. In a poignant part of the film, the women are protesting the Ukraine-hosted Euro 2012 football championship (not the sport itself, they point out, but what goes in to hosting these events–displacing students to set up brothels, etc.). This comes toward the end of the film, when we’ve seen the women beaten, imprisoned, and held captive, and Oksana is concerned her apartment–which was ransacked–has been bugged. While they disrupt a game, we see footage of the cheerleaders and female entertainers dancing and performing for male audiences. There were numerous charges filed against the Femen activists after Euro 2012. The scantily clad women that were in those spaces specifically for the male gaze, however, were welcomed.
At the end of the film, behind-the-scenes activist and leader Anna and a small group appear in Kiev in 2013. She has been beaten, and they say that Russian and Ukrainian secret services have kept them from protesting. Anna joins her sister in Switzerland, and three prominent activists, including Oksana, seek asylum in France to continue their organization and activist training.
As well-shot, complex, and humanizing as I Am FEMEN is as a film, I couldn’t help but be uneasy. Because I’d seen and written about Ukraine is Not a Brothel, I wondered how I Am FEMEN would differ, since the subjects and timelines were similar. Filmmaker Kitty Green embedded herself with Femen–living with them as she shot Ukraine is Not a Brothel–and she famously “outed” Victor Svyatski as an abusive mastermind behind the scenes of Femen, whom the women eventually broke away from. He is interviewed in her film, and tells Green that the women are “weak” and that “getting girls” was part of his motivation for galvanizing the group.
In I Am FEMEN, Oksana flippantly mentions the infamous Victor, saying that he simply “supports our work,” and is a “feminist man.” While Margot told the story in front of him, if an audience member was familiar with Ukraine is Not a Brothel, the fleeting mention of Victor leaves many questions unanswered. Certainly Green’s storytelling was from a different perspective, as she lived with the women and became much more than a director. Green also focused more on Inna Shevchenko‘s journey, and Margot focuses on Oksana.
There is much to appreciate in I Am FEMEN, and much to be inspired by. Feminists in general have conflicting views of Femen, but we cannot deny the power of turning the sexual object into the angry subject. The current aim of the movement–an international reach, dubbing themselves as a “sextremist” group– is fascinating. While there are complex, complicated problems that are inherent in any activist group, attempting to subvert the male gaze–which enjoys provocative dancers yet beats and arrests topless activists–is, essentially, a forceful weapon.
Inna recently penned an op/ed for The New Statesman. She says,
“With Femen’s topless protests, we succeeded in frightening many patriarchal institutions by taking away women’s naked bodies from the shining world of advertising, and taking them back to the political arena. Here, women’s bodies are no longer serving someone else’s demands or pleasing someone else, but are instead demanding their own rights. We revealed and highlighted the double standards of a world which easily accepts the use of female naked bodies in commercials, but roars in anger when topless women bare their political demands.”
It would be most compelling to watch the two Femen documentaries as a complementary pair. Ukraine is Not a Brothel and I Am FEMEN both beautifully delve into the past, present, and possible futures for a group that seeks to push and keep pushing. In an interview with VICE, Inna discusses the Victor revelations, and confidently asserts that they’ve moved on and now they’re independent. All of this–the literal and figurative nakedness of protest, the growth of a movement, the breaking free from the external and internal patriarchal structures–teaches us that in so many ways, the world thinks it owns women’s bodies. I Am FEMEN (and Ukraine is Not a Brothel) show the worth of this organization that’s out to change the world.
I Am FEMEN is available via First Run Features and iTunes.
[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaVXQVJ1Ct0″]
See also at Bitch Flicks: Ukraine is Not a Brothel: Intimate Storytelling and Complicated Feminism; Pussy Power and Control in Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer
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Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.
Oksana Zabuzhko, the academic mother of Ukrainian feminism, used her novel “Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex” to map Ukrainian identity onto the woman’s body. This is smart, because Ukrainian men feel pressurized to accept Russian as “default culture” just as women feel pressurized to accept men as “default human”, meaning that watching the state brutalizing naked women painted with political resistance is triggering on many levels for a Ukrainian man.
Also, Soviet censorship denied Ukraine a real sexual revolution. FEMEN remind me so much of Carolee Schneemann’s art in the American 60s. And with the consumable, hypersexualized, “mail order bride” image representing Ukrainian women abroad, it’s great to see hypersexualized women wearing their own strident opinions and politics.
But I really, really doubt that this movement can translate and retain its force if it tries to operate globally.
FEMEN is a for profit organization run by a Cis man, who recruits women he specifically defines as attractive (note, he does not recruit women of color, women with scars from maceotcmy or Caesarian sections or other surgeries, fat or physically disabled women, and once in a rare blue moon women of color are chosen) who is the mastermind of the bare breasted protests. His “protests” often take place in public places and put other people in harms way. His protests are often aimed at other women, such as models or cheerleaders. I’m sure you’ve seen FEMEN girls running onto a catwalk with signs that read “prostitute” and “whore”, at once insinuating these women are dirty and disgraceful for doing their job and adding to the stigma and oppression of sex workers. Also recently these protests have been very islamaphobic , protesting any wan wearing a hijab, which completely strips women of their self autonomy. He offers no protection for the girls as he watches them “protest” for him. He calls the women who work for him bitches, whores, and cunts, in his words, to “toughen them up” this is white feminism. This is exclusive feminism, this is not really feminism at all. This is the work of a sick, awful man who is using feminism for his own sexual, monetary, and political gain. What he coerces how selected women to do is nothing but a means of profit off women’s fight for equality.
Is it true that Shachko and the others have separated themselves from him now?
That’s the thing, they seem to have distanced him from the public ever since that first video made its way around, but the members aren’t denying he’s in it, and he’s one of the most primary founders, so it’s not likely he’s going to be removed from an organization he’s largely created and also funded. And the thing is, so many of their protests are so anti-sex worker, islamaphobic and potentially triggering, not to mention their archaic member policing that even if he had nothing to do with it in the first place, they’de still be the most terribly exclusive and self-serving group of feminists to grace the movement yet.
I’m right there on the “islamophobic” thing. How can you celebrate Pussy Riot desexualizing and anonymizing themselves with voluntary balaclavas and then condemn all voluntary burkhas (I would obviously condemn involuntary burkhas and dress codes of some Islamic states)? Re: anti-sex-worker, “Ukraine is not a brothel” refers to a real international image of Ukrainian women as hypersexual, silenced and available to be bought as “mail order brides”. I haven’t been following enough of their activities since to make a deeper judgment.
I wasn’t clear about the islamaphobia, I’m totally supportive of the hijab and burkas wearing Muslims, I’m referring to the FEMEN protests in which the protesters call for the banning of the head coverings under the guise of “liberating Muslim women” and the incidences where it’s reported FEMEN members have actually ripped hijabs off the heads of Muslim women. And I was not referring to the “Ukraine is not a brothel” movement directly, but I would like to add that the movement has created anamosity against sex workers in Ukraine, despite it not being their fault the tenants were evicted and they’re just trying to make a living. I was referring exclusively to the slurs like “whore” and “prostitue” they use against women how work is sexualized but not even sex industry jobs. Not to mention that FEMEN hasn’t even taken an organization-wide stance on weather they support sex workers, which is a pretty good indicator they don’t.