Anthropology of East Europe Review 29(2) Fall 2011 153 

Pictures from the Margins: Disability and Difference in Post-
Socialist Art 
Olia Bueva, Indiana University 
 

Introduction 

 

The struggles for equitable and respectful representation have been at the center of 

disability movements’ efforts in post-Socialist states, affecting disabled men’s and women’s 

experiences and encounters in society.  In mass media and art people whose bodies deviate from 

the norm have remained largely invisible or marginalized through reductive social and cultural 

stereotypes.  For women the struggle for respectful and inclusive representation has been 

especially urgent due to their more frequent subjection to stereotypes representing women with 

disabilities as deviations from particular sets of normative femininity (Nead 1992:77). 

This analysis involves a study of a diverse body of works by East-European and some 

Western artists that can be conceived of as examples possibly forming an inclusive 

representational system that acknowledges difference and creates representational space for 

women (variously identified and diversely socially located) whose bodies deviate from the 

cultural norm and who are rarely portrayed as beautiful, feminine or desirable.  While much of 

the work discusses disability in the post-Socialist context, the notion of disability here is 

conceptualized very broadly and includes diverse, differently embodied persons, who 

traditionally are excluded from representations conferring beauty and aesthetics.  This paper 

examines diverse representations of various bodies’ transgressions of the classical ideal, 

including those bodies transformed by age, disease, excessive fat, as well as those “disfigured” 

by amputations or limited mobility.  Following Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s (1996, 2000, 

2009) approach to understanding disability, in the paper representations of persons that are 

classified as disabled (e.g. impaired or “handicapped”) share the discursive representational 

space with those “disfigured” by scars, deformities, age, etc., who were deemed in-valid for 

signifying aesthetically pleasing corporeality. 

This discussion draws particular attention to the activist potential of authoritative cultural 

spaces of display, such as the gallery or the museum, which as a critical space of social agency 

can and have been effectively mobilized in challenging medicalized and individualized ways of 

seeing disability and corporeal difference (Sandell 2006) by subverting cultural assumptions of 

aesthetics, normative embodiment and hegemonic femininity.  Museums, as cultural sites 

possessing constitutive and generative power (i.e. the potential to shape, rather than simply 

reflect social relations and realities), have historically often reproduced and shaped dominant 

(negative) understandings of difference, by excluding and marginalizing (through elision) or by 

constructing representations that are reductive, essentializing, discriminatory or oppressive 

(Sandell 2006:139).  Considering the productive potential of authoritative public spaces of 

display, a radical rethinking of museums and galleries as spaces for social agency would inform 

new activist strategies to employ exhibition-making and representation to construct new 

respectful narratives of disability as a meaningful element of humanity.  Thus, museums might 

also operate as sites of intervention that “confront, undercut, or reshape dominant regimes of 

representation that underpin and inform contemporary attitudes towards disability” (Sandell 

2006:139).  Acknowledging the importance and mediating power of images and the insufficiency 

of empowering artistic representations of female corporeal difference, this project attempts to 



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154 

locate, analyze and contextualize art works from various post-Socialist states that could 

potentially serve as a foundation and inspiration for a respectful and inclusive representational 

regime. 

 

Representing Disability in Post-Socialism 

 

Representations of disability mediate the relations between people with disabilities and 

able-bodied people, affecting and shaping the ways that marginalized and structurally 

constrained persons with disabilities are able to negotiate their positions in society (see Sandell 

2010; Barnes 1992).  Conceived as constitutive and reflective of the various ways of seeing and 

talking about disability (Sandell and Dodd: 3), cultural representations of difference and 

impairment are a critical site for activism and social advocacy for various actors invested in 

transforming social relations and cultural constructs that normalize the intricate mechanisms of 

exclusion pervasive in post-Socialist societies.  In a context of divergent competing interests 

between the state, market, people with disabilities community and other social actors, 

representations and cultural constructions of disability play a critical role in the ways that 

advocacy groups are able to legitimate claims and mobilize support for improving the economic 

and social status of persons with disabilities. 

The post-Socialist collective archetypal image of a disabled person in popular media and 

collective imaginary was, to a large extent, informed by Soviet portrayals of disability, especially 

in literature and film, which generally featured representations of men with impairments who, 

through moral virtue and stoicism, despite their physical deficiency, managed to overcome 

restricted mobility and social stigma associated with disability (Iarskaia-Smirnova and Romanov 

2006:229-230).  In positive portrayals of persons with physical impairments, disability often 

rhetorically overlapped with the loss and subsequent recovery of acceptable masculinity, leaving 

women with disabilities at the margins of public portrayals of corporeal difference.  The Soviet 

representational regime—in which people with disabilities body was troped as deficient, but 

capable of transcending lack of mobility through moral virtue, physical endurance and political 

engagement—traditionally excluded positive or respectful representations of women with 

disabilities, since femininity and disability occupied the same discursive space, and both often 

were associated with pity, personal tragedy, pain and inadequacy (Iarskaia-Smirnova and 

Romanov 2006:230). 

These stereotypical representations of persons with disabilities as either recipients of 

charity or venerable heroes (Phillips 2011:152) have significantly informed the repertoires of 

disability in the post-Socialist representational economy.  Analyzing the Ukrainian media – one 

of the principle sites where people encounter representations of people with disabilities, 

anthropologist Sarah D. Phillips identifies four main, at times overlapping genres of portraying 

disability: the Symbolic, which employs disability as a lens to shed light on social problems; the 

Sensational, characterized by grotesque representations, focusing on the “shocking details” of 

one person’s physical and intellectual anomalies; the Critical, articulating disability in context of 

social inequalities and wrongs which evidence the state’s inadequacy in defending the rights of 

marginalized groups; and the Personalizing, using personal profiles of persons with disabilities to 

construct individual, yet relatable narratives of difference, marginalization or overcoming 

(Phillips 2011:147-152).  While these genres are not always negative, the sensationalizing visual 

rhetoric and at times melodramatic portrayal of disability, cutting across all registers of the 

representational idioms in post-Socialist media, reproduce reductive and stereotypical cultural 



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constructions of disability that propagate and normalize dichotomous conceptions of corporeal 

normativity and difference.  Embedded in these diverse accounts of disability are contrasting 

visual tropes ranging from pitiable to heroic that populate the discursive space of people with 

disabilities body with at times contradictory and at times overlapping semiotic connections 

between disability and personal tragedy, failed masculinity or femininity, helplessness, 

immaturity and dependence on charity and benevolence of others.   

The gender dimensions of these representations are clearly rendered in Iarskaia-

Smirnova’s and Phillips’s discussions, which find that that women are more likely to be 

portrayed as recipients of charity and victims of personal or familial tragedy.  While men are 

more likely to figure as activists or public actors that have managed to overcome the barriers 

posed by their limited mobility (e.g. disability rights activists or paralympic athletes), with few 

exceptions, representations of women with disabilities mostly dwell on personal misfortune and 

emphasize themes of lost or found love, failed or fulfilled motherhood (Phillips 2011:151).  

Positioned and examined primarily in the context of the private sphere or familial relationships, 

women with disabilities in popular media rarely figure as independent, politically involved 

agents–a feature that reifies the discursive overlap between popular constructions of disability 

and femininity, both associated with physical frailty and dependence.  Although this connection, 

constructed through media profiles of women with disabilities, in some regards alleviates the 

stigma of disability and the implied status of dependence on state welfare, it further delegitimizes 

women’s claims to employment and motherhood: gendered expectations and attitudinal and 

structural barriers translate into very limited job opportunities and concomitant questioning of 

their roles as adequate reproducers and care-givers (Iarskaia-Smirnova 2009: 71-72; Phillips 

2011:180-182).  

The overall disabling collective image of impaired women is also complicated by the 

increased popularity of nationalism and neofamilialism, which configure women primarily as 

reproducers of the nation, thus rhetorically placing women with disabilities outside the realms of 

acceptable citizenship.  Considering the politics of gender in post-Socialist Eastern Europe, 

Susan Gal and Gail Kligman (2000a, 2000b) argue that constraints on reproduction (though in 

this case not normative, but rather symbolic) serve to define who is a proper member of the 

state’s populace: “citizens” are in many cases recognized as deserving of that title, and of the set 

of attendant “rights,” by their display of particular forms of state-sanctioned, legally acceptable, 

usually reproductive sexuality.  And conversely, the reproduction of citizens is seen as 

beneficial, judicious and necessary for the future, while the reproduction of those not recognized 

as such is seen as dangerous, out of control and polluting (Gal and Kligman 2000a:23).  Thrust to 

the margins of society by nationalist, profamilialist rhetoric, in post-Socialist states women with 

disabilities increasingly find themselves in a double bind: scrutinized as acceptable reproducers, 

they do not conform to the ideal model of proper citizenship; then they are further marginalized 

by an overall disabling socio-economic environment. 

The post-Communist social politics—in part informed by marketization, the spread of 

neoliberal ideals and neo-familialism—bring the divergent interests of citizens with and without 

disabilities upfront, simultaneously complicating the gender dynamic in terms of access to social 

services and opportunities that people with disabilities have.  Globalization and neoliberal 

reforms in Eastern Europe and Russia resulted in a radical rearticulating of state-citizen relations 

in post-Socialist states, disproportionately affecting the more vulnerable segments of society, 

including people with disabilities. The neoliberal project in Eastern Europe led to a significant 

shrinking of social safety nets and the privatization of responsibilities previously allocated to the 



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156 

state or other collectives, radically transforming the role of the state as the principal provider of 

goods and services and guarantor of access to healthcare, leaving citizens without support 

systems that were previously in place (Phillips 2011:6).  

While practically all persons with disabilities were rendered vulnerable by the overall 

marketization and economic liberalization, women with disabilities in post-Socialist states were 

especially adversely affected by the shift in social politics.  Iarskaia-Smirnova’s analysis of the 

hardships and social stigma that women with disabilities encounter in Russia demonstrates that 

the allocation of financial aid to persons with disabilities is informed by ideological 

presuppositions about the “worth” of disabled recipients of assistance and services: the system of 

economic redistribution in Russia demonstrates a clear privileging of war veterans or those 

disabled as a result of work-related injuries (who are predominantly male), while women are 

systematically disadvantaged in the sphere of social security.  According to the same study, 

women are also significantly discriminated against on the job market due to specific restrictions 

and systems of benefits that the employer has to contend with, as well as stereotypical 

perceptions of women with disabilities as unfit for work (Iarskaia-Smirnova 2009).  

The overall precarious position of women with disabilities in post-Socialist contexts is 

further complicated and amplified by a pervasive and aggressive sexualization and 

commodification of female bodies and sex in popular media.  Discussing the emergence of 

pornography in post-Socialist Russia as industry and genre, Eliot Borenstein argues that the 

“pornographication of the mainstream” (term used by Brian McNair to describe the process of 

imagery once considered exclusively pornographic trickling down into everyday culture) in 

Russia was simultaneous with the (re)appearance of pornography as a distinct category.  Since 

there was no time lag between the arrival of porn and the pornographication of culture at large, 

pornography became a privileged locus for worries about cultural change (2008: 56).  In the 

context of the allegorical function of this genre in the national system of symbols and meanings 

as well as the traditional gendering of national(ist) discourses in Russia,  pornography in Russia 

significantly reflected and overlapped with nationalist rhetoric regarding the country’s loss of 

superpower status.  Inherent to this gendered dynamic, “even a cursory glance at Russian porn 

confirms an almost ritualistic objectification and subordination of women, but when the men 

who produced these words and images reflected on their work, it was the Russian male whom 

they presented as weak and embattled.  In the textual and visual two-dimensional world of the 

Russian pornographic magazine, Russian men saw themselves fighting back against national and 

sexual humiliation” (Borenstein 2008: 63).  Embedded in the gendered distribution of social 

roles and functions, women, as meaningful social and cultural agents, and their individual 

experiences as citizens, are rendered contingent and ultimately irrelevant to the construction of 

the national narrative of self-perception and representation.   

The rise of nationalist rhetoric and this distinctly gendered function of female bodies in 

the post-Socialist national imaginary have fundamentally impacted women’s (disabled as well as 

able-bodied) possibilities for meaningful agency as cultural and socio-economic subjects. The 

new post-Socialist socio-economic, cultural and symbolic landscapes have increasingly created 

barriers for women’s opportunities for meaningful agency and full citizenship, oftentimes 

articulating normative femininity in reductive and highly traditional and prescriptive terms, 

positioning them as either embodiments of culturally acceptable (reproductive and desirable) 

femininity or metaphorical receptacles of social ills and anxieties (the broken, permeable body of 

the woman in a pornographic image).  The relatively rigid configuration of the boundaries of 

normative femininity in the post-Socialist context suggests a discursive overlap and 



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157 

interconnectedness between issues of representation of femininity and disability, confirming 

Garland Thomson’s assertion that “a firm boundary between “disabled” and “nondisabled” 

women cannot be meaningfully drawn” (1997: 27).  Consequently, the issues of representation of 

disabled femininity have to necessarily address and question culturally constructed formations of 

gender and hegemonic femininity. The frequent discursive equation of women’s disability with 

the loss of acceptable femininity are evident in cultural perceptions of impairment or corporeal 

difference and the harsh socio-economic realities that women have to face in day-to-day 

encounters with society.  In part constitutive of the pervasive inequalities characteristic to post-

Socialist societies, the gender dynamics in representations of female disability in popular culture 

often locate women with disabilities outside the realm of acceptable citizenship and femininity, 

compromising their position as social actors and negatively influencing their ability to articulate 

and legitimate their claim for recognition and access to employment opportunities, economic 

security and social services. 

 

Disability and/as Inequality: the Violence of the Margins 

 

The exploration of the potential collective archetypal image of a disabled body in popular 

media and collective imaginary in Russia and Ukraine, which locates people with disabilities on 

the margins of culture and society, marked by his or her insurmountable lack due to deficient 

corporeality, demonstrates that representation matters.  The broader struggle of disability rights 

groups in Eastern Europe includes discussions around representations and public portrayals of 

people with disabilities’ bodies (see Iarskaia-Smirnova 2009; Phillips 2011), which, while 

having diffuse and difficult-to-trace effects on the public discourse around disability, in many 

ways influenced people with disabilities’ lives and determined the ways in which they were able 

engage with the world.  The struggle to influence dominant representations of disability as either 

a mark of deviance, personal tragedy or overcoming impairment, pervasive in post-Socialist 

media (Phillips 2011:147-154), is part of a larger initiative amongst disability rights groups and 

disability studies scholars to change popular cultural conceptions of disability.  Aware of 

characteristic oscillation between “enfreakment”
1
 and utter invisibility of differently embodied 

persons in the spheres of representation traditionally associated with beauty and aesthetics, 

various disability rights advocacy groups strive to provide accounts of disability as typical or 

ordinary (Phillips  2011:152-153; Iarskaia-Smirnova and Romanov 2009:230-231), 

conceptualizing disability as a form of identity, and emphasizing the humanity and individual 

experience of embodiment.  Concerns about portrayals of disability are evident in the growing 

number of various public performances, art exhibitions, happenings and public commentaries, 

which by making explicit and meaningful the existing relations and deep similarities between the 

able-bodied and people with disabilities in experiencing life and embodiment, emphasize the 

individual worth of persons with disabilities and attempt to assert their worth as citizens.  Among 

the most prominent and publicized events are the international disability film festivals like 

Breaking Down Barriers (Moscow), which feature diverse visual accounts about disability 

through different genres and various cultural contexts; art exhibitions like Photos that Do Not 

Suffice (Moscow) that present original, emotional and nuanced narratives of disability; and 

yearly beauty contests, sports and dancing competitions.  An almost total absence of Russian and 

East European artists from these cultural events and a pronounced marginalization and almost 

complete invisibility of women at these initiatives are some of the alarming features of the 

contemporary post-Socialist art scene.  With few exceptions, most exhibitions and festivals 



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158 

exploring disability are dominated by foreign artists, while local representations of disability 

continue to be informed by old Soviet films and literature and the contemporary media. 

The current politics of representation, constructed through the competing and mutually 

constitutive discourses of popular conceptions of disability and the awareness-raising work of 

disability rights groups, are, in part, informed by the previously mentioned shift towards 

marketization and spread of neoliberal ideals.  The social model of disability, which defines 

disability in terms of social oppression, social relations and social barriers (Shakespeare 2006, 

Altman 2001, Williams 2001), is in tension with neoliberalism and calls for meaningful social 

change and re-conceptualization of the role of the state and society in insuring equal access and 

providing equal opportunity for participation.  While provoking significant resistance due to its 

ideological overlap with the Soviet state-imposed functional approach (Phillips 2011:83), the 

social model conceives of disability as socially constructed and related to pervasive and deep-

rooted inequalities, and normalized by social relations that articulate normativity and privilege 

by creating various taxonomies signifying difference and stabilizing the rigid boundary between 

able-bodiedness and disability.  Discussing disability as a rhetorical structure that sustains the 

intricate systems of exclusions and power relations that reify the able-bodied/disabled binary, 

Rosemarie Garland Thomson argues that the disabled body, constructed as the embodiment of 

corporeal insufficiency and marked by insurmountable otherness, becomes a repository of social 

anxieties about such troubling concerns as vulnerability, control and identity (Garland Thomson 

1997: 6).  The various taxonomies created to define and describe corporeal difference sustain the 

dichotomy between normal and deviant corporeality by comparing individual bodies to a set of 

unstated, but determining norms, arising from cultural expectations of how human beings should 

look and act (Garland Thomson 1997:6-7).  Consequently, the meanings attributed to disabled 

bodies are informed by social relationships in which “one group is legitimated by possessing 

valued physical characteristics and maintains its ascendancy and its self-identity by 

systematically imposing the role of cultural or corporeal inferiority on others.  Representation 

thus simultaneously buttresses an embodied version of normative identity and shapes a narrative 

of corporeal difference that excludes those whose bodies or behaviors do not conform” (Garland 

Thomson 1997:7). 

 The constructed nature and the embedded power asymmetry of dominant 

representational economies that conceived of disability in terms of deviance have been 

historically normalized and reified by the politics and poetics of museums’ exhibition practices, 

which articulated traditional old master representations of the body as a corporeal ideal, 

structuring popular understandings of what was perceived as beautiful, desirable and whole.  In 

view of the ostensibly self-evident value of cultural ideals of body normativity, inclusive, diverse 

and respectful representations of disability must necessarily make legible the power dynamic and 

gendered components of classical constructions of aesthetics and ideal corporeality, engaging 

with the classical canon in a way that interrogates and subverts the normative nature of 

traditional Aristotelian conception of beauty.  

The formation of evaluative frameworks of normative embodiment, based on cultural 

dichotomies, are premised on the articulation of the disabled body as inevitably marked and 

contrasted with the “normal” body, conceived as universal.  This dichotomous articulation of 

difference reifies Cartesian formulations of identity, where disability is emphatically corporeal 

and overwhelmingly defined by its lack while able-bodiedness transcends the limits of 

corporeality.  The Cartesian principle, characteristic to dominant ways of conceiving disability, 

is intrinsic to various traditional discourses of the body in western culture, especially classical 



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high art, where the nude (traditionally female) connotes “Art,” symbolizing a representational 

idiom and cultural canon with distinct and clearly defined aesthetic parameters.  In classic art, 

the body of the object of representation (typically gendered female) is rhetorically separated 

from the mind and personal character, the artist (traditionally gendered male) being the sole 

producer of meaning.  

The issue of corporeal norm in art is especially critical for investigating gender dynamics 

in representing difference, making classical representations of the female body a rich terrain for 

locating similarities and intersections between normativity, articulated through societal 

representations of corporeal deviance, and the classical female nude, which transcends 

corporeality and erases difference and diversity of embodiments of femininity.  In the classical 

representational canon the articulation of notions of aesthetics and female beauty is 

concomitantly accompanied by an annihilation of female subjectivity, whereby individual 

experience of embodiment, personhood and character become irrelevant to the representation, 

the contours of a beautiful female body being continuously examined and evaluated against an 

artistic ideal.  Exploring the trajectory of the specific aesthetic norms structuring the 

representation of the female body in western art, Lynda Nead argues that the pivotal feature in 

the construction of the nude is corporeal containment, realized through strategic and canonized 

deployment of forms, conventions and poses that metaphorically regulate and structure the body 

(1992:5-12).  Modeled after the Aristotelian aesthetic of classical ideals of symmetry and definite 

form, the western language of aesthetics articulates the nude as sealed and static, with fixed 

limits of corporeality, displaying and discursively reproducing the boundaries dividing the inside 

from the outside, the subject from the object, and the mind from the body (Nead 1992:6-14).   

The neoclassicist representational canon (derivative from classical or old master art) and 

traditional art criticism is discursively rooted in the civilizational rhetoric of Enlightenment, 

which stabilizes the distinctions between the cultured and the profane. Intrinsic to that taxonomy, 

the neoclassicist aesthetic also distinguishes between nude and naked, where differences between 

the two categories are conceptualized in terms of lack and vulnerability versus containment and 

regulation, presenting the naked body as “huddled and defenseless” and the nude as “clothed 

with art” (Nead 1992:14).  Nead argues that in classical art the nude transcends corporality by 

means of a unified formal language (ibid., 22), forming and solidifying the “frame” around the 

field of art, culture and acceptable artistic expression. The civilizational thrust and regulatory 

function of the classical representational canon results in the reproduction of pervasive gendered 

dichotomies that articulate civilization and aesthetics by means of constructing the inassimilable 

category of “other”—the unshapely unfeminine naked body, cast outside culture and artistic 

representation—thus propagating the exclusion and invisibility of those bodies marked as 

deviating from the ideal. By placing the naked body (marked by corporeal identity and individual 

experience of embodiment) outside the realm of cultural representation, classical art connotes 

difference and diversity as inassimilable and irrelevant to the project of art (Nead 1992:19, 22, 

27).  In the context of the overwhelming resonance and authority of classical representational 

regimes, women with diseased, disabled or obese bodies are unfit for representation precisely 

because of their gender: by embodying difference, they transgress the acceptable and fixed 

bounds of femininity encapsulated by the nude.  Thus, society and the classical representational 

canon render the body of the disabled woman, marked by difference, doubly unfit, casting it 

outside the realm of acceptable femininity and subjecthood.   

In this context of normalized and entrenched mechanisms of exclusion embedded in the 

culturally accepted evaluative frameworks, the issues of femininity and disability have to be 



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160 

considered and deconstructed in tandem.  As mentioned in the previous section, Garland 

Thomson argues that cultural narratives of femininity and disability often discursively overlap, 

being “inextricably entangled in patriarchal culture, as Aristotle’s equation of women with 

disabled men illustrates” (1997: 27).  Garland Thomson suggests that, historically, practices of 

femininity have configured female bodies similarly to disability, in that the disciplinary regimes 

of feminine beauty often obscure the seemingly self-evident categories of “normal” and 

“pathological”: the nineteenth century ideal of upper-class female beauty – pale skin, emaciated 

body, wide eyes – strikingly parallels symptoms of tuberculosis, just as the cult of thinness today 

mimics the appearance of disease (1997: 27).   

Related to this binary, the Aristotelian female ideal overlapped with the nineteenth 

century scientific discourse of the body, which conceived the anatomical scale of beauty as 

simultaneously one of pathology: “the further a female body departed from absolute beauty, the 

more “abnormal” it became” (1997: 28).   As one manifestation of the unbeautiful woman, the 

figure of the woman with disabilities disrupts the oppositional paradigms of disabled and non-

disabled femininity.  Consequently, while experiences of disabled and able-bodied women in 

society can be vastly different and contingent (both within and outside/between the two 

categories), the discursive overlap of the two groups in the cultural vernacular suggests the 

paramount interconnectedness of issues of gender and hegemonic femininity with female 

disability, evidencing the pivotal role of interrogating representations and cultural constructions 

of gender in contexts of resituating and reconstructing portrayals of disability in empowering 

ways.  

 

Of Gods and Freaks: Women outside the Gaze and Bodies in Transition  

 

The classical aesthetic ideal and the Cartesian conception of the body are a fundamental 

component of the Eastern European cultural episteme, informing the ways that concepts of 

beauty and normative embodiment are constructed.  Legible to across geographies on both sides 

of the phantasmal Iron curtain, the defining elements of the classical and neoclassicist 

representational canon have been internalized and theorized as to a large degree constitutive of 

art in Russia and Eastern Europe.   Forming a critical component of interpretational frames used 

in assigning value, Aristotelian aesthetics and classical ideals of femininity significantly overlap 

with ideas of aesthetically pleasing, desirable female corporeality. 

In conjunction with relatively rigid configurations of hegemonic femininity, cultural 

ideals of beauty and aesthetics render women in post-Socialist states particularly vulnerable to 

stigmatization and marginalization.  According to Sarah D. Phillips, in Ukraine, parallel to the 

revival of traditional norms of femininity, globalization and increasing emphasis on consumption 

as a marker of success and identity, Barbie, as the embodiment of desirable standards of beauty 

and sexuality, has become a one of the most influential models of femininity.  Phillips argues 

that standards of beauty, which emphasize physical appearance and possession of a perfect body 

as a measure of women’s worth, are “especially problematic for women with disabilities, whose 

different physique and limitations in movement place them well outside the range of what is 

considered beautiful and desirable, or even acceptable” (Phillips 2011:181). 

Concomitant with the culturally normalized practices of marginalizing disfigured women 

and subjecting them to disabling and reductive stereotypes, the overt and emphatic sexualization 

of female bodies in the post-Socialist representational landscape widens the culturally 

constructed gap between normalcy and deviance.  As noted, analyzing the evolution of the 



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161 

discourse of sex in post-Socialist Russia, Eliot Borenstein argues that after the fall of the Soviet 

Union, Russian culture in all its manifestations has become thoroughly and overtly sexualized.  

While most evident in “lowbrow” media, sex and erotic imagery have become integral to print 

media, radio and television programming through advertising, where “scantily clad women moan 

the names of the latest indispensable consumer gadget” (2000: 55).  Blatant sexualization of the 

media along with commodification and normalization of erotic imagery in public discourse 

further problematize issues of disabled visibility, implicitly resulting in female disabled bodies’ 

symbolic oscillation between exclusion and “enfreakment.” Traditionally viewed as not ideal 

reproducers or embodiment of desirable or even acceptable femininity, women with disabilities’ 

sexuality is either marginalized and excluded as unacceptable and deviant or, alternatively, 

fetishized and incorporated into the booming and rapidly expanding representational idiom of 

pornography.    

Embedded in the operational logic of representational canons and gendered public 

perceptions of disability, women in post-Socialist societies have been subject to multiple forms 

of discrimination, cast into the margins of society and public visibility by the multiple 

mechanisms of exclusion, these legitimated by ostensibly self-evident and naturalized 

assumptions about disability and gender embedded in post-Socialist imaginings of the social 

contract.  The fact that representation matters and that the dominant representational canons are 

gendered, disproportionally affecting women’s experience of disability and difference, speaks of 

the incommensurability of current representational regimes in post-Socialist states and the 

urgency in transforming popular perceptions of women with disabilities through representations 

that make visible the constructed nature of disability and reductive articulations of femininity.  

By critiquing classical conceptions of beauty and asserting the volatility and constructed nature 

of gender, contemporary feminist art has the potential to subvert gender expectations, creating 

terrains for inclusive representational economies that recognize difference and conceptualize the 

body as inscribed by culture and in a state of continuous redefinition and change. 

Thus, progressive representations of disability are inevitably concerned with gender as a 

social construct, challenging not only public perceptions of able-bodiedness, but also 

conceptions of normative femininity and sexuality, strategically deploying reductive and 

patriarchal articulations of desirable womanhood to subvert exploitative representations of 

women and to create spaces for difference, individual experience of embodiment and 

subjectivity.  Corporeal difference, conceived broadly, can constitute a distinct position and 

subjectivity that can be used to create alternative narratives of corporeality and femininity, 

opening cultural spaces for rethinking beauty and able-bodiedness (Phillips 2011:168-169).  In 

view of the intrinsic discursive connections between disability and femininity a radical 

rethinking of the representations of disability involves a visual re-conceptualization of issues of 

gender and femininity in the post-Socialist cultural imaginary as a whole.  

The complex and often uneven effort of feminist artists in post-Socialist spaces to 

transform cultural constructions of gender repertoires and social relations between men and 

women has to a large degree been informed by their resistance to cultural stereotypes produced 

by the overlapping and mutually constitutive influence of the previously discussed classical 

ideals of aesthetics and femininity and the pervasive commodification and sexualization of 

female bodies in popular media.  For instance, Russian feminist artist Elena Kovylina’s (b. 1971) 

performance Pick a Girl (2006), where viewers are asked to remove the surgical needles used by 

the artist to affix magazine images of pin-up girls directly into her body, can be seen as 

representative of the popular trends in post-Socialist contemporary feminist art, which frequently 



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162 

politicizes the sexualized and exploited female bodies in popular culture.
2
  Inspired by Yoko 

Ono’s Cut Piece, the title of the project (“Snimite devochku”) implicitly suggests the action of 

“picking up” a prostitute.  Reacting to certain socio-political realities in Russia, specifically 

blatant sexualization of post-Socialist culture and commodification of sex, Kovylina makes 

explicit the connection between representation and individual experience of corporeal pain: 

collapsing the abstract, gratuitously sexualized object of representation and corporeal pain of the 

artist’s performative body, she attempts to reconstruct the individual subjectivity of the cut-out 

pinups hitherto invisible and symbolically removed.   

Evident in Kovylina’s work and characteristic to many other feminist artists in post-

Socialist states, progressive gender-conscious art works react to and resist the power dynamics 

produced by classical aesthetics, local constructions of gender normativity, and sexualization of 

culture, thus significantly overlapping with western methodologies of feminist art.  While Pick a 

Girl is in dialogue with Yoko Ono’s famous piece, it also reacts to the social and cultural 

realities of post-Socialism: commenting on the social context of the piece, Kovylina explicitly 

connected the piece with experiences of gender and sexuality in Russia, suggesting that “the 

spectre of communism became a spectre of prostitution” (kovylina.com).  

 Despite the ostensible transnationalism of Kovylina’s piece, Pick a Girl is semantically 

multivalent and diversely legible in different contexts.    Though it is reasonable to read the piece 

as another one in a series of critiques of prostitution and commodification of the female body, in 

view of the long history of symbolic and metonymical functions that the body of the prostitute 

acquired in Russian cultural mythology, Pick a Girl can be interpreted as commentary on the 

new symbolic function that the figure of the prostitute has been burdened with.  Eliot Borenstein 

argues that the symbolic post-Soviet prostitute has become “a sign of Russian national 

humiliation – of the desperation of a country forced to sell off its natural and spiritual resources 

to unscrupulous clients from other lands” (2008: 79).  At the same time, “despite this pervasive 

feminization of the country on the symbolic level … the Russian prostitute symbolized national 

humiliation as male, rather than female experience” (2008: 79-80).  In the context of the 

pervasive objectification (real and symbolic) of the female body, Kovylina’s work can be 

interpreted as an attempt to insert female subjectivity into the predominantly male national 

narrative.  By juxtaposing the real, embodied girl and the inanimate cut-out girls for “pick up,” 

the artist calls attention to the fact that in the post-Socialist representational landscape women, as 

agents, have been silenced and have become irrelevant to the narrative, serving as abject 

receptacles of national anxieties and fears of humiliation.  

Similarly, the works and writings of the Russian feminist artist Anna Alchuk (1955-2008) 

engage with the works and discourses of classical as well as contemporary feminist art, while 

explicitly calling attention to and commenting on the women’s social and economic positions 

and experiences in contemporary Russian society.  Working from a distinctly feminist position 

and asserting the close interrelation between what is often labeled as western feminist discourse 

and real lived experiences of women in Russia, her works avoid ghettoization by engaging with 

feminist art theory used across “eastern” and “western” art contexts, while actively calling 

attention to the local gender dynamics.
3
  The artist’s photo series Double Game (1995), 

consisting of sixteen pairs of photographs of a man and a woman in identical clothing assuming 

identical poses, arranged in a particular order, show “a gradual shift from extreme ‘femininity’ 

via androgyny to extreme ‘masculinity’” (Alchuk 2011:227).  Intertextually referencing Cindy 

Sherman’s representations (as well as perceptions and experiences) of gender and femininity as 

emphatically performative, Alchuk’s project makes visible “how the photographic medium, 



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props, makeup, and clothing all helped to deconstruct the capital-F femininity and capital-M 

masculinity” (Alchuk 2011:227), but by using distinctly post-Socialist cultural markers, 

parodying the “chap and nasty pornography of the perestroika period” (ibid., 228).   

A precursor to Double Game, the artist’s earlier installation A Maiden’s Toy (1994), 

consists of six photographs of the torsos of six male authors of the Moscow art scene, modeled 

after the famous image of Venus de Milo, and the sculpture of Venus’s head, positioned in front 

of the images and contemplating the headless, armless male bodies.   Evident in the gendered 

repositioning of the viewer’s gaze and object of contemplation, the artist attempts to satirically 

reverse the gaze through a humorous gender inversion of the dynamic characteristic to the 

Russian contemporary art scene.  The artist notes that while the technique of self-“exotization” 

or self-“othering” was a typical trend in the 1990s conceptual art scene, which promoted cultural 

self-display “from the outside,” a similar deconstruction of the gaze involving gender reversal 

provoked significant resistance and unease from both the viewership as well as the male 

participants in the project (Alchiuk 2011:227).   

While A Maiden’s Toy evidences the pervasive cultural authority of not only classical and 

neoclassicist ideals of feminine beauty but also the embedded and culturally internalized 

gendered dynamic of producing and consuming art, the project also serves as an important 

critique of the cultural constructions of and discursive overlaps between acceptable repertoires of 

femininity and disability.  The intertextually referenced Venus de Milo, in Alchuk’s work 

functioning simultaneously as a feminine ideal and amputee (in Alchuk’s words “a defenseless 

female body with no arms to cover her nakedness”), in a situation of gender reversal reveals the 

hitherto obscured and ostensibly self-evident cultural construction of ideal femininity in art, 

where defenselessness and passivity have historically become a desired feature of the female 

object of representation.  The rhetorical overlap between disability (a cultural construction here, 

alas, not scrutinized) and femininity, along with questioning the gendered process of consuming 

art, demonstrates the utter absence of female subjectivity and agency in the production of 

meanings in relation to art.  Echoing Borenstein’s assertion that the female body in the post-

Socialist sexualized cultural imaginary functions exclusively as a symbol of male nationalist 

anxieties and fears of loss of masculinity (Borenstein 2008:63), Alchuk’s piece directs the 

viewer’s attention to the cultural construction of ideal femininity as defenseless, objectified and 

incapable of producing meaning.  The reversal of the gaze, however, does not dismantle the 

voyeurism and exploitation; rather, it disrupts the previously normalized narrative ties: as 

Liudmila Bredihina notes, in the pseudo-museum space of Alchuk’s installation, the “‘carriers of 

meaning’–women are not willing to, and ‘producers of meaning’–men cannot function in a 

traditional fashion.
4
” By subverting the gendered dynamic of the representational canon, 

Alchuk’s project scrutinizes the typical representation of women in the post-Socialist context as 

abstract carriers of meaning, deprived of individual voice and subjectivity.   

The pervasive discursive and semiotic overlaps between disability and femininity in the 

post-Socialist representational economy strongly suggest that socially engaged art needs to 

necessarily address issues of culturally normalized and socially reproduced constructions of 

acceptable femininity and disability and difference simultaneously and as mutually constitutive.  

Asserting that mass culture is masculine by definition, aiming to “pervade our consciousness 

with the idea that its symbolic images are natural,” Anna Alchuk argues that the role of the artist 

is to constantly challenge that notion (2011:232).  Discussing the reductiveness and violence of 

the Cartesian conceptualization of the body as explicitly separate from the mind, Elizabeth Grosz 

argues that developing alternative accounts of the body that defy its containment within the 



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spheres of biology and life sciences, would allow for alternative ways of thinking outside the 

binary frameworks that the knowledges of the body traditionally operate in (Grosz 1994:20-24).  

A conscious departure from medicalized conceptions of normality is evident in Veronika 

Bromova’s work, which frequently employs transition and transformation as the crucial visual 

trope to destabilize assumptions of body integrity and portray embodiments of difference.   

Bromova (b. 1966) is a Czech artist who explores issues of gender and difference by 

using photography (which confers a level of realism) and computer alteration to create 

representations that are suggestive of a reality, but are not quite real. Her work thus creates a 

visual world of a super-reality that does not exist parallel to the real world, but is produced by 

the penetrating gaze of the artist who sees beyond the visible.  Thus the super-reality constructed 

in Bromova’s works is not an imaginary surrealist space, but a visual narrative created through 

deconstruction of social relations and stereotypical representations, the supernatural element 

functioning as a trope for defamiliarization. In Bromova’s works, irregular bodies that challenge 

Aristotelian aesthetics and ideas of body integrity subvert ideas of the unambiguous finality of 

transformation, thus opening new subjectivities, boundaries of physicality, corporeality, and 

widening repertoires of performance of gender.  

Bromova’s Girls Too (1994) is 

an exploration of corporeality at the 

borderlines of containment, a discussion 

of the body as being non-orientable, like 

the Mobius strip.  The conical 

arrangements of color planes in the 

image suggest finite movement. This 

terminality is counterbalanced by the  

anti-climatic arrangement of bodies that 

form a separate integral structure, 

destabilizing the overall direction of the 

flux. The sensuousness and sexual 

tension produced by the all-engulfing 

clash of red, blue and black creates an 

ambiguous space where Aristotelian 

containment is transgressed by multiple 

meshing of sexual, cultural and aesthetic signifiers, where sources of contamination are 

deliberately scattered. The source of trespass and nature of the transformation is unclear: is the 

starting point a woman or a man?  Instead the tension of the figures and the space they inhabit 

suggests an anti-progression, a continuous state of non-linear flux.  

Mary Douglas suggests that, the body’s boundaries cannot be separated from the work of 

other social and cultural boundaries. Consequently, “any structure of ideas is vulnerable at the 

margins. We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolize its especially vulnerable points” 

(Douglas 2002:121). The bodily deviation and ambiguity in Girls Too is a playful transgression 

of social boundaries, a troubling of a dichotomous conceptualization of the body, which 

articulates transition not as a teleology, but a state of being, a different kind of corporeal self-

sufficiency and integrity. The clash of bodies and colors does not erase sensuousness and 

sexuality: the perspective that the figures form suggests movement and change, but the 

ambiguity and hybridity of the starting point defies the familiar teleology of transformation of 



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one defined form into its opposite or, alternatively, evolution from conventional “A” to “B.”  The 

figure escapes polarity through flux without crossing over.  

While these works do not display disability as such, they are critical interventions in the 

representational landscape in Eastern Europe that push against the boundaries of accepted 

femininity.  In Bromova’s representation the body displays an awareness and tension with the 

classical canonic nudes, characterized by conventional, rigid and finite boundaries.  The bodies 

in the discussed pieces, deliberately marked as inassimilable into the classical ideal, interrogate 

the supposedly “universal” and self-evident authority of Aristotelian aesthetics of the sealed, 

finitely gendered and sexed body.  The subversive and open-ended articulations of femininity 

and sex in these works, while invoking the formal features of classical art, interrupt its function 

of assigning aesthetic value.  Though the bodies portrayed in Girls Too are not mutilated or 

impaired, they occupy the same discursive space as the bodies of persons with disabilities, 

carrying the weight of reductive and violent cultural articulations of gender, beauty and worth.  

The attention to this discursive overlap does not mean to trivialize the experience of disability, 

but rather call attention to the gendered nature and breadth of mechanisms of exclusions 

embedded in the dominant representations of the female body.  Bromova’s work in this context 

functions on several levels, demonstrating subversive and strategic ways of using classical art to 

undermine the traditional aesthetics in post-Socialist contemporary feminist art, emphasizing 

gender as a critical site of deconstruction, and creating new open-ended ways of seeing and 

conceiving of beauty and embodiment.   

 

The Body of Disease 

In the 1960s and 70s, the diseased female body, whose site of visibility was hitherto 

usually limited to medical atlases, became a popular and powerful subject in feminist art.  

Reflecting on the rhetorical overlap between desirable femininity and health, Lynda Nead argues 

that the images of the “imperfect” or incomplete female body can only be managed within 

consumer culture by rendering them invisible, or by subjecting them to generalized stereotypical 

narratives (1992:77).  Aware of such stereotypes and omissions, feminist artists like Mary Duffy, 

Jo Spence and Hannah Wilke used body and performance art to confront issues of gender, able-

bodiedness and representation.  Mobilizing the representational potential of body art, feminist 

artists in post-Socialist states continue to use the body and performance to produce resonant, 

emotional and personal accounts of disease and difference.  

Performance or body art, as a medium and genre, radically rethinks the traditional power 

dynamic specific to the production of the nude, where the artist and the viewer, both traditionally 

gendered male, create visual representations and examine the object of representation, usually 

gendered female.  In traditional old master painting canon, the nude genre presumes the presence 

of a male artist as the principal protagonist who, though always missing from the painting, is 

manifest through the regulating and disciplining effect of his gaze (Berger 1972).  The classical 

painting also is structured around the frame, used to shore up the female body, regulating the 

process of viewing and display, disciplining the viewer gaze and contouring the body of the 

nude, determining its interaction with the objects surrounding it.  Invoking Derrida’s discussion 

of the discourse on the frame, Lynda Nead argues that the definition of limits and frames 

determines not simply the meaning of art, but meaning as such (1992:7), where the frame 

symbolically fixes the limits of corporeality and acceptable femininity.  In conjunction with style 

and convention, the frame functions to “seal orifices [of the body] and to prevent marginal matter 



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from transgressing the boundary dividing the inside of the body and the outside, the self from the 

space of the other” (Nead 1992:6).   

In this context, the power relations specific to the process of creating and viewing the art, 

the regulating function of style and frame, and the clear distinction between the artist and object 

of representation determine the terms of engagement between the artist, the represented model 

and the viewer, establishing not only the style of representation but also what constitutes 

embodiment that is acceptable for public display.  Performance or body art became one of the 

most prominent mediums in feminist art precisely because it deconstructs and transforms the 

power relations characteristic to classical art production and viewing.  Amelia Jones argues that 

body art practices “enact subjects in passionate and convulsive relationships (often explicitly 

sexual) and thus exacerbate, perform, and/or negotiate the dislocating effects of social and 

private experience in the late capitalist, postcolonial Western world” (1998:1).  For Jones body 

art is a set of performative practices that through “intersubjective engagement, instantiate the 

dislocation of the Cartesian subject of modernism” (1998:1).  By transforming the relationship 

between the object of representation and the artist by collapsing the two categories and by 

allowing the performer/object of representation the possibility to stare back, body art can 

potentially create a space where the female body is in the position to produce meaning and assert 

its own subjectivity.   

 Similar to Western performance/body art, the beginning of body art in Eastern Europe 

goes back to the 1960s.  Along with greater pan-European artistic influence, such as 

performative practices in the works of Dadaists, Duchamp and Pollock, the development of East 

European body art was in part informed by the rich tradition of Russian futurists and 

Constructivists as well as the multiple local avant-garde movements from the beginning of the 

century (Badovinac 1999:13-14). Since levels of political repression and social isolation in 

Communist states varied, the visibility of and access to body art in various states was to different 

degrees limited, remaining confined to spaces bordering between public and private. For 

instance, in the 1970s and 80s, in Yugoslavia body art was relatively less isolated, and a 

significant culture of actions and rituals also developed in private apartments in Moscow, 

particularly in its suburbs (Badovinac 1999:14).  While displays of body art in Russia and 

Eastern Europe were generally confined to the local art scenes, the end of the 1980s and 

beginning of the 90s saw an introduction of eastern body art to the western art world, generally 

dictated by mostly male Russian artists, especially Erik Bulatov, Ilya Kabakov and Komar and 

Melamid, the representative type of eastern art being formed in the general atmosphere of the 

transition of art from modernist universalism to post-modernist particularism and, inherent to it, 

cultural identity politics (Badovinac 1999:14-15). 

 Despite the overall greater visibility of male artists in the landscape of East European and 

Russian body art, body art became the preferred genre of feminist artists in the east during 

communism and especially after the collapse of the iron curtain.  Displaying embodiment 

contrasting with the asexual and androgynous body of socialist realism, the ritual body of Marna 

Abramovic, the cosmological bodies of Natalia LL and Teresa Murak, the intimate body of Sanja 

Ivecovic, the erotic body of Vlasta Delimar, the body of Egle Rakauskaite, treated with honey 

and fat, or the disease-exhausted body of Katarzyna Kozyra, all represent the “liberation of the 

body,” pointing, perhaps indirectly, to “an active relationship with both society and nature” 

(Badovinac 1999:16).  The principal subversive function of feminist body art in Eastern Europe 

was the deliberate departure from the collective, abstract and ideologically burdened body, and 



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an emphatic favoring of representing autonomous and individualized accounts of personal 

experience of embodiment. 

 Body and performance art remains a preferred genre of Russian and East European 

artists, creating important opportunities to establish a dialogue with mainstream dominant culture 

(Kovylina 2000:30-31).  In the “Red Stocking” feminist art manifesto, Elena Knovylina declares 

that in Russia actionism and performance are the most adequate and resonant genres of art, 

requiring relatively little time and money investment, allowing artists to react to diverse 

situations and contexts with unparallel speed and precision, and leaving few traces and 

possibilities for documentation and incrimination.  Asserting that all material objects are subject 

to aging and have limited relevance across space and time, Kovylina argues that in contemporary 

society the body is the principal representational tool in the arsenal of the feminist artist: “the 

performative image, created corporeally and procedurally, directly translates the particularity 

(individual corporeal experience) of the female view: the body, mediated through movement, and 

the gesture authentically reflects the subjective world of the woman… the body, transformed 

through performance into an art-body, simultaneously becomes the image and the representation, 

the inside and the outside, the object and the subject” (Kovylina 2000:30-31).   

Due to its unique power to reassert female subjectivity and individualize embodiment, 

and since the experience of illness is emphatically corporeal, body art frequently has been used 

to portray disease, pain and loss in feminist art across various geographies.  Hannah Wilke’s 

(1940-1993) series Intra-Venus, a shocking and emotional visual narrative of her experience 

being treated for cancer that shows the artist’s body under the grip of disease, is an impressive 

example of the strategic use of what Amelia Jones calls “radical narcissism.”  Jones argues that 

in narcissism the distances between the artist and the object of representation are explicitly 

collapsed such that “the image is the self,” and the “borders of the frames of identity are 

imploded” (Jones 1998:180).  The images of Wilke’s disease transform the traditional process of 

art production and viewing by transgressing the Cartesian dualism between the body (object of 

representation) and the artist (the producer of the meaning associated with the represented body), 

strategically connecting, using Neads’s terms, the “inside” with the “outside,” placing her own 

experience of embodiment  center-stage.   

Katarzyna Kozyra’s (born in 1963 in Warsaw, Poland) series Olympias (1996), where the 

theme of disease, body decay and putridity intersect with desire and sexuality, employs an 

approach similar to Wilke’s narcissism, intentionally collapsing the division between the artist 

and the model.  The project Olympias consists of three large photographs accompanied by a 

video recording of Kozyra’s lymphoma-inflicted body during a chemotherapy treatment.  In the 

video the eye of the camera fluctuates from slow to neurotic, connoting fear, helplessness and 

violence; the artist’s body accepts the inflicted pain and violence in order to live.  The first 

photograph portrays Kozyra, bold and visibly affected by cancer, as Manet’s Olympia; the 

second shows her lying nude in a classical pose on a hospital bed with the figure of a doctor 

standing behind it; the third one depicts an old woman, sitting on an undone bed.   

 



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The deliberate reference to Manet’s Olympia functions on multiple levels, invoking the 

modernist system of meanings to critique and ultimately subvert the modernist representational 

economy.  Manet’s Olympia, a radically realistic depiction of a nude courtesan, was critiqued for 

blatantly displaying intersections between art, class and sexuality, which were scandalous for the 

expectations of the French salon in 1860.  Contrasting traditional classical nudes, which 

obscured and diluted sexuality and avoided any marks that would signify social status, Manet 

overtly displayed the model’s occupation, making explicit her class and sexuality.  However, the 

blatant commodification of sex and working class identity in Manet’s Olympia remain 

subversive only to the formal components of the classical art, leaving the position of the woman 

as lacking subjectivity and object of the viewer’s gaze intact.   

Kozyra invokes Manet’s work precisely due to its revolutionary role in transforming the 

western representational idiom, but does so to insert herself and her personal experience of pain 

and embodiment in the representation.  Olympia-Kozyra, embodying the artist and the model, 

returns the gaze not as an object of desire, but as the artist, who makes explicit and visible the 

formerly obscured eye of the viewer, indicating reciprocity of staring.  Along with deliberate 

insertion of subjectivity, Kozyra’s self-representation adds another layer of meaning to the 

sexualized and classed Manet’s Olympia: the concentration camp aesthetic placed in a visual 

context that has been historically interpreted to evoke desire and sexuality makes visible the 

seams on the modern construction of acceptable and desirable femininity.  While according to 

critics Manet’s Olympia walks the thin line between nudity and nakedness, Kozyra is blatantly 

naked, subverting the containment of cohesive classical style.  By citing Manet’s infamous work, 

the poses and the environment in the photographs clearly evoke sexuality and desire, which 

violently clash with the realistically displayed visibly and radically imperfect bodies.   

The rhetorical connection between the components of the project communicates an 

anxiety related to the loss of control over the body, as well as desire to face and interrogate the 

stigma of possessing a body marked by disease and decay.  Commenting on the experience of 

being a cancer patient, Kozyra mentioned in an interview that she was bound to medical care, 

depending on it “like a dog.” Becoming a patient required an utter release of all control over the 

body (Olkowski 2007:14-15), resulting in a Cartesian separation of the body from the mind of 

the individual person.  Kozyra’s careful documentation of experience of disease and treatment 

through creative reenactment of Olympia in the hospital presents a wrenching performance of 

pain and struggle to regain control over her body through a public vivisection of self, which 

centers the embodied experience of the diseased woman in society, where a sick body ceases 

being an object of desire and is symbolically confined to and articulated through medicine.  By 

interweaving the medicalized and objectified bodies of illness and decay with the sexualized 

body of Olympia, Kozyra makes visible the process of objectification occurring when the body 

becomes subject to medical classification or an object of sexual desire.  

If read against the pervasive “pornographication of the mainstream” and the concomitant 

denigration of women’s rights (e.g. ban on abortion) in Poland brought about under the influence 



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of the political authority of the Catholic Church and nationalist ideology (all three based on the 

rhetorical exploitation of the collective and abstract figure under the guise of articulating popular 

narratives of national decay or rebirth), Kozyra’s work evidences a deliberate politicization of 

the diseased and frail body.  Intertextually invoking histories of artistic vanguard andradical 

defiance as well as exploitation and patriarchy through Manet’s Olympia, and by positioning 

herself as both the subject and the object, the author reinserts herself in the narrative of 

femininity in art history and Polish post-Socialist culture.  While in Communist Poland gender 

relations women were represented as “brave victims,” responsible for the care and wellbeing of 

the family, performing a balancing act between professional work and motherhood, the post-

1989 femininity was reframed to include ambitious and commodified sexuality (Gal and 

Kligman 2000b:12). Discussing the transformation of the concept of ideal femininity in Poland 

in the era of transition, Marody and Giza-Polezczuk argue that women were confronted with 

conflicting and, in many respects, opposite models of womanhood: one dictated by the canons of 

the Catholic Church and the Polish nationalist rhetoric, promoting women’s roles as mothers and 

reproducers of the Polish nation and culture, and the other one related to the liberalization of the 

Polish economy and based on the image of the “new woman” pervasive in advertising-based, 

capitalist mass-media which envisions the new feminine ideal as individualist, financially 

successful and a good consumer (2000:171-174).  In both formulations of femininity (attained 

either through reproduction or consumption), attractiveness is recognized as a key factor behind 

a woman’s “success,” both with men and in the labor markets; thus, although presenting different 

models of desirable womanhood, both formulations fix the boundaries of acceptable gender 

repertoires (Marody and Giza-Polezczuk 2000:169).  Echoing Ukrainian ideals of feminine 

behavior (Berehynia and Barbie), Polish stereotypes of the female ideal center on women’s roles 

as necessarily related to the needs and desires of men and the nation, symbolically excluding 

women who deviate from the norm of acceptable femininity and citizenship.   

While subverting the Aristotelian aesthetic canon and transforming the subject/object 

relationship of the classical nude, Kozyra’s project troubles the models of femininity 

characteristic to post-Socialist Poland.  Resisting the objectification of the sexualized media 

sound-bite as well as utter de-individualization and exclusion  from patriarchal nationalist 

discourses, Kozyra reenacts the trauma of disease, loss of control and acceptable femininity 

precisely to de-center the culturally normalized ideal of femininity promoted in Polish 

nationalism by giving disease and undesirable femininity a individual face, and a controversial 

one at that (Kozyra at the time of the project already had acquired the status of infamous, radical 

and controversial artist).   

Kozyra’s Olympias are a deliberate resistance to the collective “we” that both communist 

and nationalist rhetoric construct, as well as an overt defiance of the disabling “they,” under 

which all the diseased, deformed and impaired bodies are often grouped.  The individualized 

account of Kozyra’s experience of dying, the realist documentation of her willful self-

objectification and tacit agreement to being treated as meat in order to live, and her defiant stare 

back are evidence of her desire to find herself, to reassert herself in a body that is emphatically 

de-personalized and deprived of individuality in both medicine and society.  Issues of 

embodiment and control raised by the artist in the context of the Olympias ostensibly acquire 

additional meanings if read against the post-Socialist shift in gender roles, specifically the 

reinstitution of the Polish Mother, an essentially conservative construct, accompanied by the 

rapid development of capitalist relations that provoked significant insecurities and anxieties in 

relation to the role and status of women in society.  As Agnieszka Graff’s analysis of the Polish 



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mass media suggests, the discussions of economic development and accession to the European 

Union in Polish press were frequently accompanied by a vilification of feminist ideology as well 

as construction of rhetorical links between successful capitalism and the traditional family (Graff 

2008:202-203).  In this new social context of harmonious coexistence of neoliberalism with 

conservatism, the “autonomous family,” resilient and capable of reproducing itself as capital 

became a metaphor for the desired state of the nation (ibid.).  The diseased and frail body of the 

artist poignantly deviates from the culturally constructed feminine ideal, symbolically excluding 

her from acceptable Polish citizenship.  In response to that symbolic exclusion and effective loss 

of control over her body, Kozyra, visually unattractive, frail and ostensibly non-reproductive, 

though emphatically gendered and sexualized, defiantly stares back, as if mockingly proving that 

even though not accepted as feminine as such, she is still a woman.  

Theorizing disability in the context of social relations, Garland Thomson discusses 

Kant’s aesthetic theory “Critique of Judgment” as an instance of antipathy towards difference, 

based on Kant’s assertion that colors are beautiful only when they are “pure,” displaying a 

uniformity untroubled by foreign sensation.  This abstract value system structures elements into 

pure and corrupt, legitimate and illicit, thus potentially legitimating ideologies that deem some 

people impure, unbeautiful, or unfit (1997: 33).  Kozyra’s Olympias symbolically muddle the 

“Cartesian” colors of aesthetics and gender normativity, troubling the hierarchical divisions 

imposed by classical representational canons as well as culturally constructed ideals of body 

integrity and femininity.   On the Meta-contexts of art history, gender and disability studies, 

Kozyra’s work works to dismantle and challenge the Aristotelian aesthetic ideal by creating 

visual narratives, consisting of the intertextually referenced nude, and the naked diseased body, 

often displayed and perceived as asexual, but here “clothed” with art and explicitly sexualized.  

Embedded in the construction of the object/subject relationship in the triptych, the reclamation of 

female agency and subjectivity, in traditional representational regimes oftentimes marginalized 

and repressed, here becomes the crux of the work, centered on a strategic breakdown of 

artist/model roles and boundaries.  Following Garland Thomson’s argument about the frequent 

discursive overlap between femininity and disability in art and culture, Kozyra’s project reveals 

the power dynamic and mechanisms of exploitation and exclusion embedded in the interpretive 

frameworks intrinsic to classical representational paradigms. Olympia’s defiant stare and blatant 

sexuality disrupt the dichotomy between disability and able-bodiedness, sexual deviance and 

desirable femininity.  

 

Grotesque and Carnivalesque: Worlds without Fixed Symbols 

 

Discussing the complex semiotic transformation of the meaning of the body placed in the 

topsy-turvy of the symbolic system of the carnival, Mary Russo argues that a woman is 

especially vulnerable to public criticism and castigation for exposing her intimate self: “Making 

a spectacle of herself” (1986:213).  A blatant performance of unruly femininity and a deliberate 

display of an irregular body, while unacceptable and obscene in mundane social interactions, can 

gain currency and function in empowering and transgressive ways when placed in the context of 

contemporary art, which creates new parallel worlds that purposefully obscure and blur the line 

between reality and performance.  Constructing simultaneously capacious and flexible systems 

of symbols and meanings, art has the potential to subvert the modern semiotic systems that 

rigidly define normative corporeality and repertoires of femininity.   



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Jo Spence’s (1934, London – 1992) series of photographs narrating her experience of 

corporeal deformity due to breast cancer and subsequent mastectomy borrow from the visual 

tropes of the carnivalesque, where the purpose of revealing and exposing the deformities of her 

body is to achieve the “catharsis of revelation,” to demystify and unmask the injured body 

(Evans 2005:50).  For Jo Spence the transgression of the boundaries of the private sphere, 

conceived as invisible to the public eye, involved the overcoming of persistent feeling of shame 

of her ugliness and being un-desired (Spence 1995:158) and realizing that the roots of her shame 

lie in the perception of disability in a bourgeois culture that wants to “repress the disturbing and 

the dirty” (Evans 2005:52).  She exercises her agency by framing her socially and medically 

inscribed body as a space where she can “write back” (Evans 2005:54).   

As Rosemarie Garland Thomson points out, disability does not merely designate a form 

of physical inferiority of a body, but rather “is a culturally fabricated narrative of the body, 

similar to what we understand as the fictions of race and gender” (2000: 334).  Artistic 

representations of disabled women’s bodies are an important space for renegotiation of gender 

roles and redefinition of normalcy and beauty in post-Socialist culture.  In feminist art the 

exploration of women’s bodies affected by disease oftentimes is accomplished with the playful 

use of grotesque imagery. The reference to the culture of the carnivalesque in this case indicates 

the “loss of control and boundaries” (Russo 1986:213), removing the images of disability from 

the realm of the private sphere.  The grotesque and carnivalesque representation transposes the 

body into the new semiotic system, traditionally interpreted as playful and subversive, which in 

turn allows for a reinterpretation of traditional ideals, roles and hierarchies. 

Naturalist depictions of the body contain powerful symbolism that can be employed in 

redefinition of concepts of gender and normality. When discussing body margins (bodily refuse) 

as symbol of danger and power Mary Douglas (2002) points out that the body is a model that can 

stand in for any bonded system, including society, and that body symbolism is part of the 

common stock of symbols.  Body orifices oftentimes symbolize the margins of society’s identity, 

systems of belief, and structure.  Since any structure of ideas is vulnerable at the margins, it is 

then logical that bodily secretions (which have traversed the boundary of the body) are framed 

within the same system of symbols and are coded as powerful and dangerous.   In Rabelais and 

his World Bakhtin (1968:25) argues that the “grotesque image reflects a phenomenon of 

transformation, an as yet unfinished metamorphosis, of death and birth, growth and becoming.”  

The grotesque body is an oozing, secreting body involved in the transformational processes of 

birth, growth, copulation and aging.  It stands in contrast to the classical body of the “finished, 

completed man, cleansed, as it were, of all the scoriae of birth and development” (Bakhtin 

1968:25).   

Discussing Bakhtin’s concept of the carnival, Mary Russo argues that the categories of 

carnivalesque speech and spectacle contain the “protocols and styles of high culture in and from 

a position of debasement,” the various tropes and disguises functioning to “resist, exaggerate and 

destabilize the distinctions that mark and maintain high culture and organized society.  It is as if 

the carnivalesque body politic has ingested the entire corpus of high culture and, it its bloated 

irrepressible state, released it in fits and starts in all manner of recombination, inversion, 

mockery, and degradation” (Russo 1986:218).  The carnival, containing the elements of 

hierarchies of high culture, creates a semiotic space that echoes the dominant culture while 

simultaneously debasing and subverting it, by playfully transforming meanings and relations 

between the signifiers and the signified, placing cultural taxonomies on the shaky grounds of 

semiotic whirlpools.  The fluctuating meaning in this context can potentially be employed to re-



Anthropology of East Europe Review 29(2) Fall 2011 

172 

evaluate the disabled body through the carnivalesque’s characteristic insurgency against 

normativity.  

While Bakhtin’s concept of the ambivalent and fluid grotesque body and the subversive 

nature of the carnival do not incorporate the aspect of gendered representations of female bodies, 

according to Tickner the images of transformations and processes specific to the female body as 

well as parody and role reversal are some of the main strategies of re-claiming and de-colonizing 

the woman’s body in art.  In this context, the deformed, diseased and transforming body, 

distinctly different from the monumental sculpted classical nude, can have important effects on 

dominant articulations of gender normativity by gaining new functions in the fictitious world of 

art.  The playfulness and unrestrained and fluid nature of the carnivalesque and grotesque can 

become crucial means of creating spaces of transgression of social boundaries, gender roles and 

assumptions of normalcy and beauty.   

 

 
Y. Solomko, “Baba Yaga,” 2001. 

 

Placing representation of corporeal difference in the fluid topsy-turvy world of the 

carnival and grotesque, the Ukrainian artist Yuri Solomko (b. 1962) engages with issues of 

disabled femininity and embodiment, redefining the hegemonic conceptions of the aesthetically 

pleasing and “able” body.
5
  His realistic and yet stylized photographs de-center the ontological 

function of the “classical nude” by using the tropes of traditional aesthetics in a way that echoes 

classical conceptions of beauty and corporeal integrity but, through radical ways of articulating 

body mobility and function, interrupt and re-shuffle the hierarchies of hegemonic cultural 

representations of femininity and beauty.  Regeneration is a photographic series of portraits of 

Elena Chinka, a double amputee who lost parts of both her legs at the age of 23.  The use of 

porcelain masks, mirror reflections and playful reversals of shapes and body parts suggests that 

the images draw heavily on the Venetian culture of the carnival.  At the same time the use of 

classical rules of composition, color, light and shadow in the photographs are all evidence that 

the artist portrays the body according in the old master tradition, using Aristotelian aesthetics, 

but expanding, reframing and “clothing” Chinka’s extraordinary body in the subversive culture 



Anthropology of East Europe Review 29(2) Fall 2011 

173 

of carnivalesque with its characteristic articulation of bodies as in a state of perpetual motion and 

transition.   

Indeed, Chinka’s body finds and displays a new balance and mobility, signaling an 

alternative form of bodily integrity: in the photograph she is not presented as lacking or disabled; 

rather she expands the idea of body dexterity, function and shape.  In the photograph of Chinka 

facing the viewer but with her back to him/her, the body inversion does not lead to body 

disintegration: instead it creates an alternative sense of balance, harmony and proportion.  Using 

the tradition of carnivalesque which combines corporeal flux and deviation with aestheticism, 

Solomko’s project redefines the traditional assumption of body integrity: the model is able to see 

with the back of her head, so her range of mobility and body function is expanded, rather than 

restricted.   In Solomko’s photographs Chinka’s body and unruly femininity, displayed as 

extraordinary, beautiful and uniquely mobile, challenge reductive cultural articulations of 

corporeal normativity, beauty and integrity.   

  While undermining limiting and disabling conceptions of beauty and body integrity, the 

strategic manipulation of the classical aesthetic canon and the genre of carnivalesque also 

succeeds in troubling binary and reductive articulations of acceptable femininity pervasive in 

post-Communist Ukraine. Quoting Oksana Kis, Phillips argues that gender expectations for 

women in Ukraine are rooted in two fundamental images–Berehynia and Barbie.  In the context 

of the Ukrainian independence movement and the rise of popularity of nationalist and 

neofamilialist discourses, Berehynia, a pagan goddess from ancient Slavic mythology, is a 

symbol of Ukrainian womanhood deployed to encourage women to engage in the natural and 

cultural reproduction of the nation, to devote themselves to the maternal role and foster the 

revival of the traditional Ukrainian family (Phillips 2011:180-181).   Yet in the context of a 

globalizing market economy and the increasing emphasis on consumption, Berehynia competes 

with another model of womanhood: Barbie–a beautiful, sexy, charming toy for a man.  Such 

rigid standards of femininity, focusing on either reproduction or outward attractiveness, are 

especially problematic for women with disabilities, whose different physique and limitations in 

movement often  place then outside the range of what is considered beautiful or feminine (ibid.).   

While Solomko’s photographs of Chinka are far from Berehynia or Barbie, the 

subversive use of form and style as well as the intertextual reference of traditional ideals of 

femininity interrupts cultural narratives of femininity and disability, portraying Chinka as sexual, 

beautiful, mobile and whole.  Playfully invoking the tradition of carnivalesque and grotesque, the 

Regeneration series troubles conventional articulations of gender normativity and aesthetics 

through defemiliarization
6
 (term coined by Viktor Shklovsky), making commonly encountered 

objects and phenomena, the value of which is hitherto interpreted as self-evident, seem 

unfamiliar and divorced from the fixed system of meanings of dominant culture.  By controlling 

the process of perception through intertextuality and innovative use of style, Solomko’s 

photographs present an alternative vision of beauty and bodily integrity that resists the stigma of 

the label “disability” and does not conform to the culturally accepted and normalized ideals of 

femininity.   

Regeneration, thus, can be read as part of Ukrainian feminists’ concerted effort to 

problematize and question the way that femininity and disability are conceived and represented.  

Discussing the state of feminist art in contemporary Ukraine, Tamara Zlobina considers the 

project “Tenderness” (“Nezhnost’”) curated by Lesia Ostrovskaia an openly feminist venture, 

and one of the more successful all-women, gender-conscious exhibitions that seriously engage 

with issues like hegemonic femininity and gender normativity in post-Socialism (Zlobina 



Anthropology of East Europe Review 29(2) Fall 2011 

174 

2007:60).  One of the principal goals of the exhibit, which consists of works by four artists 

(Margarita Zinetz and Alevtina Kohidze from Ukraine, Bogna Burska from Poland, and Nicoleta 

Markovic from Serbia), was to problematize cultural stereotypes associated with women and 

femininity in order to reassert women’s positions as legitimate agents in constructing and 

interpreting culture, capable of articulating their subject positions (ibid.).  The exhibit questions 

the associative semantics of coupling the words “tenderness” and “woman,” which is likely to 

suggest and produce certain stereotypical associations such as “female tenderness,” “tenderness 

and beauty,” and “motherly tenderness and love.” Such characteristic trivialization results in 

normalization and stabilization of semantic and associative boundaries of the concept of 

femininity (Zlobina 2007:60).  

 Especially interesting from the point of view of the interplay between aesthetics and 

disfigurement, the work Algorithm (2002) by the Polish artist Bogna Burska (b. 1974), a 12 

photographs series that juxtaposes images of amputated limbs and flowers, produces a radically 

unfamiliar, yet visually striking and convincing associative narrative that disrupts the familiar 

semantic chains that blooming blossoms and bleeding wounds (viewed in isolation) would 

typically suggest.  

When read against the pervasiveness of reductive and disabling stereotypes that dominate 

the genderscape in post-Socialist Ukraine, the public display of Bogna Burska’s Algorithm and 

Yuri Solomko’s Regeneration in the authoritative cultural space of the gallery destabilizes the 

boundary between disability and able-bodiedness, and troubles the fixed and culturally 

normalized meanings of concepts of beauty and femininity.  By placing Chinka’s extraordinary 

body in the topsy-turvy of the carnivalesque, and by disrupting the semantic bounds of 

femininity and tenderness, Solomko and Burska suggest a new strategy for activism in art that is 

centered on transforming the reductive and disabling representational regime that places 

“disfigured” women outside the realm of acceptable femininity. 

 

In Conclusion: Towards a Discourse of Agency and Empowerment, or, the Potential of a 

Benevolent and Healing Eye 

 

As discussed and seen in multiple cases, art can be a space of empowerment and 

renegotiation of gender identity.  As Sarah D. Phillips (2011:165-169) points out, Elena Chinka’s 

embodied performance redefines traditional conceptions of beauty, normality and body integrity 

and can potentially generate an open-ended and nuanced discussion of disability and disability 

experience.  The phenomenal power of artistic representations lies in their ability to subvert, 



Anthropology of East Europe Review 29(2) Fall 2011 

175 

expose and contest stereotypes by engaging with the viewers on an individual level, encouraging 

them to experience and “live in” other people bodies.   

Art can also serve as an important place for self-exploration and re-imagining of self.  Jo 

Spence, whose work engages with various aspects of and intersections between disease, 

femininity and normative corporeality, discusses photography as a healing art that proved 

therapeutic for her dealing with the pain and shame related to breast amputation.  She describes 

phototherapy as a collaborative process of self discovery where the photographer plays the role 

of a non-judgmental benevolent healing eye, while the photographed person enacts and explores 

his/her subjectivities through photographic self-documentation.  Jo Spence and Rosy Martin 

discuss “gazes” as something that helps control, objectify and mirror identities.  Through 

internalization of powerful gazes people learn to see and differentiate themselves from others in 

terms of gender, race and sexuality.  Phototherapy reconstructs those gazes (e.g. family, 

medicine, fashion. education etc), allowing them to access “private” information about their own 

subjectivity.  In other words, phototherapy is a form of “phototheatre of self”: a safe space where 

the person can re-enact various discursive “gazes,” like those of the family, society, etc., thus 

reexamining and recognizing personal areas of resistance (Spence and Martin 1995:164-168).   

Photographs then become a space for personal redefinition, where the photographed person is an 

active subject of his/her personal history (ibid., 169).   

Similarly, Rosemarie Garland Thomson discusses the stare as a potentially empowering 

experience for persons with disabilities, noting that “portraits can provide their subjects with an 

opportunity to deliberately engage with their viewers,” where direct “eye-to-eye” contact can 

potentially restructure the relationship between the viewer and the displayed body of the 

“deviant” subject (Garland Thomson 2009: 84-85).   Thus, the viewer of Kozyra’s Olympias is 

locked in a moment of exchange, where the “abnormal” body on display stares back at the 

viewer, symbolically turning the eye on itself, demanding self-reflexivity of the voyeur. The 

collapse of the boundaries between the subject, object and viewer can transform the culture of 

viewing disability, reformulating the process of looking in terms of confronting personal 

assumptions and cultural norms.  

The analysis of various artistic representational strategies in the context of this paper also 

aims to uncover the social construction of reductive representations of disability and emphasize 

the activist potential of intertextual invocation of classical art canon to deliberately create visual 

aporias. These in turn force the text of the hegemonic representational economy to deconstruct 

itself, making visible the deep and violent mechanism of exclusion and power asymmetries 

sustained by the ostensibly self-evident and universal value of classical aesthetics.  A new visual 

idiom cannot function on its own in a cultural vacuum, but must actively engage with the 

dominant representational economy.  Thus, the project of constructing inclusive and respectful 

representations of women with disabilities is a complex but critical project that acknowledges 

and interrupts the complex and mutually constitutive discourses and cultural articulations of 

disability, femininity, aesthetics and social hierarchy.   

Discussing the politics of representation of East European body artists on the Western art 

scene, Zdenka Badovinac quotes Peggy Phelan’s book Unmarked – the Politics of Performance, 

which explores the significance and the force of that which is not signified and therefore cannot 

be codified within the borders of the ideology of the visible.  Critiquing the identity politics 

embedded in the post-Soviet representational idiom and the politics of visibility of East-

European art in the West, Badovinac invokes Phelan’s problematization of the connection 

between representational visibility and political power, which have been a dominant force in 



Anthropology of East Europe Review 29(2) Fall 2011 

176 

cultural theory in the past decades: “the conviction that greater visibility also means greater 

power is false.  Such an observation could bring us to the rather comical conclusion that naked 

women rule the world. Power is located precisely in the irrepresentable,” (i.e. something that 

does not figure within the borders of the institutionalized and controlled) (Badovinac 1999:11).   

Importantly, greater visibility of female disability does not necessarily imply 

rearticulating the representational canon in an enabling and respectful way: post-socialist media 

narratives suggest the opposite. Rather a radical rethinking of the representations should involve 

an active and meaningful engagement with the dominant visual economy and culture precisely to 

destabilize it with a strategic and subversive use of authoritative places of cultural display in 

radically new, activist modes that encourage alternative and respectful ways of seeing disability 

as a meaningful component or facet of humanity.  Portraying shared and individualized modes of 

experiencing gender, corporeality, and difference, progressive representations of disability could 

potentially create alternative and diverse accounts of body integrity, beauty and normality, 

thereby broadening the dominant repertoires of femininity and able-bodiedness.   
                                                            

1
 The term refers to the discursive construction of people with physical disabilities as well as 

“other people whose bodies could be made to visually signify absolute alienness” into icons of 

inassimilable physical otherness (Garland Thomson 1997: 17). Having extensively used this term 

to investigate representations of disability in US art and culture, Rosemarie Garland Thomson 

argues that enfreakment, as an intricate form of exploitation, reifies the difference corporeal 

“norm” and “aberration,” reinforcing the “onlookers’ common American identity, verified by a 

body that suddenly seemed by comparison ordinary, tractable, and standard” (ibid., 17). Garland 

Thomson uses the term especially to describe cultural meanings produced by freak shows and 

public spectacles involving people with disabilities and corporeal deformities.   

2 See http://www.kovylina.com/projects.php?cid=155&pg=3, retrieved 4 November, 2011. 

3
 Diana Yeh provides an overview of Alchuk’s work at 

http://www.culturebase.net/artist.php?1301, retrieved 4 November, 2011. 

4
 http://www.owl.ru/win/books/visualnie15p.htm, retrieved 4 November, 2011. 

5
 See Phillips 2011(163-169) for further analysis of Solomko’s disability-inspired art. 

6
 A term coined by Viktor Shklovsky to denote a stylistic technique designed to remove objects 

and phenomena from the sphere of automatized perception. In Art as Technique Shlovsky argues 

that the purpose of art is to lead the reader “to a knowledge of a thing through an organ of sight 

instead of recognition. By ‘estranging’ objects and complicating form, the device of art makes 

perception long and ‘laborious’” (Shklovsky 6). Thus, by taking objects, phenomena and 

behavior from the realm of the familiar, the literary text is able to enhance perception.  
 
 
 
 
 

 

http://www.kovylina.com/projects.php?cid=155&pg=3
http://www.culturebase.net/artist.php?1301
http://www.owl.ru/win/books/visualnie15p.htm


Anthropology of East Europe Review 29(2) Fall 2011 

177 

 

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Images of works by Burska, Bromova, Kozyra, and Solomko are reproduced here with 

permission from the artists.