Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine

5. Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in the Era of “Posts”

170 disability and mobile citizenship in postsocialist ukraine Edited field notes May 9, 2005. Kyiv, Ukraine. Today was Victory Day, marking the sixtieth anniversary of the victory of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany in World War II. My friend Dmitrii invited me to watch the Victory Day parade with him and the members of Mandry, his club for disabled adolescents. I saw Dmitrii already waiting for me when I emerged from the subway station into a light drizzling rain, and I walked to meet him at our designated meeting place in front of the Central Post Office. We exchanged the customary and friendly kiss on the cheek upon meeting, and then hid under my umbrella as we chatted and waited for the others . An elderly man using crutches (possibly a WWII veteran) walked up to us, looked at Dmitrii in his wheelchair, then at me, and said, “You are a real woman.” He proceeded to wish us health and happiness, and told Dmitrii to value me and keep me close. We both struggled to suppress our giggles—the man clearly assumed Dmitrii and me to be a “family pair,” and we were embarrassed (I am married, and Dmitrii has a steady girlfriend). Although we both took it in stride and started talking about something else after the man walked away, the atmosphere suddenly had changed. I think Dmitrii interpreted the man’s words thus: “You are really lucky that you, an invalid, have a woman to take care of you.” I also felt that I, as Dmitrii’s imagined partner, was being praised for my supposed self-sacrifice in caring for a disabled man. Suddenly Dmitrii, a thirtyeight -year-old athlete and independently living director of an NGO, was thrust into the role of a marginal, dependent invalid. Dmitrii and I never revisited the incident, but it prompted me to take notice of how people’s experiences of disability in Ukraine and other postsocialist countries 5. Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in the Era of “Posts” disability, gender, and sexuality in the era of "posts" 171 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 intersect with formations of gender, masculinity, femininity, and sexuality , questions that have been little explored in the post-Soviet context. Ethnographic Explorations of Spinal Cord Injury, Gender, and Sexuality Considerations of the gendering of disability in formerly socialist societies are few and far between, although some research on disability and gender has been conducted in Russia (Iarskaia-Smirnova 2002a, 2002b; Indolev 2001:110–146; Romanov and Iarskaia-Smirnova n.d.), in Lithuania (Šėporaitytė and Tereškinas 2008), and in Slovenia (Zaviršek 2006). In this initial examination of the intersections of disability, gender , and sexuality in Ukraine, I begin by asking general questions similar to those posed by Thomas Gerschick in his influential article “Toward a Theory of Disability and Gender”: “How does disability affect the gendering process? How does it affect the experience of gender?” (2000:1263). Also following Gerschick (2000:1267), I consider, “How might the stigmatization and marginalization that [disabled ] women and men . . . face contribute to the creation of alternative gender identities?” Thus I examine how disabled men and women in postsocialist Ukraine both sustain and subvert gendered expectations, both “enact and undo the ordinary terms of both gender and disability” (Smith 2004:4). I consider how the experience of disability can be an avenue for individuals to assert not only alternative gender identities, but also alternative claims to citizenship. This focus allows me to go beyond the common story of the disabled as social exiles and noncitizens to explore creative ways in which disabled people experience and perform citizenship as gendered, embodied subjects. Although Ukrainian women have been the focus of recent studies of changing gender regimes after socialism, women’s roles in the new political economy, and the Ukrainian women’s movement (Hrycak 2005, Phillips 2008, Rubchak 1996), little attention has been paid in the scholarly literature to men’s changing roles and negotiations of masculinity. By juxtaposing the experiences of spinally injured men and women, we can explore how being disabled affects men’s and women’s ability to enact gender in contemporary Ukraine, and how disability and gender variously intersect to inform their citizenship struggles. Ethnographic perspectives, which locate theoretical analyses in the day-to...