ORIENTALIZING FEMININITY: NOTIONS OF IMPURITY IN UKRAINIAN MODERNIST LITERATURE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper examines the interconnectedness of feminity with ethnonational otherness in Ukrainian modernist literature in the context of European misogyny and ethnophobia. It demonstrates how the representation of female sinful otherness, impurity, and disloyalty was cemented in misogynistic imagery, in which women appeared as witches and heterodox temptresses through sexual and cultural differentiation. The otherizing of Orientalized ethnic groups in Eastern Europe — typically Jews, Roma, and Tatars — involved their conceptual feminization as well. Specifically, the paper analyzes the topic of the decay of the Slavic/Orthodox/masculine ‘race’ and the range of concomitant tropes and ideas found in Ukrainian modernist literature, such as castration, celibacy, and obsession with ‘tainted’ blood, which reflected ‘racial’ anxieties that went hand in hand with misogynistic ideas of the feminine role in spiritual and physical decline. The study performs close readings of works by Olha Kobylianska, Mykhailo Yatskiv, and Natalia Livytska-Kholodna, in which women appear as demonic-vampiric, heterodox seductresses and heresiarchesses, who threaten to ruin the ethno-androcentric culture of the modernist epoch. Orientalized femininity and the ambivalence it brought to Ukrainian modernism harbored the ethnoreligious fears and inherent sinfulness that encompassed traditional descriptions of the femme fatale, as well as such associated figures as the fallen angel and seductive adulteress – the initiatrix of moral, sexual, national, and religious transgression, which invariably alluded to a perceived crisis in patriarchy and reproductivity. The analysis focuses on the three thematic aspects of sin and sinfulness: temptation, heterodoxy, and betrayal.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".