The gendered iconography of the Belarus protest

Those familiar with Soviet posters might have seen the heart-wrenching ‘‘Red Army soldier, save!’’ artwork from the Great Patriotic War that features a woman holding her child huddled in fear of the bayonet with the Nazi insignia on it. The damsel in distress trope is not unique to the Post-Soviet space: iconography of any political turmoil in the world would offer one. But what happens when the damsel is in distress but she does not need a male to rescue her? Or even more so, when she is actively fighting against the male in power? Does she have to bare her chest as the Liberty on the French barricades or wield a sword like the statue in Volgograd? This is the iconographic challenge that the protests in Belarus were faced with: apart from the confrontation between a large part of the population against an authoritarian leader, the conflict had also clear gendered lines: a leader striving to project hypermasculinity (at least, at the beginning) versus a female-led protest. How does this gender divide translate into the visual iconography of the protest? Belarus is clearly a part of the Post-Soviet cultural space (although Belarusians might take issues with their current President saying that they are Russia’s ‘‘younger brother’’) and the protest iconography is deeply imbued with the Soviet and Russian cultural artifacts. This also makes Belarusian population more receptive to other Soviet representations of women: not just damsels in distress, but armed Motherlands, muscular female Kolkhoz members and voluptuous sportswomen. At the same time, as Reid argues (Reid, 1998), even the portrayal of strong women in visual Soviet culture put them in a slightly subordinate role, where in the seemingly equal tandem of Factory worker and Kolkhoz member statue by Mukhina, the factory worker had a higher and more important position in the Soviet society, not to mention the perceived femininity of food-related occupation. Thus, even the purportedly emancipated and gender-equal Soviet society still managed to promote patriarchal values through cinema and art (Gorsuch, 1996; Haynes, 2003).