Ruslana’s bodily palette of leather, metal, and bare skin suggested, to many onlookers, a kinkiness that directly opposed the traditional conservativeness of Hutsul female self-representation. This was partially demonstrated in Ruslana’s integration of Scythian imagery in her Hutsulian Project, which she repackaged as modern sexuality: “In these clothes, we felt ourselves to be true Amazons—at once sexual and warlike” (quoted in Pavlyshyn 2006, 481). Pavlyshyn read the “sado-masochistic attributes with which the costumes were replete” as a comment on the strong female voice represented in the song, one defined by power and the defiance of quotidian norms (481). This interpretation is valid, but does not account for the diversity of interpretations and the robust debate about meaning that followed Ruslana’s 2004 Eurovision victory, in which her erotic auto-exoticism meant many different things to different publics. As a representation of Ukrainian femaleness within Ukraine, Ruslana’s body became inscribed with the weight of internal national discourses of Ukrainian sexuality and femininity; as the representative of Ukrainian femaleness outside of Ukraine (on the Eurovision stage), her message communicated an ethno-national wildness vis-à-vis unbridled female (understood as some combination of Hutsul or Amazon) sexuality.
As the anthropologist Sherri Ortner (1974) famously argued, the female voice and body are recurrent tropes of the nationalist myth cross-culturally, where femininity is conflated with the sphere of “nature” that is counterposed to the rational, masculine sphere of “culture.” In the Slavic world, the nation has, “since time immemorial,” been depicted as female (Goscilo 1996, 32). In Ukraine, where a gargantuan Soviet-era statue of Rodina Mat’ (Motherland, called the iron baba with ironic affection by locals) towers over the city of Kyiv, the cradle of Slavic civilization, the symbolic position of the female protector and mother in the Slavic imaginary is manifest physically, in massive quantities of steel. The ancient archetype of the female Berehynia (protector of the hearth of the nation) has recently been rehabilitated as a prevalent trope in Ukrainian notions of femininity, referenced by prominent politicians such as Yulia Tymoshenko, radical feminist groups such as FEMEN, and in revival festivals celebrating pre-Christian fertility (Bilaniuk 2003, 54; Helbig 2011; Zychowicz 2011).6 In its reinvention, the Berehynia has been repurposed to express a range of stereotypical feminine qualities, from nurturing to mysterious to hysterical. Ruslana’s self-sexualized presentation also evokes Western postfeminist discourses that, among other things, mark a “shift from objectification [of the female body] to sexual subjectification” (Gill 2009, 101). Thus, Ruslana fused an emergent brand of post-Soviet Ukrainian femininity onto the canvas of her celebrity body, one that culls from nationalist and Soviet discourses of female aggression and freedom, Western postfeminist discourse, and the ancient archetype of the Amazonka.
Ruslana’s manipulation of such Indigenous tropes—of both femininity and rurality—and her savvy branding of them as a uniquely Ukrainian kind of “world music” on the Eurovision stage, suggest that her strategy of auto-exoticism was enacted in part to subvert the power structures inherent in acts of exoticizing.7 Yet, her method stands in contrast to other notable examples of such subversions on the ESC stage, such as the controversial Russian pop duo t.A.T.u.’s performance in 2003. Dana Heller has suggested that the duo’s faux-lesbian shtick and poo-pooing of Eurovision norms presented a “challenge to the hegemony of the West” and “indifference to the ‘assumed rules of the globalization process’” (2007, 204). Heller interprets this as revealing of the deeply entrenched hostility felt by Russians toward Europe.
In contrast, Ruslana’s 2004 performance appears to be a dedicated endeavor to appease Europe by perfecting the Eurovision aesthetic that blends catchy global pop with essentialized national self-presentation. Ruslana’s celebrity body, adorned in the primitivist drag of Amazonian/Hutsul fantasy, is surrendered to the crude exigencies of the Eurovision machine in order to make a claim about Ukrainian political desire. Thus, the pop star’s body is put on display in what might be called a pop “ritual of sovereignty,” in which Ukraine’s European-facing desires for political sovereignty in line with the values of liberal democracy are expressed through deference and submission (cf. Bernstein 2013b).8
In its tactics, the appropriation of Hutsul elements into this Ukrainian popular music rehearses themes prominent in the scholarly literature on globalization and the world music industry: the reproduction of hegemonic relations between cities and villages (Taylor 1997), the masking of compensation mechanisms (Meintjes 1990; Feld 2000), the denial of modern subjectivity to peoples on the margins of power, and, less cynically, the “intimate entanglement of sounds and bodies in music and dance underpinned at the ideological level by an ‘all out relationism’ and ‘empathetic sociality’” (Stokes 2004, quoting Erlmann 1999, 177). But the interpretation of “Wild Dances” as an attempt to subvert marginalization through strategic auto-exoticism is further complicated by the complaints that were voiced by many of the very people that Ruslana constructed as the Ukrainian subaltern: the villagers of Kosmach and other villages in Hutsulshchyna. For some Hutsuls, the shame of being called “wild” outweighed the fact that Ukraine had won, as many put it, “the attention of Europe.” Segments of the community stereotyped as the “exotic other” attempted to resist the tropes of othering that were thrust upon them through the rhetoric of Ruslana’s press releases and the branding of her product. This attitude exposes a tension predicated on the power of postcolonial representation, here rendered as the wish for affiliation with legitimizing discourses of civilization that are mostly, but not always, opposed to discourses of Wildness. For some Hutsuls, the rejection of Wildness was demarcated strenuously, as an explicit alignment with the sovereign imaginary that desired inclusion in the European Union and that would finally shed the burdens of exoticism that mark Hutsul modernity.
PRIDE, SHAME, AND SHAROVARSHCHYNA
In 2009, I asked Mykhailo Tafiychuk, the patriarch of the Tafiychuk family of musicians, for his opinion on Ruslana’s Eurovision-winning “Wild Dances” as we sat in his kitchen in the isolated Hutsul village of Bukovets’. His initial reply was a shrug. After a pause, he added that he didn’t “understand her jumping around. She behaved badly.” Further, he said, “she really offended us by calling our culture wild.” I asked him what he took this “wildness” (дикість) to mean. He answered that it implies that “we are not smart” and then added, “animals are wild, not people.” At this, his wife Hannusia, who had been quietly sitting by and listening, weighed in, “Ruslana put on some underwear and a Hutsul kozhukh [traditional decorated vest] and danced on television … it was not very nice [гарно].” To the Tafiychuk family, Ruslana’s labeling and selling of her aesthetic as “Hutsul” was taken personally, as an insult and a denigration of their own integrity and sophistication.9
In the months following Ruslana’s ESC victory, some Hutsuls lobbied their local district parliament to censor sales of the Wild Dances disc for their strong objections to the representation of their culture as “wild” in an international arena. Ivan Mykhailovych Zelenchuk, a historian and ethnologist based in the town of Verkhovyna, told me about the misunderstanding and bitterness that local people felt when they saw Ruslana’s representation of the deeply entrenched stereotype of Hutsuls as “wild people”:
FIGURE 1.2 Mykhailo Tafiychuk in his instrument workshop. The unfinished body of a lira, a hurdy-gurdy, is visible in the foreground. Photo by Alison Cartwright Ketz, 2011.
FIGURE 1.3 Father and son demonstrate the sound of newly completed horns in front of their home as other members of the Tafiychuk family look on. The trembita is the elongated horn played by Mykhailo