Women’s bodies at war: Soviet Women at the front during World War II

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the work The Unwomanly Face of War, by Belarusian journalist and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Svetlana Alexievich. The investigation is conducted from the perspective of gender studies and their relationship to memory, considering the experience of Soviet women on the front lines of World War II. It accounts for the peculiarities of space and time present in the narrative by mobilizing the Bakhtinian concept of the chronotope to examine the connections between the war environment and the witnesses’ subjectivity. Furthermore, the study highlights problematics inherent to traumatic memory narratives, exploring the tension between remembrance and forgetting, as well as the challenges regarding the representation of catastrophe. It also reflects on the systematic silencing endured by these combatants,  imposed by both official History and society, investigating the reasons why their accounts and discourses were suppressed, postponed, and delegitimized in favor of an androcentric view of the conflict. The theoretical framework guiding the text articulates propositions from authors such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Ecléa Bosi, Elisabeth Badinter, Teresa de Lauretis, Michel Foucault, Michel Pollak, Giorgio Agamben, Márcio Seligmann-Silva, Sigmund Freud, and Theodor Adorno, aiming to understand the construction of female identity and resistance in contexts of extreme violence.