MASCULINIZATION OF FEMININE (WOMEN'S) DISCOURSE IN CONTEMPORARY UKRAINIAN DRAMATURGY

Abstract

The article is devoted to understanding the phenomenon of masculinisation of the female image in contemporary Ukrainian drama during the period of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 based on the material of “2: Anthology of the IX Play Competition ‘Drama.UA’ ”.The article identifies the key artistic strategies that transform feminine discourse in the direction of strength, mobilisation, determination, and readiness to act and defend. Particular attention is paid to how the war provokes a revision of gender roles and leads to new types of female subjectivity in the dramatic text. The theoretical basis of the study is the concepts of J. Butler (performativity of gender), R. Braidotti (post-gender subjectivity), and C. Caruth (traumatic repetition). Within these approaches, the masculinisation of the female image is not interpreted as an artistic deviation, but as a new type of representation – a subject capable of speaking, acting, making decisions, and protecting in the face of disaster. The study focuses on female characters in a new heroic paradigm that combines emotional sensitivity and effective responsibility. Masculinisation is seen not as an attempt to imitate ‘masculine’ behaviour, but as an adaptive strategy of survival in the face of traumatic experience. The article analyses several aspects of the representation of female action: bodily-spatial activity, linguistic organisation of action, emotional and ethical rhetoric. The author highlights how the female body turns into ‘armour’, an instrument of direct action, not as an exception, but as a new norm in wartime. Of particular importance is the theme of motherhood as a source of strength, endurance, and strategic self-forgetfulness, which forms an internal ‘front’ – a battlefield not only for the physical but also for the psychological survival of the child. It is shown that contemporary Ukrainian drama records the formation of post-gender heroics based on a combination of strength and empathy, action and care, strategy and vulnerability. Thus, the texts under study do not reduce the female image to masculine forms, but expand its boundaries by incorporating feminine experience into the logic of the heroic. A heroine who speaks briefly, moves quickly, and makes decisions in critical conditions does not go beyond the feminine, but creates its renewed, hybrid form. Masculinisation in Ukrainian drama appears as a form of literary resistance, an artistic tool for an ethical response to the war, and an attempt to capture a new female presence in the theatre of memory and testimony.