Gender Regime Transformation in Ukraine: Policy Change and Policy Debates

My research project is concerned with the institutional and discursive construction of the state gender regime in Ukraine with the focus on gender norms embedded in social policies. Of principle interest are the following questions: how gender subjects are produced and negotiated in legal texts and in the policy-making; what gender norms are institutionalized in policies and manifested in debates. I analyse policy changes and policy debates in three broadly defined areas – state welfare provision, labor regulation and gender equality legislation – from 1991 until 2015. I illustrate in the dissertation that through all of these policy areas and consistently throughout the whole period motherhood remains the central characteristic of the woman-subject in policy discourses, while different strategies are used to establish and legitimize that, given socio-political transformations in Ukraine since the fall of the Soviet Union. I argue that the regime of ‚compulsory motherhood‘ has been constructed relying on the discourse of ‘demographic crisis’, nationalist ideology dominating Ukrainian politics, and on the concept of ‘health’ used to legitimize state interventions.