albeit one filtered through the unique, kitschy sensibilities of the Eurovision Song Contest.5 Between the Dyki Tantsi and Wild Dances albums, as her primarily Ukrainophone domestic audience expanded to an international (primarily European) public, Ruslana’s persona also underwent a radical shift, as the guileless post-Soviet estrada singer metamorphosed into an “Amazonka.”
From its first iteration in 2002, Ruslana’s Hutsulian Project was marketed with flamboyant language, positioning Ruslana as a uniquely skilled curator tasked with the mission of “popularizing” the ancient traditions of the Hutsuls for the modern consumer. Due to the international ambitions of Ruslana’s Hutsulian Project, even early press releases were made available in multiple languages, including English: “The colors of Hutsul music, fiery rhythms, dance that pulls you into its circle—that’s the energy that lights a fire in the soul! The music of Ruslana stores this fire. She brought the rhythm of the mountains to the stage and made it modern, cultish [sic]” (press materials, 2002).
In the lead-up to the Eurovision performance, Ruslana’s marketing language became even more ostentatious: “Without giving [the] audience an opportunity to take a breath from the impression, here we see wild and sexy, hot and dangerous, mystic and knowledgeable about all the secrets of Carpathian mol’fars (shamans) mountain Amazonkas. Fur and leather, ethnic weapons, danger ous games and unique meditations all of this charms and entertains you, gives shimmering in the heart [sic]” (press materials, 2004). This heightened pitch of her marketing language corresponded to the increased sexuality in Ruslana’s self-presentation and self-identification: whereas the Ruslana of “Znaiu Ya” was modestly dressed in a tailored full-body leather suit, a shoulder-length bob, and an unassuming grin, the Ruslana of Wild Dances emerged as an “Amazonka,” predatory and stern, with an expansive mane of gnarled hair and an innovative wardrobe of bikinis, microskirts, and studded leather accessories.
Ruslana’s identification as an Amazonka was first and foremost a nationalist allusion, referencing the ancient Scythian warrior women who inhabited parts of modern-day Ukraine (the Crimean peninsula and the “wild field” (dyke pole) to its north, but not modern-day Hutsulshchyna) in antiquity. Famously described in Herodotus’s Histories as archetypal barbarians, these Amazon warrior women battled on horseback, and were reputedly willing to amputate their right breasts to facilitate shooting arrows (2003, 276–79). Ruslana knowingly drew on this history аs she reconstructed her persona as a fierce and wild woman, even releasing a 2004 music video to the song “Oi, zahrai my muzychen’ku” (originally included on the album Dyki Tantsi) filmed in Crimea, where she is depicted as a horseback-riding free spirit who viciously beats up her cheating boyfriend on the shore of the Black Sea.
Ruslana’s erotic auto-exoticization—predicated initially as it was on the image of Hutsuls—became a contentious source of debate for scholars, critics, and Hutsuls themselves, especially as the image of Ruslana-as-Hutsul-woman became conflated with Ruslana-as-Amazonka. Ruslana justified the change as an outgrowth of her prolonged ethnographic study of Hutsul culture, legitimized by her cooperation with ethnomusicologists from her alma mater, the Lysenko Academy of Music in L’viv. Ruslana’s turn toward this reputed institution historically devoted to the systematic study of rural folklore was significant as a legitimizing step in the reinvention of the material (despite the fact that some of her consultants later distanced themselves from the work), and as a brace against accusations of exploitative exoticism. Emphasizing the “exotic” and “ancient” aspects of Hutsul culture as truisms ostensibly observed during Ruslana’s own field expeditions, she validated her license as an artist to exploit these facts. Pavlyshyn explains that “just as the music of Wild Dances was publicized as the fruit of Ruslana’s own ethnomusicological research in the Carpathians, so the costumes were explained as the outcomes of the meticulous collection and study of ethnographic data” (2006, 481–82). This explanation, however, did not pass the muster of Hutsuls themselves: in the course of my fieldwork, it was repeatedly pointed out to me that traditional Hutsul dress for both females and males is quite modest (if extremely colorful), and always covers the body. The traditional wardrobe is composed of painstakingly embroidered shirts; ornate woolen vests embellished with vibrant embroidery, mirrors, and leather piping (kozhukhy); overcoats (serdaky); men’s pants and thick leather belts (cheres); skirts (zapaska, for women); and elaborate headwear: colorful hats for men (krysania), and meticulously wrapped head scarves (khustky) or headbands (namitka) for women.
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
