Alexievich and the women of war : A gender performative examination of The unwomanly face of war by Svetlana Alexievich

This essay examines gender construction in the Soviet Union army and the female experience of World War II, based on the extensive journalistic research done by Svetlana Alexievich as accounted for in The unwomanly face of war. The nature of Svetlana’s work brings to attention a theory of ethics by Emmanuel Levinas, which is derived from the face-to-face encounter with the Other and its alterity. The analysis will apply the theory of gender performativity coined by Judith Butler. She argues that gender is socially and culturally constructed through speech acts and nonverbal communications that define and maintain identities. She also defines the dichotomies of sex, gender and sexuality in a normative structure called The heterosexual matrix. The analysis shows the dichotomies of the heterosexual matrix to be blurred by the context of war. This essay argues that the female identity of women partaking in World War II was altered to fit these new conditions. What also emerges is the experience of verbal and symbolic violence as the “unwomanly” women returned to civilization. The analysis supports the idea that the dichotomies of sex, gender and sexuality are constructed and limited in its ability to explain or define a human individual