Authors

Matilda Hicklin¹;  ¹ University of Bristol, UK

Discussion

This paper examines the abject maternal body as a form of poetic feminist resistance against state-imposed reproductive imperatives in Putin's Russia through the work of the contemporary Russian poet Ksenia Pravkina (b. 1994). Despite her powerful voice, Pravkina, and her subversive poetry remains largely unknown outside Russian literary circles.
In her work, Pravkina can be seen to disrupt both patriarchal literary traditions and contemporary nationalistic discourses surrounding motherhood. In this use of visceral imagery and corporeal horror, I suggest Julia Kristeva’s (1992) notion of the abject provides a framework through which to read Pravkina's feminist rejection of gender normativity and maternal ideals. According to Kristeva, the abject emerges at the breakdown of meaning caused by the loss of distinction between subject and object, Self and Other; the maternal body epitomises the abject, representing the primal border between life and death. The abject is neither subject nor object but is instead that which must be expelled to maintain psychic and social order (e.g., bodily fluids, corpses, excrement). This order, however, is inherently unstable and perpetually threatened by the abject.
Through a close analysis of Pravkina's poem (‘i dreamt i was burying with my hands’, published online in 2020), I suggest that her grotesque corporeal imagery and subversion of maternal tropes can be read as a rejection of the pronatalist policies aggressively promoted by the current regime. The governing metaphors of reverse burial and womb personification exemplify this abject poetics: the poet-speaker dreams of burying her baby in the earth, collapsing distinctions between creation and destruction, nourishment and decay, and her womb becomes an autonomous creature with its own insistent voice. Pravkina presents reproduction as horror, ambivalence and loss. Her abject maternal body resists incorporation into nationalist narratives and instead exposes the violence underlying such ideological demands.