Oles Barlih: Queering Myths for Legitimation

In the 1990s, prominent literary critics Solomiia Pavlychko and Tamara Hundorova, revised the relationship between the totalitarian society and literary development in Ukraine. Pavlychko argued that in the formerly colonial and totalitarian Ukrainian society, the search for a modern ideal involves revisiting the once-forbidden historical past and looking toward the West (2002) and what Hundorova (2013) described as the desacralization of literature initiated by post-modernism. In other words, departing from traditional literary norms and themes is a part of that search for an ideal. This raises the crucial question of whether that departure from tradition encompasses queer narratives recently created in contemporary Ukrainian literature. Such narratives can be studied as constructs, not as inherently natural or “original,” as Judith Butler (1990) put it, to help us better understand how the traditional gender categories are challenged in literature. The emergence of gender-nonconforming and queer narratives contributes to the broader legitimation of queerness in literature. In this paper, the plays of Oles Barlih from the collection 'Zvìrì podivlâtsâ zamìst tebe / Beasts Will Gaze Instead of You', are analyzed as both performative acts of queerness and cultural activism. The analysis will focus on the origin of homoerotic narratives and character networks to understand forms of intertextual playfulness, such as pastiche, parody, and burlesque as modes of subverting traditional gender politics in Ukraine. Contrary to views that position representations of queerness as paradoxical or infantilized, this article examines Barlih’s manifestations of queerness, phantasmagorical characters, and his undermining of normative gender discourse and politics, highlighting his role in fostering the legitimation of queerness in literature in post-Euromaidan Ukraine.