The edited volume Freedom Taking Place by Jessica Zychowicz is a timely addition to the feminist scholarship exploring the key agents of (performative) resistance amidst “the steadily rising threat of authoritarianism” (1) in Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland. The choice of three countries is well-grounded in their historical legacies and current national socio-political context including “competitive authoritarianism,” as well as cross-border interlinkages and “cultural relations” (8). The collection is predominantly inspired and informed by a set of recent events such as Ukrainian revolutions in the 2000s and Maidan in 2013–14, the Belarusian uprising following the 2020 presidential elections, and the Polish Black protests of 2016–18. The collection examines original empirical data from various interdisciplinary perspectives. It adds to the growing “living archive” of activist academic writing striving to “preserv[e] accounts of contemporaneous events” (19). The book is highly attuned to feminism vocabulary, gender, and cultural studies perspectives. It presupposes some background knowledge of regional socialist history and the Soviet female emancipation project.

The book commences with the biographies of its fifteen contributors, the introduction and thirteen chapters, arranged under three sub-sections titled “On Unity and Autonomy: Unmaking Vulnerable Subjectivity,” “On Crossing Borders: Past as Litmus of Freedom of Expression,” and “On Social Transformation: Text, Body, Protest, Ballot.” Its first sub-section deals with the representation of gender in documentary art, film, performance, and music; the second part delves into the history of the female struggle for emancipation in Poland and Ukraine; the third sub-section questions the feminist element in the electoral process and social transformation in Belarus and Poland. By exploring these themes, scholars and artists unpick the points of tension between regional and western feminisms and highlight the diversity of women’s activism within patriarchal settings. The discussions adopt “feminism as a mode of inquiry” (17) with its critical stance, reflective self-positionality, frequent agentic, subjective, and emotional claims. Most of the chapters illustrate their analysis by using original artistic work, with one imagery selected as the striking collection’s cover.

The Introduction is dense, as it strives to cover a lot of ground: to account for the regional history and geographical scope and global trends and processes, such as the anti-gender backlash and post-truth environment “weakening cohesion around democratic ideas and institutions” (8), and to explain the book’s key notions and structure. As a result, the text leaves underdeveloped some valuable observations, such as that “feminism is never a ‘united front’ and its alliance against authoritarian regimes is not a given” (9). The discussion would benefit from clarifying what is understood under “feminism” or why “western” feminism is considered “decadent.”

This volume uses the notion of freedom to conceptualize women’s agency in struggles for human rights as “women’s activism” becomes “a key component of civil society” (2). It departs from the idea of physical freedom (a female struggle for professional roles in nineteenth century Poland, Ch. 6 by Joanna Dobkowska-Kubacka) via the freedom to exercise one’s right for free election (Belarusian 2020 protests) to the “freedom of expression” (via media, performative art and intellectuals’ writing), which, in turn, co-determines physical freedom. The issue of freedom is operationalized via a notion of “civic language(s)” understood broadly. For instance, language “as an extension of the body” (2) informs resistance of the “angry women” movement in Poland (Ch. 13), as Agnieszka Graff demonstrates. In other cases, civic languages include both overt and covert performative resistance via art and aesthetics. Thus, Magdalena Furmanik-Kowalska and Małgorzata Jankowska look at post-WWII feminist art interventions in Poland (Ch. 7); Kateryna Iakovlenko explores artists’ practices of materiality and maternity in Ukraine (Ch. 8); and Antonina Stebur questions political gestures by female artists in Belarus (Ch. 12).

Next, a multitude of connotations around “civic language(s)” include visual communication “generat[ing] new affective sense of belonging” (7) and affective communities (an anthropological understanding of the “collective catharsis” post-screening of the Maidan documentary Rough Cut (by Nataliya Tchermalykh, Ch. 3); music as empowering transgressive femininity in wartime Ukraine (by Iryna Shuvalova, Ch. 2); the artistic experiments and use of the body as a political tool (Chs. 5, 7 13); the utilization of folklorist motives for dissident symbolism in Belarus (by Antonina Stebur, Ch. 12); and documenting dispossession in Ukrainian art post-2014 (by Svitlana Biedarieva, Ch 1). Going beyond resistance, artistic practices constitute coping strategies in response to violence and war, and become a way of addressing one’s “cultural memory” (Ch. 8) and nurturing a growing “feminist consciousness.”

The narratives frequently reveal a complex and uneasy relationship of contemporary regional feminisms with the ideological meanings associated with its Soviet socialist legacy and, at times, contradictory perceptions of western feminism, which can be seen as radical or irrelevant. Contestation of the applicability of western “waves” of feminism generates an idea of “feminist time” seen as linked to the time of the nation (by Olga Plakhotnik and Maria Mayerchyk, Ch. 4). This “newly emergent feminist subject” (Ch. 13, Graff) is at times multifaceted, displaying irregular (aesthetic) patterns of resistance, such as the female/feminist resistance in 2020 Belarus by Natallia Paulovich (Ch. 11) and Veranika Laputska (Ch. 12). Oksana Briukhovetska (Ch. 9) focuses on the Soviet legacy for understanding race and Jessica Zychowicz (Ch. 5) picks on class dimensions, thus foregrounding different aspect of intersectional feminism.

Importantly, the volume problematizes an intersection of activism, artistic performance, and academic commitment as the writings become a way of reflecting and engaging within the rapidly shifting geopolitical context and socio-cultural fabric of society. While feminism gained a public space, or as Graff states, “gained a public,” the collection foregrounds constructive and productive feminism, omitting instances of its appropriation by regimes or “demonization” (14) by its opponents. This can constitute the focus of the subsequent initiatives. Overall, the book is a valuable addition to courses on area studies with a focus on eastern Europe, feminism, art history, and gender studies.