This is an important book for shedding light on the complexities of civic protest in post-Soviet Ukraine. It brings to the fore issues of political power and identity nuanced by both a real and perceived systemic gender divide. Through various stages of dissent spurred by auspicious turning points in Ukraine's move toward a democracy, the reader is made aware of the lingering effects of a patriarchal Soviet legacy in Ukraine. Beginning with the Orange Revolution (2004) through the Revolution of Dignity (the Maidan of 2014) to the current war with Russia, the incidents of public protest demonstrate the degree to which, after almost thirty years of independence, Ukraine's government has failed to address, accommodate, and/or ameliorate the gender-based needs of its constituency.

Using contemporary visual culture as a platform for exposing anxieties around belonging, isolationism, and the violence of war and politics, most of the book's discussion centers on Kyiv. In Chapters 1 and 2, we are guided through the flashmob style of Femen's bare-breasted street eruptions. The more structured collective Ofenzywa (which, for reasons unexplained, alternates between Ukrainian and Polish transliterations in the text) formed around the Gender Studies department at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy is featured in Chapter 3. The mixed-gender anti-institutional stagings of the curatorial team HudRada and REP [Revolutionary Experimental Space] are the focus of Chapter 4. Next, Chapter 5 takes us to another level of institutional confrontation and outright censorship focused on the Mystets΄kyi [Art] Arsenal and its then director, Nataliia Zabolotna (whose surname, alas, is frequently misspelled in the book), and others in key administrative positions as related to education and the arts. The Conclusion offers yet another dimension to the protest narrative, recounting the fallout of the Maidan and the absconding of Viktor Yanukovych, whose infamous invitation to the world at the 40^th World Economic Forum in Davos in 2011 to visit Ukraine during the spring when Ukrainian women begin to “take off their clothes,” tellingly exposed the insidious disposition of power over gender in modern Ukraine.

Soon after the breakup of the Soviet Union, foreigners deplaning at Boryspil airport in the early 1990s would unwittingly become complicit in this endemic process of sexualization. When, at the time, prior to getting passport clearance, visitors were required to make an insurance payment based on the number of days allowed by the traveler's visa, the application was printed on card stock picturing half-clad females in provocative poses advertising Kyiv's strip bars and “gentleman” clubs. Mimicking the style of corporate marketing, the new government was, no doubt, attempting to advertise a fresh post-Soviet face of Ukraine as if to tout sexual promiscuity, once banned in the USSR for its association with capitalism, as a post-Soviet reality. Such egregious instances of exploitation, which branded Ukraine as a resource for human trafficking and prostitution, point to only some of the ills that lie at the base of feminist protest in Ukraine. Alienation and poverty, exacerbated by government gender bias, remain a root cause for opposition.

Zychowicz takes up these issues via a discourse of feminism and postcolonialism and examines the images of gendered protest through the lens of visual culture and its various media. Except for the participatory on-site mural for the “Draftsmen's Congress” held at the National Museum of Art of Ukraine (2012–13), and the project entitled 32 Gogol Street (2011) by Yevgenia Belorusets, a series of photographs focusing on the theme of inadequate housing as a human rights abuse, most of the illustrations do not stand up to the scrutiny of a thorough visual analysis and remain mostly documentary in nature. Zychowicz's tactic to draw parallels between the contemporary Ukrainian vanguard and the revolutionary, specifically Russian, avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s, comes across as superficial, if not gratuitous.

Heavily steeped in the abstruse lexicon of theory, the succinct and informative aspects of the book are sometimes lost in longwinded phrasings seemingly directed at an élite audience who speaks the same language. Quotations from noted theoretical paradigms come across as perfunctory one-liners, and redundancies surface within the dense discursive style. The unusual diary-like insertions of the first person could have been avoided as it detracts from the objectivity of the narrative. In the end, one realizes the impact of the word “superfluous” in the title. Not only does it have a literary connection to Turgenev who writes about a generation unable to effect changes because of its station in life, but it also brings to the surface the futility of feminist protest in a post-Soviet order in Ukraine. Notwithstanding, having laid out this history, the book opens possibilities for moving forward.