The Strength of the Strengthless: Women, Aged, and Disabled People as a Subversive Force in the Belarusian Protest Movement 2020

ABSTRACT

This article examines the Belarusian protests of 2020, triggered by the rigged presidential election results and the illegal disproportionate use of force by the authorities. Given that most protesters were apolitical before 2020, the article seeks to clarify how it happened that passive vulnerable individuals were unprecedentedly mobilized for sustained collective political action. The author focuses on protest actions organized by particularly vulnerable social groups (women, pensioners, the disabled) and reveals their importance for the democratic protest against the patriarchal-authoritarian order. The article traces three stages in the protest development: the moment of traumatic shaking, the caesura of the political sublime, and the rapid scale of the peaceful protest movement characteristically represented by the social groups in question. It is argued that their protest actions had a subversive effect with respect to the autocratic rule and re-actualized an alternative normative and axiological horizon in a given life-world.

KEYWORDS:

• Vulnerability
• sovereign power
• peaceful protest
• political sublime
• ethics of nonviolence
• authoritarian regime

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Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2023.2231748)

Notes

1 Gaiduk, Rakova and Silitskii, Sotsial’nye kontrakty v sovremennoi Belarusi.

2 Shchyttsova, “Deprivation of the Future”.

3 See Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly 139.

4 Ibid. 140.

5 Shchyttsova, “Deprivation of the Future”.

6 Heidegger, Being and Time (paragraph 29); Schmid, “Shared Feelings”; Fuchs, “The Phenomenology of Affectivity”.

7 Salmela and Nagatsu, “Collective Emotions and Joint Action”.

8 Patočka, Heretical Essays 39–40.

9 Patočka, Heretical Essays 125.

10 Ibid. 126.

11 Ibid. 134.

12 It should be clarified clear that Butler’s thesis that “vulnerability and invulnerability are not essential features of men or women, but, rather, processes of gender formation, the effects of modes of power that have as one of their aims the production of gender differences along lines of inequality” (Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly 145) belongs to the second aspect.

13 Foucault, The History of Sexuality Part five.

14 Shapiro, The Political Sublime 4.

15 Ibid. 3.

16 This definition must be understood as an ethical one. At issue is the primordial ethics (ethos) shared by the community. From the point of view of the community’s ethos and common-sense system, the authorities’ violence had been perceived in terms of such popular expressions like “It's not human”, “People don't behave like that”, “It's just a bit savage”.

17 See Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience 168, 178.

18 Anderson, “Affective atmospheres” 78.

19 Böhme, “Atmosphere as the fundamental concept of a new aesthetics”.

20 Anderson, “Affective atmospheres” 80.

21 Freeman, The Feminine Sublime 11.

22 Ibid. 10.

23 See the concepts of sovereign power developed by: Schmid, Political Theology, and Agamben, Homo sacer.

24 Scott, “Gender” 1069.

25 Anempadistau, Koler Belarusi; Lobachevskaya, Belarusian folk textile.

26 Freeman, The Feminine Sublime 11.

27 Ibid. The Feminine Sublime 10.

28 It is remarkable, that it was fully in line with Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s very specific election program as a candidate for president. See: Shchyttsova, ‘Sovereign power and Ethics of Non-violence’.

29 Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly 140, 141.

30 Comp. Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly 139.

31 Readings, “Sublime Politics” 411.

32 Butler, The Force of Nonviolence 39.