From Particular Femininity to Civic Universals: Gendered Performances and Democratic Claims in the 2020–2021 Belarusian Protests

This paper examines how women’s performances in the 2020–2021 Belarusian uprising mobilised culturally sedimented scripts of femininity to enact democratic claims under authoritarian paternalism. Focusing on the Women’s/White Marches, I argue that gendered repertoires – white attire, flowers, maternal slogans, open palms, and the visual grammar of care – functioned as a symbolic technology of legitimacy that enabled women to articulate universalist demands (“stop violence,” “free political prisoners,” “fair elections”) from a culturally intelligible and seemingly apolitical position. Drawing on Butler’s performativity and Laclau’s articulation theory, the paper conceptualises these performances as visualised political acts that re-signified the gendered body as a bearer of civic universality. Under Belarus’s paternalist authoritarianism, femininity retains a double valence: it is a site of ideological regulation, yet also a reservoir of moral capital. Women’s strategic citation of traditional roles – mothers, daughters, caregivers – rendered their presence legible within dominant normative frameworks while subverting the regime’s self-understanding as protector of “order” and “family.” These gendered performances temporarily modulated repression, widened coalitions, and allowed marginalised subjects to seize the moral centre of public space. Yet this tactic carried structural ambivalence: it broadened the repertoire of contention while risking the reinscription of the very patriarchal codes it tactically inhabited. The paper situates the Belarusian case within debates on feminist democratization, authoritarian gender orders, and the symbolic politics of resistance. While not framed as explicitly feminist by participants, the Women’s/White Marches destabilised authoritarian gender infrastructures by transforming a culturally conservative repertoire into a conduit for civic claims. In Laclau’s terms, a particular, gendered enactment came to represent an emergent universal: women’s performances condensed heterogeneous grievances into a provisional collective subject – “the peaceful people” – and redefined the frontier between civic virtue and state violence. At the same time, these universals remained fragile, exclusionary, and reversible, as the regime adapted through targeted repression, humiliation, and the re-signification of displayed femininity within protest scenography as impropriety and disorder. Methodologically, the paper employs a multimodal, visual-first analysis of images, videos, and captions to operationalise how gendered scripts travel across audiences and transform localised gestures into scalable political claims. This approach foregrounds affect, moral shock, and semantic openness as mechanisms through which symbolic repertoires gain resonance, diffuse, and structure opportunities for further mobilisation. By analysing how gendered performances become democratic practices in contexts where feminist politics is structurally constrained, the paper offers three contributions: (1) it theorises how particularist, traditionalist gender codes can generate civic universals under authoritarianism; (2) it elucidates the ambivalence of respectability-coded feminised repertoires as simultaneously enabling and limiting feminist possibilities; and (3) it expands comparative feminist and contentious politics by bringing authoritarian, post-socialist cases – often peripheral to the Social Movements canon – into the core of theorisation.