History,Politics, and the Cartography of Sexed Bodies in Iurii Illienko’s A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa

Abstract

This article explores the “corporeal” dimension of Iurii Illienko’s reconstruction of cultural and historical discourses in the 2002 film Molytva za het'mana Mazepu [A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa], which focuses on the hetman’s drama, his relationship with Peter I, and the defeat of Swedish and Ukrainian joint forces at the Battle of Poltava in 1709 that signified Ukraine’s submergence into a supranational, imperial community. Illienko’s cinematic space, in which plots of history and sexual politics are mapped onto one another, allows for conceptualizing the body as a site of political and cultural construction, contestation, and radical resistance. Demanding an intertextual approach that involves an open exchange between his cinematic domain and a “universe” of intersecting historical, cultural, ideological and political discourses, his multilayered re-memoration strategies expose both the fictionality and the political dogma surrounding the inherited mythologies. As a decentred reflection of the past, the film poses critical questions about competing histories and the dynamics of historical agency in colonial and postcolonial contexts, thus making a contribution to the protracted process of decolonization in Ukraine.     

Late Adolescents’ Coping Styles in Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Conflicts using the Narrative Disclosure Task

The present study examined differences in coping styles of female late adolescents who were writing repeated narratives about either interpersonal or intrapersonal conflicts. Following the paradigm of Pennebaker’s (Hints on writing a running experiment. Unpublished manual, 1994) narrative disclosure task, 30 female adolescents wrote about the most upsetting event in their lives for 20 min on three consecutive days. These narratives were coded for the presence of interpersonal family conflict, peer conflict, and intrapersonal conflict (e.g., academic failure, medical problem), as well as 30 specific coping processes, including processes such as resignation, blaming others, and taking active steps. These 30 processes were later grouped into five broad coping styles: approach, cognitive, avoidant, internally-focused, and externally-focused coping. The results indicated that coping styles differed significantly depending on the type of conflict. External coping strategies (e.g., blaming others, acting out) were used more often in conflicts with parents, while conciliatory coping strategies (e.g., taking active steps to solve the problem), were used more often with peer conflict. Coping strategies tended to become more adaptive by the end of the third writing session (i.e., restructuring and acceptance increased, while withdrawal, distraction, and acting out decreased). The study is aimed to enhance our understanding of adaptation to psychosocial stressors of adolescence. Clinical implications of the results are discussed and are especially relevant to practitioners working with adolescent females and their families.