Intimacy before Sexuality: The Ukrainian Tradition of Unwed Youth Spending the Night Together

Аннотация

In the preindustrial Ukrainian village, there was a tradition of young people of marriageable age spending the night together. Even though nineteenth-century scholars studied the live tradition almost simultaneously and mainly in the same regions, they provided very different accounts of it. While some saw it as decent entertainment for youth, others pointed to the more intimate or even sexual nature of young people’s relations. Drawing on the Foucauldian idea of discourse as power and queer theoretical framework on sexuality, the paper explores knowledge production on the tradition of young people spending the night together (also known as prytula). In particular, the article seeks to understand how the modern concept of sexuality informed scholars’ perspectives on the tradition and how their discursive positionality defined their understanding of what they witnessed. Three main discursive perspectives are identified and scrutinized: national romantic, radical, and feminist approaches. In the paper’s final part, a queer theoretical perspective on the tradition, which destabilises the very idea of sex, is introduced.