Gender a výzkum / Gender and Research 2026, 27 (1): 25-50 | DOI: 10.13060/gav.2026.008

Decolonised Gendered Subjects at War for Freedom and Self-Determination: Women in Combat in Real-Time and in Digitalised Memory

Mariya Shcherbyna ORCID...a,b, Tetiana Havlin ORCID...b
a Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg
b Politecnico di Torino

Women’s history has long been marginalised in dominant narratives, with archives and institutional memory omitting or minimising women’s contributions. Recognising and documenting women’s roles across warfare, social movements, science, and culture is essential to shaping collective memory and challenging persistent gender bias. The digitalisation of archives and memory practices has democratising potential, expanding accessibility, diversity, and global engagement with women’s histories. Online platforms transcend geographical and institutional barriers, integrating testimonies and artefacts in multimedia formats that foster inclusive, participatory representations of women’s experiences. In post- and decolonial, postsocialist contexts, these tools create alternative spaces to contest state-controlled historical discourses. In Ukraine, digital public history initiatives such as Incredible Women (Gender Museum 2024) and Beading the Womantory (Gender Culture Centre 2025) recover the contributions of marginalised women, while Invisible Battalion (2025) and Her War Story (Gender Museum 2025b) document women’s wartime experiences. Drawing on 25 testimonies of women in or formerly involved in combat, we examine self-representation, identity, and agency to explore how digitalised memory practices transform collective remembrance and commemoration in the context of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. We argue that these digital narratives function as epistemic repair, reclaiming women’s subjectivity within androcentric and imperial memory regimes, and propose the figure of the ‘woman at war’ as a discursive and decolonial subject of commemoration.

Keywords: digitalised memory, women in combat, Russo-Ukrainian war

Received: November 5, 2025; Revised: July 9, 2026; Accepted: July 9, 2026; Prepublished online: September 8, 2026; Published: September 9, 2026  Show citation

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Shcherbyna, Mariya and Tetiana Havlin. 2026. "Decolonised Gendered Subjects at War for Freedom and Self-Determination: Women in Combat in Real-Time and in Digitalised Memory." Gender a výzkum / Gender and Research 27(1):25-50.
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