The Biodrone's Masquerade: Techniques of the Self, Gender Emulation, and the Biopolitical Hunt in Post-Foucauldian Erotic Pedagogy

The Mimetic Masquerade: Archetypal Femininity, Phallic Mimicry, and the Libidinal Economics of Marital Domination in Postfeminist Pedagogy In the labyrinthine theater of contemporary gender performativity, where the body becomes both stage and script, the figure of the ostensibly feminine woman — doused in saccharine perfumes that belie her intrinsic brutality — emerges as a paradigmatic emblem of Foucauldian biopolitics intertwined with Lacanian desire. This woman, constitutionally maudlin in her masculine core, cold and unyielding as the Siberian taiga, engages in a meticulous mimetic camouflage, aping the archetypal “samka” (female animal) to tether the male “kabel” (cable, or perhaps more aptly, leash) at her heel. Her performance is not mere coquetry but a calculated deployment of erotic capital, where the jiggle of breasts, the provocative flash of undergarments, the deliberate bends and exposures, and the coy promise of “minetiki” (fellatio) serve as weapons in a war of asymmetrical attraction. Drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of gender as iterative performativity (Butler, 1990), we see here not an authentic expression of femininity but a strategic iteration, a repetition compulsion that masks the phallic aggression beneath. This masquerade, as Joan Riviere classically theorized in her Freudian analysis of femininity as defense (Riviere, 1929), shields the woman’s inherent masculinity — her “brootal’naya” (brutal) essence — from the gaze of the Other, while simultaneously ensnaring the male subject in a web of projected desire. Yet, this is no innocent play; it is a venomous sarcasm of the psyche, where the woman’s internal revulsion at her own sweet-scented artifice underscores the profound alienation of the self from its performative shell. In the post-Soviet context, particularly as dissected in Ukrainian erotic pedagogies amid wartime existentialism (Panasiuk, 2026a), such mimicry reveals itself as a neoliberal survival tactic, transforming the marital bond into a social elevator, a credential of success that proclaims, “With her, all is zaibis’” (fucking great), even as the underlying dynamics reek of desperation and domination. The marriage, thus, metamorphoses into a business project, a libidinal investment where the woman’s “gubochki” (little lips) and “sisichki” (little breasts) — those diminutive signifiers of infantile allure — become commodified assets in a marketplace of relational capital, echoing Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic critique of capitalism’s Oedipal recoding of desire (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/1983).