Ukrainian Features of the "Female Military" on the Facebook Social Network

The purpose of the article is to identify the features of the “female military” in the Ukrainian culture of the early 21st century on the materials of the visual content of the social network Facebook. We call the Ukrainian “female military” the images (primarily photographic) of women in military uniform, with military attributes, often in a real combat situation that were This is an open access journal, and all published articles are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. established in 2014–2021 at the level of the mass culture frame. The research methodology combines quantitative (content analysis, statistical calculations) and qualitative (structural semiotic and semantic analysis) methods with culturological interpretation of the results. Almost 2,500 photos of women in military uniform on Facebook accounts have been analysed, which reflected different contexts — a woman in military service, a woman in real combat operations, a woman in command positions in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, a woman in military attire as an artificial media-object. Scientific novelty. For the first time, “female military”, which in most developed cultures functions as a fashion style, is considered as a reflection of the fact of increasing involvement of women in real service in the Armed Forces of Ukraine or their participation in volunteer military formations in Eastern Ukraine and the embodiment of “militancy” as a feature of the Ukrainian national character. Conclusions. It has been determined that, in fact, the “female military” in a real war does not make up the majority, images of women in traditional types of economic activity and simple posing predominate. Women, even in command positions in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, are more likely to post private photos than photos from official ceremonies, because they do not consider military service as an important social elevator. The article demonstrates that most of the Ukrainian “female military” in relation to the trends of media globalism is partly staged. In such photos, the image is concentrated around the beauty, femininity of the heroine This demonstrates the contradictory nature of the development of feminism in Ukrainian culture — the simultaneous expansion of women’s social opportunities and the emphasis on the archaic interpretation of their gender.