Le mouvement anti-genre en perspective comparée

Abstract

This paper focuses on the current wave of "backlash" against women's and sexual rights. It explores recent attempts to implement the conscience clause in the Polish healthcare and education systems. The "Chazan case" (Chazan was the director of a public specialist hospital in Warsaw who refused to provide a legal abortion in Spring 2014 because of a "conflict of conscience") and the proposal to provide teachers who oppose gender equality and sexual education with the right to use the conscience clause are sometimes interpreted as instances of a religious or cultural war that has taken over the Polish public sphere. While these cases mark a dominant, or in the opinion of some experts, expanding role of the Catholic Church in the public sphere, they are certainly not the first signs of backlash against women's and sexual rights in Poland. The second part of the analysis links the current ultraconservative, anti-women phenomena to its origins and the previous waves of backlash in Poland: a period of "thaw" between 1953 and 1956, and the transformation from state socialism after 1989. I will argue that in these processes' local legacies, combined with transnational forces, have led to the consolidation of the profound impact of the Catholic Church on Polish political and public life and shaped the internal public debate on gender and sexuality.