Women’s Uprising in Poland

Abstract

In 2016 a legislative proposal introducing an abortion ban resulted in female mass mobilisations. The protests went along with frequent claims of Polish as well as European belonging. Next to this, creative appropriations of patriotic symbols related to national movements, fights and uprisings for independence and their transformation into a sign of female bodily sovereignty could be observed all over the country. The appearance of bodies needs to be looked at in relation to the concrete political context and conditions in which bodies materialise (Butler 2015). Bodies are in this sense always relational, but they also depend. The article argues that the constitution of 'European bodies' can serve to empower people exposed to and oppressed by nationalist biopolitics. In such cases a 'European body' might be constituted in distinction to the nation/nationalism and its claim of ownership on female bodies (the 'national body') and by performing multiple belongings extending national belonging.

Struggles over Europe

“…Following postcolonial and race-critical perspectives, a wealth of literature has emerged in recent years in reference to post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe, particularly applying critical whiteness studies and discussing the different shades of whiteness of Europeans who come from this region of the continent (Böröcz and Sarkar, 2017;Szillasy et al, 2014;Smoczyński et al, 2017;Krivonos, 2019;. There is also growing interest in notions of gender and sexuality and their role in Europeanization processes and in the expansion of the EU to countries of Central and Eastern Europe (Ayoub and Patternotte, 2014;Bilić, 2018;Husakouskaya, 2019;Keinz, 2010;Ramme, 2019;Slootenmaekers et al, 2016). However, there is little literature on racist and racializing processes of Europeanization that includes the implicit or explicit (self)hierarchizations and essentializations of the East, let alone the intersecting processes that involve gender, sexuality, and race in entangled and reciprocal productions of East and West.…”