Abstract
This article attends to the instrumentalization of gender and sexuality in recent Polish political campaigns. Locating current political debates in a cultural-historical context of long-established hierarchical divides, it conceives of gender and sexuality as ‘empty signifiers’ deployed in political struggles (for hegemony) over notions of civic responsibility, good citizenship and articulations of Europeanness. Similarly, it takes ‘Europeanness’ as an empty signifier, without any essential meaning, arguing that these signifiers are key to understanding recent mobilizations around moral frontiers in Polish politics. Illustrative examples serve to elaborate how LGBT rights and sex education are instrumentalized among self-proclaimed liberals as well as rightwing nationalists, seeking to guarantee the moral integrity of the nation according to an antagonistic logic. On both sides of the political divide, we witness a self-orientalizing positioning towards the European ‘core’, whether phrased in terms of sexual modernity or Christian civilization.
Highlights
This article draws on critical political theory in the tradition of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) to highlight the instrumentalization of gender and sexuality in recent Polish political campaigns
We take as our point of departure that post-1989 Poland is characterized by, on the one hand, the disruption or dislocation of old interpretive frameworks of civic responsibility, which, after 1989, lost their efficiency in interpellating political subjectivities, and, on the other, discursive strategies of assessing its actual or imaginary state of maturity according to self-reported European values or ideas (Kuus, 2004; 2007; Böröcz, 2006; Melegh, 2006)
In Poland, the prudent citizenry has in various historical contexts been perceived as torn between the empires of the rational, civilized West and the barbarian, alien East, the latter being variably associated with nationalism, authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, and suppression of women and sexual minorities
Summary
This article draws on critical political theory in the tradition of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) to highlight the instrumentalization of gender and sexuality in recent Polish political campaigns. We take as our point of departure that post-1989 Poland is characterized by, on the one hand, the disruption or dislocation of old interpretive frameworks of civic responsibility, which, after 1989, lost their efficiency in interpellating political subjectivities, and, on the other, discursive strategies of assessing its actual or imaginary state of maturity according to self-reported European values or ideas (Kuus, 2004; 2007; Böröcz, 2006; Melegh, 2006). We will highlight the impact of an entrenched ‘feudal’ lord/boor binary on contemporary struggles for hegemony in the Polish public sphere. This framing suggests that it is helpful to consider both local, historicalcultural specificities and global factors when interrogating how antagonistic frontiers originate in dislocated structures (see Nabers, 2017: 421). Illustrative examples will serve to highlight how LGBT rights and sex education are instrumentalized in political struggles across the political spectrum – among selfproclaimed liberals and rightwing nationalists alike
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