Lost between the Waves? The Paradoxes of Feminist Chronology and Activism in Contemporary Poland

Abstract

As a Polish feminist, writer and academic, I find it somewhat amusing when well-meaning Westerners, on their two-day stop in the Popes homeland, voice their concern that, surely, feminism cannot exist in my country, because you are all so deeply conservative, arent you? and so very Catholic. The truth is that Polish feminism can and does exist, though it is often tormented by self-doubt. As a movement cultural, political and intellectual we are growing in numbers and becoming radicalized by the hour. Quite possibly, we are on the verge of something new, something beyond the familiar paths of Polish gender politics, something that resists the chronology of waves used to describe feminist movements in the West. The aim of this paper is to explore the complexities of this cultural moment in the context of expectations implicit in the wave metaphor, as well as those written into Polands national mythology. When Drag-Queens Dress Up as Bishops In the fall of 1996, Pe!nym G!osem [In Full Voice], the sole feminist periodical published in Poland at the time, featured a lively debate on the existence or rather non-existence of feminism in Poland. Most of the contributors, including myself, claimed