Bringing the Second World In: Conservative Revolution(s), Socialist Legacies, and Transnational Silences in the Trajectories of Polish Feminism

Abstract

This essay traces genealogies of Polish feminisms to three incomplete transformations: the conservative revolution after 1989, the unfinished revolution of state socialism, and the self-limiting revolution of Solidarity. It argues that none of these three transitions singularly accounted for the particular trajectories of post-state-socialist feminisms. To fully comprehend Eastern European feminisms’ multidirectional engagements with local legacies and hegemonies, particularly those of nationalism and anti-imperialist movements, any discussion of gender and feminism in post–state socialism must also pay attention to the positionality of the region within existing postcolonial and transnational feminist frames. This essay asks what the transnational feminist project would look like if it included the subjugated knowledges, multiple and fragmented genealogies, and silenced power hierarchies produced within the subaltern second world. I argue that bringing Eastern European space into transnational feminist debates stretches the boundaries of existing postcolonial frameworks because it requires accounting for colonialism within Europe and forces a reconceptualization of the directionality and ideology of the colonial gaze. While it poses fundamental challenges to crucial postcolonial categories, such as race, the incorporation of the second world’s genealogies of postsocialist transformations, state socialism, and religious fundamentalism and nationalism into existing transnational frameworks may help to overcome the enduring relation of mutual ignorance between the third and second worlds. It further challenges the existing hierarchical, binary frameworks perpetuated within feminist scholarship that focuses solely on the relationship between the global South and the global North, East, and West.