Vortrag
‘Naked Girls and Bare Shelves’. Pre-1989 Anti-Gender Discourses and Their Long Legacy in Contemporary Poland?

Many pages have been recently written about the origins of the backlash against women’s rights in Poland. While some scholars have looked for explanations in the years of post-socialist transition, others have painted a more global picture, pointing to several overlaps between anti-gender politics in several regions of the world. These studies, however, rarely consider the impact state-socialist policies had on the development of gender discourses in East Central Europe and, conversely, on the backlash that followed. Therefore, by shedding more light on the pre-1989 discussions of gender, we can study the roots of contemporary anti-gender movements and historicise them beyond the essentialist framework portraying the ‘East’ as always lagging behind the ‘West’.

With such questions in mind, this lecture investigates the history of late state-socialist media discussions of gender and the long shadow they hold over contemporary Poland. The crisis of state socialism – I argue – profoundly transformed the portrayal of gender relations in the media. By the 1980s, women were expected to not only be effective labourers and homemakers but also fulfill the demanding criteria of sexual attractiveness and availability. In turn, many men rejected visions of socialist gender equality, reasserting their heteropatriarchal masculinity through the consumption of erotic images. The rejection of gender equality and embracement of visual culture which objectified female bodies, all contributed to a notable backlash against women’s rights, which would be best observed after 1989, when women’s reproductive rights came under attack. But, as this paper argues, the first attempts at questioning and dismantling the socialist visions of gender equality occurred much earlier. They were, in fact, part of a longer transformation of Polish sexual, national, and economic imaginaries that impacts political debate on women rights up to this day.

Anna Dobrowolska is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw. She holds a DPhil in History from the University of Oxford, and her research focuses on the history of sexuality, visual culture, and gender under state socialism. Her recent book Nie tylko Chałupy. Naturyzm w PRL [Not only Chałupy: Naturism in state-socialist Poland] (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2024), explores the history of nudist activism in 1980s and 1990s Poland.

The talk is part of the HAIT Lecture Series Lost (in) Transformation: Answers from the Recent Past to Challenges of Today in the winter semester. Maren Hachmeister will moderate the talk.

The Lecture Series takes place in TIL 110 and hybrid via Zoom.

If you would like to attend, please register by the Monday before the event at: hait@tu-dresden.de, stating your full name. The registration link will be sent to you separately a few days before the start of the event.

Diese Maßnahme ist mitfinanziert durch Steuermittel auf Grundlage des vom Sächsischen Landtag beschlossenen Haushalts.