Negotiating democracy's gender between Europe and the nation

Bibliographic Data

ID7774381
AuthorsAnika Keinz (European University Viadrina [email protected], corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume2009
Issue53
Pages38-55
Publication date2009-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFocaal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0920-1297 • E-ISSN: 1558-5263
PublisherBerghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.3167/fcl.2009.530103
OpenAlexW2006707232
LanguageEN
Citations received2

Soon after the collapse of communism, women's rights and gender equality became hotly debated issues in Poland, particularly as they were linked to different interpretations of what the transition to democracy ought to mean. In the context of conservative arguments linking Poland's “return to normalcy” with a return to traditional gender roles and relating feminism to the “foreign” socialist order, women's NGOs and networks in Warsaw started to creatively re-frame their arguments within the terms of Polish tradition. At the same time EUropeanization of gender discourses provided another contested register in which women's rights activists had to negotiate their claims. This article explores how concepts of gender and feminism in Poland have become objects, as much as effects, of powerful political debates, describing a discursive field where national self-understandings and values are negotiated in the context of transition and EU accession. It provides an ethnographic account of the central role played by notions of gender and feminism in imaging democratic citizenship and in producing new subject positions in postsocialist Poland

Citizenship · Communism · Democracy · Feminism · Negotiation · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · European history and politics · Gender Politics and Representation · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law

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