Monstrous Queers vs. Innocent Kids: Utilization of Children as Victims of 'Gender Ideology' in Polish 'Anti-Gender' Discourses

Description

Abstract

Drawing on selected public debates and the findings from the RESIST project, this presentation examines local specificities surrounding the construction of children as purported victims of ‘gender ideology’ and ‘LGBT agenda’ in contemporary Poland, highlighting the ways in which Polish narratives intersect with operationalizations of vulnerability and deviance in ‘anti-gender’ discourses across Europe and beyond.

The concept of 'gender ideology' as a perceived threat to children and women is a prevalent theme in Polish right-wing parliamentary and media discourses (RESIST Project Team 2024). Additionally, proponents of 'anti-gender' politics in Poland often depict LGBTIQ+ people and feminists as a depraved, uncontained, foreign force that endangers 'traditional' women and 'innocent' children. The latter demographics are constructed as vulnerable entities lacking agency, reliant on the protection of cisheteropatriarchal men for national continuity and cohesion. Consequently, women and children are portrayed as objects in need of safeguarding from (imaginary) enemies: the perverted Queer, the man-hating Feminazi, and the Western ‘civilization of death’ (in contrast to the Catholic ‘civilization of life’, cf. John Paul II 1995).

While the Child as ‘the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention’ (Edelman 2004) has been examined in queer theory and while studies of 'anti-gender' politics found the same trope across nations, including the UK, Switzerland, and Hungary (RESIST Project Team 2024), the Polish context is distinct due to Catholic influences and the malleability of the West-East conceptual framework. Poland’s unique, postcolonially ambiguous geopolitical position allows Polish 'anti-gender' actors to portray the 'West' as both an oppressive colonizer and an orientalized site of moral decay where children suffer like quasi-martyrs from the hands of queer persons and feminists. Through its Eastern European positionality, the Polish case study can contribute to transnational discussions on the re-traditionalization of values, which profoundly affects gender and sexual freedoms across diverse sociocultural contexts.