From streets to Sejm: Discourses of feminist protest and political change in Poland

Chalupnik, Malgorzata; Brookes, Gavin

Abstract

Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet (All-Poland Women’s Strike) is a grassroots campaign engaging with social, feminist and women’s rights issues in Poland. Formed in 2016 in response to proposed tightening of abortion laws, the campaign coordinated a series of protests in Poland, including the unprecedented mass protests of October 2020. On 17 October 2023, two days after the Polish General Election, the campaign issued the following statement: ‘[p]rotested in 2020, then voted in 2023 – women and youth bring electoral victory to Polish opposition over the right wing, populist government’. This represented a rare English-language post on the campaign’s popular Facebook profile. The post attributes the ousting of the former ruling party, the national-conservative Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (PiS; ‘Law and Justice’), after eight years in power, to women and young people. Indeed, this represented an unprecedent political shift after the continuous rise of populism and conservatism in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in many other parts of the world.

In this chapter, we analyse 3-months’ worth of postings from Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet’s most popular social media account, Facebook. In particular, we focus on the period directly following the 2023 Polish General Elections. The postings are subjected to critical discourse analysis, with a particular focus on the representation of social actors (van Leeuwen, 1996, 2008). Our analysis scrutinises how the campaign frames itself, its supporters (mainly Polish women) and the Polish government. In doing so, the analysis aims to account for the discursive construction of the relations between gender, protest and political change, simultaneously contextualising this analysis in the contemporary history of Polish protest and political life. We highlight here the collectivising ability of contemporary, networked feminist protests, serving as an important force for political change and a counterforce to populist and conservative politics that aims to marginalise and disempower women and other marginalised groups (for discussion, see Graff, 2014; Król & Pustułka, 2018).

Citation

Chalupnik, M., & Brookes, G. From streets to Sejm: Discourses of feminist protest and political change in Poland. In Language, Gender and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan

• Deposit Date: May 17, 2024
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality
• Series ISSN: 2947-9169
• Book Title: Language, Gender and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/34869251
• Contract Date: Apr 16, 2024