The Great Need of Solidarity: The Strategic Essentialism of the Black Protest in Poland

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  • Presentation speakers
    • Marek Susdorf, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
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    • Marek Susdorf - The Great Need of Solidarity - The Strategic Essentialism of the Black Protest In Poland.pdf

  Abstract:

  This essay explores the current situation in Poland as regards the recently proposed complete abortion ban. I will try to describe the mechanism of the nationalist discourse, which is increasingly popular in the public sphere of the country. According to this narrative, a woman is considered someone who reproduces race, capital and patriarchal system through her dependence, sexual and mental passivity, home-boundedness, and symbolic as well as physical isolation from other women. I will then present how strategic essentialism (Spivak: 1987) can become a useful tool against the patriarchal oppression, illustrating it with the case of the Polish Black Protest (3rd of October 2016). Taking issue with the plea for dissolution of fixed identity amongst the poststructuralist thinkers, I end this article by suggesting that in certain situations the politics of resistance need a well-established, homologable, collective Subjectivity, which enables public recognition and can bring a deep and considerable change within society.

 

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