Abstract
In the current revival of fundamentalist right-wing politics globally, Poland occupies an important place given the struggles for abortion and reproductive justice that have been ongoing there since 2016. Together with Mexican, Argentinian, South Korean, and Italian women, Polish feminists contributed to creating the International Women's Strike, which later spread throughout the globe, uniting movements in seventy countries. This article discusses the symmetric heroisms imposed by the conservative governments on women, who have to give birth “no matter what,” as well as on men, who are told to “defend their fatherland.” Such acute, gendered demands for heroism also perpetuate the binary heteromatrix, further marginalizing LGBTQIA+ people and groups. Recent Polish struggles have contributed to the shift in feminist proabortion narratives from the liberal one, centered on choice, to others more preoccupied with reproductive justice. This article argues that the recent legal limitations on access to abortion in Poland and other countries are central to the current effort to reestablish the rule of the state of exception. It also analyzes the weak resistance of grassroots feminist movements organizing for reproductive justice. The refusal to participate in heroic politics requires not only work for better access to abortion but also an alternative kind of subject formation, here tentatively defined as “unheroic,” as well as politics of weak resistance.
In 2005, I was trying to move beyond the discourse of choice and rights and to open space for materialist perspective in the feminist discussions of abortion and reproductive care in Poland. Suddenly I realized that even in Peter Pan—one of the most lighthearted and dreamy tales I remember from my childhood—Wendy's parents counted their money when their daughter was conceived. They wanted to determine whether they could afford the child, and thus they made a list of possible reductions in their basic expenses. In the early days of the pregnancy, they thought of how they could save in order to make their life with the child economically possible. Economic planning is a necessary part of any family planning, just as the decision about whether, when, and how a pregnancy should happen (or not) belongs to a woman.
This article is composed of three sections. In the first, I discuss the shift from liberal to materialist feminism in contemporary feminist activism, mainly in Poland. The second section analyzes the ban on abortion and restrictions on reproductive rights as central to the politics of the state of exception. In the third section, I show how the feminist politics of reproductive justice constitutes a form of unheroic, weak resistance and thus a version of genuinely antifascist, antifundamentalist politics.
Feminist scholars have discussed various dimensions of power in the field of reproduction.1 In the last decade in Poland, legal restrictions on the already scattered access to abortion led to an unprecedented mobilization of women for reproductive justice as well as for better political representation.2 This mobilization has entailed a massive popularization of feminist ideas and organizing across social, economic, and geopolitical divisions. Since 2016, feminist mass mobilization has turned into a movement as defined by bell hooks in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center—that is, a movement that is not merely a lifestyle for privileged white women but a collective recognizing differences among participants and groups acting in unison.3 This means that women who are not typically inclined to be politically active have not only joined the movement but have also begun grassroots organizing. Such a de-eliticization of feminism was seen as allowing “ordinary women” to join the movement, and although the category of the “ordinary” has been met with mixed feelings and criticism, it captures key dimensions of the recent feminist mobilizations, which remain invisible in analyses organized around other notions.4
This sudden popularization of feminist politics and activism has also influenced struggles in the field of reproductive justice, and abortion activism in particular. It has allowed groups of women to join mass grassroots networks and organizations. Before 2016, the hegemony of the liberal narrative about abortion, focusing on choice, prevented some women from actively defending the right to terminate pregnancy because this defense was compatible only with individualist, free will–centered narratives. But many women in Poland, which is still a Catholic, community-preoccupied country with large parts of the population living in poverty, find it easier to discuss their reproductive decisions in terms of their family situation, poverty, necessity, or health, and thus, unlike most members of the upper middle class, do not see choice as the primary question. Reading the testimonies collected by the Federation for Women and Family Planning (Federacja na Rzecz Kobiet i Planowania Rodziny, the first large feminist NGO to focus on abortion in Poland, relying on the narrative of “choice”) and by the Abortion Dream Team (Aborcyjny Dream Team, a newer feminist network that helps women to gain access to abortion, which began as an organization fighting for reproductive justice), it is easy to see that in the majority of cases women speak about their abortions as needed, as resulting from poverty or health issues, not as “choices” they suddenly made. This preoccupation with context, relations, economy, and the body makes the majority of women's narratives about abortions more easily compatible with materialist feminism than with the liberal feminist narrative.
Hence the significance of a materialist feminist analytic. Materialist feminism—the understanding of gendered roles and their performative repetition as always already embedded in the ideological order of capitalist production—allows us to speak about all the elements of parenthood in contextualized, historically and geopolitically situated, embodied ways. In 1993, Rosemary Hennessy explained, “Materialist feminism is distinguished from socialist feminism in part because it embraces postmodern conceptions of language and subjectivity. Materialist feminists have seen in postmodernism a powerful critical force for exposing the relationship between language, the subject, and the unequal distribution of social resources.”5 Although she later changed her perspective on the relationship between materialism and postmodernism, this is a formulation I find useful for my own theorizing. I have also found it helpful to adapt Louis Althusser's notion of ideology and try to develop a notion of “patriarchal melancholy,” naming an ungrieved loss of control over women's bodies still active in contemporary society. If we take “ideology” to be the name for an embodied ability to act in culture, acquired by means of mostly unconscious repetitions and interpellations, then abortions cannot be seen solely as “choices,” and “patriarchal melancholy” after the loss of control over women's bodies and reproduction cannot be seen only as a state of mind, because it is much more.6 Perhaps such a Freudo-Marxist, queer reading of reproduction can help us understand the current return of the fascist repressed, announced in the popularity of state-of-exception-based politics, on the one hand, and assaults on reproductive rights on the other. Perhaps we need a notion of embodied, historical, materialized gender performance not just to better diagnose the current antifeminist backlash but also to better criticize and challenge it, as well as to find the most effective “lines of flight” from it.7
Understood in intersectional terms, abortion is not solely a question of choice. If reproduction is the intersection where several streets meet and multiple factors compose a situation, as Kimberlé Crenshaw suggests in her seminal metaphor, then perhaps a woman's choice and rights are only two factors interacting with a multiplicity of historically contextualized, materialized, and embodied elements of ideological reproduction, such as cultural influences, ethics, socialization, class, gender, and ethnicity.8 Such contextualized “crossroads,” as Gloria Anzaldúa called them several years earlier,9 are necessary to understand the performative reproduction of gender, as Judith Butler claims.10 What would change in the debate on reproductive justice if we adapted this queer studies narrative to develop a situated, processual, and embodied understanding of abortion?
The first change would be that the narrative about reproductive justice, and abortion, would cease to be trans-exclusionary and thus could include trans, nonbinary, and other persons among those in need of support in the context of reproduction. It would de-essentialize the narrative concerning abortion, making it open to people of various genders as well as various worldviews. If abortion is not an issue of choice so much as one of social circumstances, there is no ideal person to have it, neither in terms of identity nor in terms of political opinions. Such an evolution of the subject of abortion rights activism is clearly visible in the discourse of the new organizations and networks for reproductive solidarity, which, as in the case of the Abortion Dream Team, always emphasize a nonessentialist understanding of the person in need of abortion, unlike the slightly older organizations, such as Federation for Women and Family Planning, which tend to speak about women (and choice), although they also evolve.
My second claim in this article is that the efforts to ban abortion are not separate from the mainstream of the current return of fascist politics. On the contrary, the effort to severely control women's reproductive health by conservative politicians should be seen as a necessary component of the contemporary state of exception. This notion, critically reconstructed by Giorgio Agamben and enacted by many politicians allied with the global return of fascist politics—from Putin to Orban, Kaczyński to Trump, Bolsanaro to Salvini—has a long history. The early twentieth-century version was conceived by the German philosopher and jurist Carl Schmitt, who sought to offer a foundation for the fascism of the 1930s.11 The central elements of the state of exception are always the same; it involves: (1) subjecting parliamentary and juridical powers to the executive; (2) the constitution of a government or leader who, while creating law, is also always already exempt from it; and (3) naming an enemy group and focusing on its degradation and eradication. Such a notion of the state of exception allows us to signal the appearance of fascism in very different countries and cultural contexts, including in all the governments led by the right-wing politicians listed above. In Poland, since 2005, key state politicians employ Schmittian philosophers as counselors. Already in 2006, during his first takeover of the government in Poland, Jarosław Kaczyński tried to take drastic steps to shore up the executive's powers by proposing a law to transfer the power to declare a state of exception from the Parliament (made up of 460 members) to the prime minister (one person). Luckily, this effort was criticized and finally defeated. But since 2015 the Law and Justice Party (PiS, or Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, Kaczyński's party) and its allies have managed to legally restrict the independence of courts and subjugate them to the government, thus liquidating the principle of checks and balances among the legislative, judicial, and executive powers.
The Polish conservative government's choice of enemy groups is strikingly similar to that of the leaders of the Third Reich in the 1930s—first LGBTQIA+ people, then refugees, and finally women, whose access to abortion has been restricted since 2020 to cases of rape and direct danger caused by pregnancy to the life of the woman. In early 2016, fundamentalist organizations started to promote laws mandating severe punishments for women who have abortions and for their supporters. This prompted some one hundred thousand women to join an ad hoc organization created by online activist groups, Dziewuchy Dziewuchom (Gals for Gals).12 The organization's actions and demonstrations effectively postponed the vote on the fundamentalist laws and decreased their severity. In September 2016, the protests continued, culminating in the Women's Strike held on October 3, 2016, when some 250,000 women joined street protests in 150 cities, towns, and even villages in Poland. The Polish Women's Strike of 2016 was organized in solidarity and collaboration with Mexican, Argentinian, Italian, and South Korean feminist protests, leading to the International Women's Strike, which brought together women and allies in almost seventy countries already in 2017.13 The Polish Women's Strike, also known as the “Black Protests” (not for the ethnicity of its participants but because of the tradition of wearing black clothes in protests in Poland since the nineteenth century), was part of a feminism for the masses of women, the country's first genuinely popular grassroots feminist mobilization.14
The politics of the state of exception requires a heroic vision and practice of subject formation. Restrictions on reproductive rights should be seen as part of this process, which subjects women in the most violent, painful way to the absolute rule of the sovereign who is exempt from legal responsibility. This fundamentalist sovereign demands absolute allegiance from the whole of society, but it also tries to preserve and strengthen the traditional gender division, and thus it militarizes men while forcing women to limit their ambitions and lives to reproduction and to sacrifice themselves, if necessary, in order to preserve pregnancy.
Schmitt argued for the need for sacrifice among the absolute sovereign's subjects, and his arguments are now repeated in calls to arms in defense of supposedly endangered traditional values in Poland, Hungary, Russia, Brazil, the United States, and other countries where right-wing populism has gained power. It is striking that these appeals to heroism today seek to reestablish binary gender divisions, forcing the men to embody militarized attitudes while women are encouraged to become the embodiments of the fascist dreams of the innocent mother, so aptly reconstructed by Klaus Theweleit in his Male Fantasies.15 When Jarosław Kaczyński said in 2016 that women “should give birth no matter what,” he was actually ready to embrace the deadly repercussions of such a vision of sacrifice.16 As the Polish Constitutional Court ruled in 2020, even in cases where the fetus shows signs of severe illness, a pregnancy has to be carried to term. Since then, several women have been refused necessary medical assistance due to the doctor's fears of terminating a pregnancy illegally. These tragic situations should be interpreted as the consequences of the version of heroism that now affects women's fate in Poland: we all have to be brave for our sovereign, even to the point of losing our lives.
Kaczyński's politics of the state of exception has been effectively softened through direct social transfers of money to underprivileged social groups, including mothers (the so-called 500+, now 800+, Polish zloty for every child per month) and the elderly (who receive two extra retirement payments per year). While these transfers genuinely changed the lives of many of the poorest families for the better, providing relief from the government's otherwise brutally neoliberal policies, these same families have now returned to where they were before 2015, due not only to the COVID-19 pandemic and its devastating repercussions but also to the current 20 percent inflation rate, a de facto nonegalitarian fiscal politics, and growing income disparities in Poland. We now host between 1.5 and 2 million Ukrainian refugees who fled their country because of the imperial, misogynist crusade launched by Putin in February 2022. Economists argue that this wave of migration greatly contributes to the Polish economy, making the payment of pensions possible and sustaining high-quality and accessible public and private services.17 In the first months of the Russian invasion, many Ukrainian women refugees needed abortions, as their pregnancies resulted from rapes committed by the soldiers of the invading army. It was difficult even for these women to have abortions, although no one officially denied the need to provide them. Only after the interventions of feminist activists and politicians were the rights of these women effectively granted.18 Polish women and girls whose pregnancies result from rape prefer to seek help from informal feminist organizations and networks, including the Abortion Dream Team, Women on Net, Ciocia Basia, and Ciocia Vienia, among others, or to migrate to other countries to make sure that the termination of their pregnancy happens in healthy conditions and without leading to unnecessary repetitions of their trauma.19 Here women's solidarity moves us beyond the heroic paradigm of exceptionality and offers an egalitarian means of resisting the state of exception's deadly norms of femininity through weak resistance and mutual aid.20
I have called this unheroic politics—the contemporary feminist politics of reproductive justice—a form of “weak resistance,” one that opposes the political tendencies of fascism. It is important to see how feminist activism around abortion and reproductive rights has changed over the last twenty years. As I have already noted, around 2016 the mainly municipal form of privileged feminism began to be replaced by an unheroic, ordinary, mass movement of women. The concept of “weak resistance” can help explain this shift, as it seeks to describe the political dimensions of actions that were denied impact in classical accounts of politics.21 It is through this shift of focus that we can see how, in the maintenance of life and social relations, ordinary and everyday strategies as well as unheroic subjects can and do act politically. This politics is not one depicted in most history books, where to engage in politics is to win wars or battles and to behave in ways dictated by the male tradition of hegemonic, European socialization.22 In the current movements for abortion and reproductive justice more generally, these earlier, excluded forms of politics—everyday organizing, solidarity actions, and grassroots mobilizations, sometimes working across the social and cultural divisions between institutional and informal, rural and municipal, poor and bourgeois, reformist and radical, antifundamentalist and antifascist politics—are enacted on a daily basis by everyday, ordinary means. These forms of politics avoid exceptionalism and heroism, although obviously some participants in these actions can and should be seen as heroic. The political significance of their actions results from something else—from an incessant, weak and vulnerable yet forceful opposition to the fundamentalist status quo. As I have argued elsewhere, weak forms of resistance stand for excluded, marginalized, and nonhegemonic forms of political agency.23 While—if enacted on a large scale, for example—they can indeed shake the status quo, they do not repeat misogynist violence. Thus their agency avoids the standard recourse to “the tools of the oppressors” that we so often see in resistance movements. When Vaclav Havel wrote about the “power of the powerless” in the 1970s, he depicted those who had every reason to think that resistance was futile.24 Nevertheless, mobilizing solidarity and subversion on a large scale led to such groundbreaking events as the creation of “Solidarność” movement in 1980 in Poland—a labor union that after some months had ten million registered members (in a country with thirty-six million citizens). The International Women's Strike took part in a similar wave of weak resistance across the globe and succeeded in uniting the otherwise dispersed women's and LGBTQ+ movements.
Abortion was legal in postwar Poland but was partially delegalized in 1997, when it was only made available in cases of rape, danger to the life of the woman, or deformation or illness of the fetus. Now, since October 2020, abortion is only legal in the first two cases, and it is extremely difficult to access even in these cases because doctors lack civic courage. They prefer to invite women to their private clinics, where the costs of a procedure often come close to the median monthly income, rather than to provide abortions legally and within the state-run health insurance system, where they risk accusations of breaking the law. Those searching for abortions—the majority of whom identify as women, but whose numbers include trans and nonbinary people as well—need access to grassroots help, which luckily has become more widely available due to the growing involvement of individuals and informal organizations both in Poland and in other countries. Organizations such as the Abortion Dream Team, Ciocia Basia, and Ciocia Vienia do not focus on choice; they focus on availability of means of terminating pregnancies. This is an important shift: before, a narrative of choice propelled proabortion tactics, despite the problem of already limited accessibility. Not all people “choose” abortions; many of them would rather not choose it but have to—for social, economic, health, or other reasons. Many never even think of such a choice—some because they never wanted to reproduce, others because their life situation leaves them no choice, and still others because they know they would not make such a choice. Their decisions are based on a sense of justice and balance. In a Catholic country, many people follow the ethical controversies surrounding abortions, and even those who do not share the religious mindset might have doubts. In the course of the transition from liberal feminism to the more heterogeneous, reproductive justice–centered position on abortion, it was important to give everyone seeking abortion a sense of belonging regardless of their viewpoints and beliefs. Between 1997 and today, a huge change has taken place in reproductive rights activism, making it possible to bring together the practice of solidarity in sharing access to abortion and recognition of the many political and ethical positions of those involved, whether as providers or as receivers of such aid. I want to emphasize that this is a very different narrative and context, a change for the better, making abortion more accessible and feminist alliances more widespread. While previously only women sharing feminist, liberal values felt at all entitled to seek help from feminist organizations, now these organizations work so that anyone, regardless of their worldview, can gain access to abortion.
This happens through “weak resistance,” which constitutes an alternative to the heroic models of political agency familiar from philosophy and history alike. The symmetry of heroisms that I have identified seeks to reproduce the gender binary and to establish a nationalist, militarized, heroic response to the complexity of late modern life. The conservative backlash, often depicted as fundamentalist, “anti-gender,” or fascist politics, installs a sense of urgency and belonging, calling for the resuscitation of love for the local and for a readiness to sacrifice. This is how the mechanisms of attachment, belonging, and unity are affectively established in the right-wing political turn today. The “anti-gender” mobilizations, as analyzed by Elżbieta Korolczuk, Agnieszka Graff, and many other feminist scholars, focus on binary gender divisions and on the defense of the “traditional family.”25 Interestingly, recent reports from court cases—SLAPPs (strategic lawsuits against political participation)—launched by the fundamentalist NGO Ordo Iuris against the Atlas of Hate made by antihomophobic activists in Poland show that no such danger against the traditional family can be identified even by the local authorities who voted in favor of laws protecting the “traditional family” from the dangers supposedly constituted by LGBTQIA+ people and groups. The transcripts from courtrooms show clearly that conservative politicians, asked by the judge directly, “What threat to the traditional family can you name?” responded: “None.”26 Without an affective support, this purely imaginary threat to the “traditional family” as well as to the “sovereignty of the homeland” and other supposed targets of the feminist and LGBTQIA+ people collapses under the weight of reality. Thus the fundamentalists need to place a sense of sacrifice at the core of their crusade, and so the discourse on the defense of the homeland is strengthened, with its call for the militarization of men. And what of women? As I argue above, the narrative that seeks to force women to give birth “no matter what”27 represents a version of heroism for women; it serves to affectively bind the other, feminine half of the population to the logic of fundamentalism. Just as men's sacrifice requires a readiness to give up their lives for the sake of the homeland, women face similar risks in today's Poland. The life of the fetus is now better protected than that of the woman, and, as I have noted, several people have already lost their lives because doctors resigned rather than harm a fetus. Women in Poland have therefore had to alter their reproductive plans, fearing that even desired pregnancies could endanger their own lives. Paradoxically, the birth rate in Poland is the lowest in the European Union because of this supposedly “pro-natal” policy, which in fact kills women.
These forms of heroism for men and for women need to be diagnosed, criticized, dismantled, and rejected. This is why we need a notion of unheroic subjectivity, a defense of weak resistance, and refusal of heroism more generally. I believe that the liberal narrative of choice does not do justice to the complexity of human political decision-making, which resembles an iceberg in that it leaves only a small part visible while the rest, the crucial part, lies under the surface, made up of the past, desire and the unconscious, and affective attachments. This narrative promotes a kind of “cruel optimism,” binding contemporary right-wing politics and those governed by it, beholden to its deadly heroism.28 The narrative based on individual choice is thus a necessary companion of this heroic politics. In order to effectively oppose the state of exception, we need weak resistance, and our refusal of heroism should be practiced and theorized as a version of political agency that has the power to dismantle fascist politics. The notion of reproductive justice should lead us to dismantle the individualism that sustains heroic politics. In the current proabortion movements in Poland and other countries, where the politics of the state of exception exalts heroism and sacrifice, we needed a nonindividualist, unheroic understanding of subjectivity and contextualized, relation-based strategies of weak resistance. These will not only allow for a better defense of abortion and reproductive health but also fundamentally challenge today's fascist politics by creating an alternative to radical right-wing rule.
It is by weakening our models of subjectivation and political belonging that we can effectively resist fascist ties. The grassroots feminist groups providing access to abortion in Poland and beyond its borders are organized in precisely this way; they remind us that solidarity means being many, acting together even under conditions of assault or danger.29 Such acts can be effective forms of defense against violence even if they are not violent themselves; solidarity networks, support, subversion, and critique can be free of violence and bring an end to violence. These feminist groups and networks situate themselves not only at the core of feminist activism but also in the center of today's antifascist struggles. Groups such as the Abortion Dream Team, “Aunt Basia,” and others act in ordinary ways, without demanding heroism, even if their actions can perhaps be considered heroic. Their chosen model of action, as they provide access to abortions, eschews the powers of heroism, strength and exceptionality. Instead ordinary women exercise uncomplicated, everyday agency together. This is the exact opposite of the heroic exceptionalism demanded from us by right-wing fundamentalists, who try to convince entire populations to act as heroes in response to imaginary dangers in the state of exception.
The refusal of heroism, solidarity based on vulnerability, weakness, and everyday tactics—these constitute the best and most effective response to the fascist awakening, as they show us a line of flight leading away from the “caring” eyes of the Leviathan and from its “caring” hands. Access to abortion might be severely limited in Poland now, but there are no limits to reproductive justice solidarity, which grows stronger with every heroic gesture of the supposedly “caring” contemporary state apparatus. If wherever there is control there is resistance, then we can see this logic repeated in the dialectics of heroism, reproduced by the right-wing authorities, and the weak resistance of the population, which recognizes its diversity and recommits to solidarity on a daily basis. In response to the forms of heroism peddled by contemporary ultraconservative politicians to strengthen the gender binary, we see the growth of heterogeneous solidarity, the refusal of heroism, and the proliferation of weak resistance and alternative models of politics, contradicting the rule of exception.
Notes
Chełstowska and Ignaciuk, “Criminalization, Medicalization, and Stigmatization”; Davis, Women, Race, and Class; Ross, Understanding Reproductive Justice; Federici, Caliban and the Witch.
Chełstowska, “Stawiam na Sprawiedliwość Reprodukcyjną”; Korolczuk et al., Bunt kobiet; Majewska, Feminist Antifascism.
hooks, Feminist Theory, 27.
Agamben, State of Exception; Ryszka, Państwo stanu wyjątkowego.
Korolczuk et al., Bunt kobiet.
See also Scott, Weapons of the Weak.
Graff and Korolczuk, Anti-gender Politics in the Populist Moment; Majewska, “Belonging despite the State of Exception.”
Maczuga, “Pytania do starosty.” For more general information on Atlas of Hate, see https://atlasnienawisci.pl.
