Papers by Urszula Chowaniec
Autobiografia, 2023
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Central Europe, 2021
This special issue emerged from the largest-ever international conference on Polish gender issues... more This special issue emerged from the largest-ever international conference on Polish gender issues outside of Poland, The Impacts of Gender Discourse on Polish Politics, Society and Culture, organized by Ula Chowaniec, Ewa Mazierska and Richard Mole and held at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, on 11–12 June 2018. As can be seen from the group photo at the end of this introduction, the conference was very well attended, suggesting that gender studies, LGBTQ+ discourses and feminist movements in Poland are flourishing. It was also a year in which we celebrated 100 years of Polish women’s suffrage (hence the #naukaniepodległa/independent education on the banner in the photo from the conference at the end of this introduction). Nevertheless, the actual papers revealed that the mood was not optimistic. The nationalist politics and rhetoric of the governing Law and Justice Party (PiS) has exerted a negative impact on openness towards queer culture and the acceptance of LGBTQ+ rights within Polish society. As we prepared this volume for publication, we followed the discourse surrounding the presidential election in Poland (28 June and 12 July 2020), in which homophobic discourse was employed to appeal to the more conservative section of the population. During the presidential campaign, the LGBTQ+ communities’ language and rights were presented as a threat to a healthy Polish society. The most conspicuous sign of this hostile approach was the creation of public ‘LGBT-free zones/strefy wolne of ideologii LGBT’ in approximately 100 cities and towns in Poland. The topic of queer politics and culture in Poland has been the subject of numerous events at University College London in the last few years. During 2017 several events took place, which discussed gender and LGBTQ rights in a changing Europe and elaborated upon the impact of Brexit on the queer communities from Poland. Among the invited guests and authors were Izabela Morska, one of the first openly lesbian authors in Poland, who spoke about her research and the situation for queer people in contemporary
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Slavonic and East European Review, 2022
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Argument : Biannual Philosophical Journal, 2012
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A woman needs to find herself. She needs to abandon all the pretentiousness in which she masquera... more A woman needs to find herself. She needs to abandon all the pretentiousness in which she masquerades herself. In order to achieve this, an open debate needs to be initiated on female sexuality, on taboos associated with the female body that turn women into oversensitive, hysterical even, and unreliable creatures with the stain of impurity (Krzywicka 1936). This is – in a nutshell – the idea of women’s emancipation advocated in the 1930s by Irena Krzywicka (1899-1994), Polish writer and journalist. She wrote with contempt about the stereotypes to which women are willing to conform in order to highlight their feminine side, “all this sentimental adoration of parents, monotonous patriotic exaltation, and hysterical attitude towards love which no normal man could bear – it is not real ” (Krzywicka 1936, 63), and which – according to her-have to be rejected. The quoted sentence includes two important messages for the debate on femininity initiated by Krzywicka. One is that women masquera...
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Przegląd Kulturoznawczy, Feb 20, 2013
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Slavic Review, 2017
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As this issue was being prepared for publication, Poland was celebrating the twentieth anniversar... more As this issue was being prepared for publication, Poland was celebrating the twentieth anniversary of its first democratic elections for over four decades. The period inaugurated in June 1989 has often been referred to as the “new” Dwudziestolecie [twenty-year interlude], strongly evoking the previous, or interwar Dwudziestolecie, which ran from 1918 to 1939 and saw the re-emergence of an independent Poland, until then partitioned by the Prussian, Russian and AustroHungarian empires. The opening of a new Dwudziestolecie saw the end of communist Poland (Polish People’s Republic), and would find a purely arbitrary end in the present year. Whatever the actual historical validity of drawing an analogy between the new and old Dwudziestolecie, it offers a convenient comparative perspective on Poland’s recent history. The main parallel usually drawn between the two periods is, of course, their democratic character (real or perceived), which was interrupted after 1939 by the advent of World...
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The main objective of this collection of papers is to explore ideas of generation and transformat... more The main objective of this collection of papers is to explore ideas of generation and transformation in the context of postdependency discourse as it may be traced in women’s writing published in Bengali, Polish, Czech, russian and English. As we believe, literature does not have merely a descriptive function or a purely visionary quality but serves also as a discursive medium, which is rhetorically sophisticated, imaginatively influential and stimulates cultural dynamics. It is an essential carrier of collective memory and a significant indicator of group identity. Along with philosophy, literature explores the intellectual and emotional, aesthetic and ethical components of our lives, and, while focusing on a single feeling or unique event or phenomenon, aspires to capture the universal attributes of human experience. Hence, we intend to juxtapose interpretations of literature originating in very different cultural milieus, such as the Central East European1
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The main objective of this collection of papers is to explore ideas of generation and transformat... more The main objective of this collection of papers is to explore ideas of generation and transformation in the context of postdependency discourse as it may be traced in women’s writing published in Bengali, Polish, Czech, russian and English. As we believe, literature does not have merely a descriptive function or a purely visionary quality but serves also as a discursive medium, which is rhetorically sophisticated, imaginatively influential and stimulates cultural dynamics. It is an essential carrier of collective memory and a significant indicator of group identity. Along with philosophy, literature explores the intellectual and emotional, aesthetic and ethical components of our lives, and, while focusing on a single feeling or unique event or phenomenon, aspires to capture the universal attributes of human experience. Hence, we intend to juxtapose interpretations of literature originating in very different cultural milieus, such as the Central East European1
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Slavic Review, 2018
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Papers by Urszula Chowaniec
Dokładny adres:
Femme mélancolique, czyli o pesymizmie najnowszej literatury kobiecej, ss. 371-408. In Ćwiczenia z rozpaczy. Pesymizm w prozie polskiej po 1985 roku, red. Jerzy Jarzębski, Jakub Momro. Kraków: Uniersitas.
Contribution:
a) (2010) Introduction: Mapping Concepts: ‘Experience’ and Women’s Writing in Russia and Poland, ss. 1-33.
b) (2010) ‘Intimately social’: the Experience of Menstruation in Polish Women’s Writing, ss. 150-170.
Introduction:
Philosophy and Literature: Generation and Transformation in Gender and Postdependency Discourse (website: http://www.argument-journal.eu/back-issues/vol-2-no-1?lang=en)
The book is the result of a project carried out from the end of December 2011 to December 2013, entitled “The ‘Ruined’ Bodies of (E)migrants, Female Tourists and Vagabonds in Contemporary Polish Fiction (The Notions of Migration and Homelessness, Melancholy and Loneliness in Literature”)
The aim of this English-language monograph was to summarize the problems of the body and its representation in contemporary literature, written by women as a theoretical diagnosis of the last two decades (1989-2010). The monograph presents the analyses of the most important literary processes from a gender perspective, taking into account the political and social events, such as post-communist transformation of the Polish accession to the European Union. The study combines the latest achievements in the field of humanities and anthropology of the body, both in Poland and in the world.
All the literary works that are analyzed in the monograph relate - directly or indirectly - to the issue of migration, written, published and discussed after 1989. Some of them are about migrants and wanderers that is the notion of migration is visible on the thematic dimension of the works. Other texts which I analyzed are written by authors who live outside Poland and they indirectly speak about their experiences of migration, alienation from language and culture.
While writing this monograph, I started from the assumption that migration in contemporary European literature is a new category (which I discuss in the fifth chapter of the book) and as such needs to be re-discussed. Among the authors who belong to the “protagonists” of the book are: Olga Tokarczuk, Izabela Filipiak, Joanna Bator, Joanna Pawluśkiewicz, Marta Dzido, Sylwia Chutnik, Inga Iwasiów and Manuela Gretkowska.
I argue that emigration is no longer a consequence of the political division between East and West in Europe. This division dissected Polish literary works into the national/home production and émigré literature for many decades. Today, however, the émigré character of literature refers solely to the specific existential dimension that is implied in the text as well as to the literary “evidence” of experience of separation from one’s own language and culture, the experience of dislocation, which was present while the text was created and is inscribed in text. Therefore, I propose that instead of talking about migration, emigration and/en émigré literature, we should talk about migration inscriptions or inscriptions of migration in literary texts.
Politics and Sexuality in the Cinema under Communism in Eastern Europe.
Lecture available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvynFSkp_xc
This is a working paper, presented at the Lunch hour at UCL, 2018, and part of the project Constructing the Personal Stories that Matter Nation, Home and Motherhood in Poland and Eastern Europe from the Non-Heteronormative and Comparative Perspectives
Main topic is the problematic debate on "gender" in public debate, in which the constant misunderstanding of the concepts leads to ridiculous argumentations and conclusions.