“God himself is the author of marriage” - Tracing the development of moral panic over gender and sexuality in Poland

A seminar presented by Dr Agnieszka Koscianska as part of the Anthropology Department Spring seminar series: The Politics of Embodiment.

Currently, sexuality and gender are at the center of public debate in Poland and throughout Central Europe. LGBTQ rights, reproduction, gender mainstreaming and sexual violence constitute major political conflicts: Catholic bishops extensively discuss the threat Judith Butler’s work poses to the Polish nation; conservatives oppose women’s rights; nationalists brutally attack LGBTQ marches. Progressive activists urge that “backward” Poland should catch up with the “developed” West in order to gain sexual and gender rights or just blame the Catholic Church for starting this conflict. Issues of national belonging and cultural citizenship underpin all these debates. Drawing on ethnographic and archival materials, in this paper I intend to examine the roots of the current moral panic over gender and sexuality.

Agnieszka is an associate professor in the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw and a senior researcher in a HERA grant (Cruising the 1970s: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures). She is the author of Gender, Pleasure and Violence. The Construction of Expert Knowledge of Sexuality in Poland (in Polish, 2014) and The Power of Silence. Gender and Religious Conversion (in Polish, 2009). She is the (co-)editor of several volumes and journal special issues on gender and sexuality – the most recent being ‘The science of sex in a space of uncertainty: Naturalizing and modernizing Europe’s East, past and present’ Sexualities, no. 1-2 2016, with Hadley Renkin. Her research interests include sexuality and gender in Central Europe, sexual violence, the history of sexuality, gender and religion.

All welcome.

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29 Mar 2017	3:00pm - 5:00pm	apple google outlook

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