From Round Table to Black Protests. Gender and the process of democratization and democratic backsliding in Poland

Mainstream literature on democratisation processes in Poland usually focuses on institutional critical junctures—defining moments of fracture that pave new paths, and patterns of “doing democracy”— without paying much attention to citizens’ struggles that accompany them. Importantly, the omission of the role of social movements’ in struggles for democracy often correlates with almost complete disregard of the impact that mobilizations of marginalized social groups have on the shape of grand political processes. This paper incorporates gender perspectives into the analysis of the10 crucial protest moments in post 1989 Poland. It analyzes the place of gender, and feminists and queer actors in the ongoing debate on democratization, and examines the capacity of marginalized social groups to trigger contentious and subversive political change by initiating protests, reproducing it, and creating a long- lasting memory, and sometimes, also institutional legacy of it (DellaPorta 2018). In-depth examination of Polish protest activities that accompanied momentous events of post 1989 democracy in Poland, such as introduction of the austerity measures, and the restriction of the abortion law (often omitted in the mainstream analyses), aims at comprehending the connectivities between exclusive democratization processes an backsliding of democracy. Shifting the focus away from institutions, and towards gendered aspects of social mobilizations will, I expect, help to reconceptualize feminist and queer movements as crucial actors who build political responses to autocratization (Dimitrova 2018), and push forward re-democratization processes (Verloo 2018).