REFRAMING CITIZENSHIP? Emerging visions of citizenship on the unprecedented social struggle for reproductive rights in Poland

Attempts to restrict reproductive rights in Poland gave rise to unprecedented social mobilisations that have been ongoing since 2016 as part of the All-Polish Women's Strikes. These have led to thousands of citizens repeatedly taking to the streets in Poland and abroad and the emergence of a sustained movement, at the core of which is the making of claims to rights that invoke multiple issues and spheres. The most numerous protests so far took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, when, despite restrictions on public assembly laws, thousands of people took to the streets responding to the Constitutional Court verdict. The breaking of the "abortion compromise" that had lasted more than two decades became the impetus for mass denunciations of obedience and challenges to the legitimacy of existing laws, authorities, or institutions. This paper aims is to explore the visions of citizenship emerging from struggle for reproductive rights in Poland. In recent years, among other things, I have conducted dozens of narrative interviews with people who participated in these mobilisations and collected speeches given at demonstrations. The result seems to indicate that since the beginning of the 2016 mobilisation, the notion of citizenship has been in the center of the movement’s constructed discursive frame. The language of citizenship theory was communicated by personal experiences that vividly problematised the sense of (not)belonging to a political community, especially in its vision shaped by the state. Citizenship has become a lived experience.