From status to lived citizenship. Citizenship in the struggle during grassroot mobilisations on reproductive rights in Poland

In October 2020, in the middle of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, during the time of the ban on public assembly, thousands of people took to the streets in Poland. They blocked major roads and hung strike symbols on balconies and windows. The marches took place in several hundred cities and towns throughout Poland, gathering up to half a million people on the streets. In Warsaw, the police abused their power; they used pepper spray and insulted the demonstrators. Public spaces filled with shouts of slogans such as 'This is war', 'you will never walk alone,' or 'When the state does not protect me, I must protect my sisters.' These events were a reaction to the Constitutional Court, ruling that abortion based on fetal abnormality is unconstitutional. But these October events are neither the beginning nor the end. They were one of the key elements in the six years of grassroots social struggles for rights that have been ongoing in Poland. In my research, it is a lens for observing new forms of political mobilizations and movements. In essence, there is a question of citizenship. This paper aims to explore the visions of citizenship emerging from the struggle for reproductive rights in Poland. In recent years, among other things, I have conducted more than 30 narrative interviews with people who participated in these mobilizations and collected speeches given at demonstrations. The result appears to indicate that since the beginning of the 2016 mobilization, the notion of citizenship has been at the center of the discursive frame constructed by the movement. 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. It comes with redefine the meanings attributed to citizenship, a new vocabulary, and categories for the definition “I the citizen”.