The struggle for the redefinition or negation of citizenship? Mobilising for reproductive rights in Poland since 2016

In recent years, we have witnessed the progressive destruction of democratic principles and the rule of law in Poland. At the core of this is a political ideology based on the heterosexual and nuclear family, determined by national-Christian values. This opened up new structures of political opportunities for anti-gender movements and power alliances with the Roman Catholic Church in Poland (e.g. Graff and Korolczuk 2022). It was clear that one of the main threats to maintaining this vision was women's rights and autonomy. Nevertheless, the attempts to restrict reproductive rights immediately became a direct impetus for an outbreak of public anger, a powerful wave of emotions expressed en masse and in public spaces, and then transformed into a series of acts and actions. The spontaneity, the spatial scale of the commitment or the form of the struggles surprised everyone, including those who took part in them as well as those who organised them. "Attention, attention, female citizens!" - was chanted during the mass all-Polish women's strike in 2016, holding a black umbrella, a frying pan or a clothes hanger, highlighting the importance of gender in everyday life in the political community. The symbols and their meaning were linked to the history of the struggle for women's rights in Poland, as well as to current campaigns and similar events in many other regions and countries around the world. Issues of the right to decide over one's own body, autonomy and to make reproductive choices free from political and religious interference became the basis of grassroots social struggles that were emerging at the time. The spaces created as catalysts for social dissatisfaction and anger, a sense of lack of recognition, fostered the identification of a growing phenomenon of systemic and structural barriers. They then took the form of claims to rights and dynamised the process of negotiating the existing order. Finally, in 2020, this was encapsulated in a remarkably simple slogan - "FUCK OFF!" - chanted alternately with the phone number "222 922 597". What did these slogans mean? What can their radical rhetorical shift say about the state of democracy, the state or society? Do they represent a significant socio-political change taking place in Poland? The civil mobilisations that took place and their echoes still resonate today - almost six years after their constitutive moment - and not only in Poland. My goal is an empirically grounded exploration of the construction of citizenship 'from below' through the struggle for reproductive rights in Poland. I ask the central question: what visions of citizenship emerge from this grassroots social mobilisation? In search of an answer, I use extensive empirical material to describe how the actions taken and the content behind them create new meanings of citizenship.