Everyday feminism in the semiperiphery: minor practices of survival in contemporary Poland

In the current moment of intensified backlash against feminist gains in Eastern Europe, feminist resistance in Poland often appears either exhausted or relegated to spectacular moments of protest. Yet focusing exclusively on organized activism, mass mobilization, or recognizable feminist discourse obscures a dense field of minor, everyday practices through which women negotiate gendered violence, structural precarity, and political disenfranchisement. This paper conceptualizes “everyday feminism” as a form of situated, semiperipheral acts that operate below the threshold of formal activism – through gestures of care, micro-negotiations of power, informal solidarities, pragmatic refusals, and tactical improvisations that enable survival within an increasingly hostile environment. Drawing on feminist phenomenology, intersectional theory, and post/decolonial perspectives on semiperipheral agency, I argue that these mundane practices constitute a crucial, though often unacknowledged, mode of feminist world-making. Rather than interpreting them as signs of political withdrawal, I approach them as affectively charged responses to disappointment, exhaustion, and the repeated failure of institutional guarantees – responses that both register the limits of emancipation and generate alternative repertoires of endurance and hope. Everyday feminism, understood in this way, challenges dominant imaginaries of feminist resistance as necessarily collective, visible, and future-oriented, and instead foregrounds slow, adaptive, and relational forms of action emerging in contexts marked by democratic erosion and material insecurity. By theorizing these dispersed, frequently nameless practices as feminist in their effects, the paper seeks to broaden the analytical horizon of feminist theory and to illuminate how, in semiperipheral contexts such as Poland, the struggle for gender justice is sustained not only through organized movements but also through the intimate, fragile, and persistent labor of daily life. Such a perspective opens up new possibilities for thinking about endurance, transversal solidarity, and the micro-politics of care as essential components of feminist resistance under conditions of ongoing crisis.