Against Theory: Selected “Girlhood” Feminist Artistic Practices in Poland

The mass public protests against introduction of further limitations on women’s reproductive rights in 2016 become important moment for the Polish feminist movement. Yet, the movement’s structure and semiotic reservoir of justifications has visibly changed in the recent years. The young Polish feminism has become more “girlish” than “womanly”. In our paper, we analyze how the “girlhood” artistic practices fit into the renewal of contemporary ref lection on the gender roles of women and the Polish feminist movement. We analyzed practices of young Polish artivists, involved in girlhood-feminist collectives, and compared their cultural tactics with those of selfie feminism. The paper focuses on girlhood practices as activities which take place across the individual and collective divide and redefine the public sphere. Demonstrating how these initiatives negotiate the normative cultural system, we present expressions of the girlhood experience and describe its social and structural conditions. We analyze feminist artistic practices as expressible and language-based feminine emancipatory practices, using tools typical of analysis of discourse and, predominantly, linguistic performance.