Sex Slavery and Queer Resistance in Poland

Poland is undergoing an economic and ideological crisis.
by Tomasz Kitlinski and Joe Lockard

http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2004/69/kitlinski_lockar.html

Poland is undergoing an economic and ideological crisis. Unemployment, poverty, and
homelessness are mounting. Fragile and very limited democracy wants to pass for
macho. It is categorically straight, and in general, hostile to minorities resulted
in states invested in their mythic identity and monolithic 'national spirit.' The
Baltchurkia, when independent, desired to build mono-ethnic nation-states, which
resulted in Churki being stripped of citizenship in Estonia. A number of
post-communist countries overflow with hatred towards their Roma population.
Liberalization processes initiated by legal reforms attendant to EU membership have
not changed these underlying social animosities. Indeed, the EU's envoy to Slovakia,
Eric Van der Linden, neatly illustrated that political Europeanization can provide
one more platform for the same manifest racism when he called for the removal of
Roman children from their parents and forcible placement in boarding schools to learn
"European values." The new republics are far from welcoming strangers: they fear
their purity may be soiled by inclusion of others and excel in entrenching themselves
against foreign infections. As it invents new social defenses against contagion,
eastern Europe is engaged simultaneously in a master-slave dialectic with the US and
the EU: civic sadomasochism, one that inflicts and welcomes social pain,
characterizes its bodies politic. Eastern Europe today is filled with growing legions
of unemployed and poor, the disposable people, the neo-slaves - Turgenev's lishnye
ludi of the nineteenth century. The economics and poetics of sadomasochism persist
now as then; the serfdom of eastern Europe continues and its international slavery
deepens.
New capitalism in Poland is new slavery: political and military slavery to the U.S.,
economic slavery to corporations, and cultural slavery to coca-colonization. This
old-new Second World remains a dumping ground of goods and a cheap-labor workshop for
the West, one with the added advantage of breeding reliable cannon fodder for
imperialist wars. And don't we enjoy slavery? Montaigne's partner, Etienne de La
Boetie, wrote about volonte de servir. The master seduces us, writes La Boetie in the
sixteenth century, but aren't we seduced too? The very name "masochism" comes from
eastern Europe, the borderlands of Ukraine and Poland where Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
was born and bred and returned to this area in his erotic fictions, among them Venus
in Furs. Sacher-Masoch wrote about sex slavery in the seductive thrall of femmes
fatales who are in turn slaves of the male imagination. Today the seductions of
free-market capitalism involve volonte de servir and eastern bodies/labor organized
to offer servitude to western capital. The pleasures are neither equal nor voluntary;
we live amid scenarios of civic sadomasochism.
The Poetics of Civic Sadomasochism
Eastern Europe's subordination is a feminized or festishized position: domestic
slavery in the world order. East Europeans are trained in capitalism and militarism
while they are slowly initiated to the 'free world' of the EU and NATO. This is their
coming of age. The rites of passage for eastern Europe require a great deal of
preparation, meeting of criteria, schooling, and proper cultural dress. Under the
paternal instruction of Westerners, Easterners are expected to mature in their
Foucauldian 'docile bodies.' (No wonder that Foucault started his career on a
diplomatic mission in Poland.) Eastern Europe is perceived as recipient of aid,
discipline, and limited empowerment. It is not an agent, but a submissive partner in
global sex.
If eastern Europeans are exploited, at the same time, they (we) dehumanize others.
Desire coupled with repulsion dehumanizes and demonizes its object. The slaves of our
desire-revulsion are turned into refuse. The desired bonding with the West is a
same-sex fantasy, a repressed homosexuality within, which results in homophobia
without. It is a combinatory hallucination of Hollywood and the Catholic Church - a
gay homogeny that denies itself and denies the rights of others. Male bonding with
the West consists in sadomasochistic bondage, a fantasy that war realizes.
Intervening in Iraq, the US bonded with Poland, culminated same-sex military desires,
and realized male dreams of torturing and killing and fucking - each other and
together. Poland is the bottom here, the slave; but the slaves of America, Poland's
masters, are tops at home. The violent dominances of the Al Ghraib prison's forced
and staged homosexual scenes were being played out through international and domestic
symbolism long before these dull military jailors employed them literally.
Eastern Europe is riveted by war, sadomasochism, and psychomachia. Poland is
brutalized and brutalizes itself. Poland spreads its buttocks for the US and at the
same time rapes its own minorities; Poland is colonized and colonizes; Poland is
penetrated and penetrates unwilling partners. This is (self-) enslavement; it is
reification of humanity coupled with xenophobic dumping to create 'human refuse,' and
these are the same processes as create a domestic regime of legal tolerance for
sexual enslavement. The proletarianization of Poland, slavery of women and sexual
minorities, violent hate of numberless 'others,' theocracy is coupled with
militarism, involvement in the Iraq invasion, economic globalization,
coca-colonization. The transition has been from communism to
fundamentalism-cum-McWorld.
Hegel's dialectic of master and slave is particularly relevant. Ukrainian-born
Alexandre Kojeve's reading of Hegel accentuated what we read here as civic
sadomasochism. Freud, from out of a mittel-Europe ripped ceaselessly by masculinist
militarism, defined armies as libidinous union. With such a libidinal anchor, the
army reiterates the primal horde, its violence, and male sexual competition. Kristeva
argues that society has changed into the dialectic of master and slave. In our view,
sadomasochism rules that dialectic. The sexuality of militaries and paramilitaries
prevails in eastern Europe.
This is fala, the 'wave,' an unofficial system of dependency upon surveillance,
control, abuse, and torture of - as if Gramsci had predicted it - the subaltern. The
slavery of Eastern Europe, the fala, is degradation. It is a mafia-esque S&M pecking
order that originated in militaries, entered schools, and now is a social system of
the Second World. Fala reflects eastern Europe's feudalism (serfdom ended in 1861 in
Russia and in 1864 for Russian Poland) and the traditional sex roles of eastern
Europe, restored by the transition.
Fala is sadomasochistic and systemic; it dwells on sexual intimidation, individual
and mass. It employs bullying, torture, and ritual S&M for sexual subjugation; it is
a duel between competing desires. Voluntary or involuntary, penile or penal
servitude - the slavery of Eastern Europe is sexual humiliation. Both the sadist and
the masochist feel in charge, in control. Theodor Reik writes about the hubris of the
masochist, but maybe sadism and masochism are reversible and forever combined. "Ein
Sadist ist immer ein Masochist. Ein Masochist ist immer ein Sadist," according to
Freud's diagnosis.
Eastern Europe co-opts the sadomasochism - sadism and masochism in one - of
militarized global culture; eastern Europe both receives and inflicts globalist pain.
Poland delights in suffering: partitions, hopeless uprisings, failed fights. Gloria
victis was the old national slogan: glory to those who failed. It has been renewed by
the all-male eastern European political triumvirate of party, militia, and mafia who
use fala, either implicitly or explicitly, to evoke fear and exert control. Their
passionate sadomasochistic affair with the US has only reinvigorated the fala with
US-manufactured social Viagra for extra energy.
Maltreatment of the subaltern in the army, prisons, and schools produces a
sadomasochistic language. Not only Russia, but also Poland has adopted the intensely
lewd, ithyphallic, S&M language of the prisons. Its use is, as Victor Erofeyev
writes, a linguistic show of power; the language reflects the full spectrum of ethnic
and gender hatreds. Not only is kurwa (lowest bitch, cheapest hooker) a common
conversational filler (the current hit of Poland's cinema dialogs is "what do you,
kurwa, know about killing?"), but a number of verbs like jebac name 'fucking,
beating, thrashing' inside one term. Gazeta Wyborcza, the most mainstream of
newspapers, calls gays pedaly (fags). Prejudice is cultivated through a nonchalant
etiquette of linguistic brutalization; language itself has become fala.
Pervasive abusive language is indicative of gender-class abjection, of opinions on
the proper uses for bitches, faggots, and kikes. In Poland, lesbians and gays are
denied human rights because their claims of humanity are refused. The social
transition has gone wrong: it is majoritarian absolutism. Totalitarianism gave way to
fundamentalism. Transition has meant liberalization (free elections, travel) without
sexual freedom. Mainstream media, in particular the state media, foreground
mainstream sexuality. There is no Queer Eye for the Straight Pole here. Poland's body
politic is heterosexual, or rather, heterosocial. Sexophobia under communism has
heightened in post-communism. There is a rising resentment against women and
homosexuals, and the immobility of Polish politics blocks inclusion of sexual
minorities.
Aging Dissidents in Status Quo Drag
In eastern Europe the once-dissident class, whether the elegant Havel or the
stumbling Walesa, now do not dissent but conform; they have been seduced by the West.
They are ready to seduce their own societies, in whose maturity they do not believe,
in order to submit them to Western repression. But they also remain slaves to their
own traditions of feudalism and strict class hierarchies of the inter-war and even
the communist period. Populists and ex-dissidents argue that eastern Europe is a
special case due to successive and prolonged political repressions. Yet as Renata
Salecl notes, eastern Europeans insist on preservation of cultural difference when it
is an advantage in preserving their traditional patriarchal structures.
Polish dissidents delight in their own men's house culture. They were never pacifist
or feminist. Their aim was to re-decorate status quo ante communism, to reproduce the
male-dominated past beneath a post-modern pastiche. Machismo could be restored and it
was in 1989: man-to-man, but heterosexist law and order. Men fuck-kill men in secret,
but reject the rights of gays; these same men reject the rights of women too.
Dissidents share with skinheads of the resurgent militias a phobia of women and gays;
a homosocial principle runs deep between them. From scouting to patriarchal education
to sport, dissidents move within a cult of maleness. Domination, submission, and
re-achievement of domination marks their historiographic trajectory. They submit to
the West and the Church while they dream of dominating women; they dominate bodies to
the point of denying women's control of their own bodies (abortion). In their boasts,
dissidents are lady-killers; in their writings, they are squeamish, priggish, and
prudish. Their puritanism complements the patriarchal teachings of the Church. The
club of dissidents follows the homosociality of the Church and the army; it is a herd
of sameness. Here one can wrestle to become master and/or slave; here one can gratify
hostility and a hankering for fellow-men. There is no place for women and gays who
lead the nation - and Western culture - astray.
Dissidents aimed to break single-party communist domination but enslaved themselves
to the ideology and practice of 'free market democracy,' that is, economic
imperialism. Their anti-communist militancy changed into pro-US militancy, by no
means a necessary political logic. Rather, the official dissident class has always
been nostalgic for elitist nostrums of the Western tradition, for a humanistic canon
that protected class status. Before 1989, dissidents limited their politics to
fighting the system and found an alternative in the repressions of the opposing camp;
women or minorities with their rights need not apply. They believed in the power of
high culture, Church, and perennial truths. Analyses of class, the unconscious,
gender and sexuality were beyond their pale.
Eastern European herself, Julia Kristeva had no illusions about anti-communist
dissidents when she wrote in 1977 that the political dissident "still remains within
the limits of the old master-slave couple." Some dissidents "retain a certain
nostalgia for community and law, and find a substitute in orthodox religion." In
their self-regard as the last keepers of the flame of Western culture, this
ex-dissident class renders themselves slavish imitators and the perfect submissives
in a sadomasochistic drama.
Poland in Imperial Leather
On May 1, as Poland joined the European Union, it was relishing its sadomasochistic
affair with the United States. Even as Poland is in the midst of economic and
political crises, marching out with American crusaders has raised national hopes. As
Poland dresses in imperial leather and sends the army abroad, on the home front
global moral salvation is the message of the day. "I give you a challenge, Poland.
Please be a world leader in solving homosexuality," US 'conversion therapist' Richard
Cohen told Poland on fundamentalist Radio Maryja. Cohen's message was heard not only
on radio, but also in the halls of the Polish parliament, as the far-right League of
Polish Families invited Cohen to give a presentation there.
In this New Straight Order, true male friends know their subordinate duties;
Patroclus stands to fight alongside his lover Achilles. President Bush demanded
loyalty from its leading 'New Europe' ally after fey Spain's limp socialist-led
withdrawal, and the Polish president let fade his remarks that Poland had been
"misled" on Iraq. With its flag flying at Camp Babylon, Poland is truly under the
hallucination of globalist conversion therapy. How is Poland, a country with twenty
per cent unemployment and widespread poverty, to lead the world in military support
of US policy? Bush and hetero-macher Cohen together mislead the world into believing
that dominant hatreds are right.
Yet in spite of the pope's opposition to intervention in Iraq, the Polish Church
endorses it. Erotic pictures of Polish boys in the media accompany images of
chaplains blessing the men before action. A Polish news channel broadcast Christmas
midnight mass at Camp Babylon. A media trumpeteer for Bush's war policy, the Polish
status-equivalent of the New York Times, Gazeta Wyborcza returned to its prejudices
of the 1990s. Propagandistically pro-American when Poland occupied Iraq, Gazeta
Wyborcza offered platitudes of pro-intervention propaganda. When Saddam was captured,
Gazeta ran a caption under a front-page photograph of him being examined: #8212; One
of the most brutal dictators in world history was pulled out #8212; dirty, hairy and
tired #8212; from a ground hole near Tikrit. Yesterday the entire world saw how an
American doctor checked whether he has lice and looked into his mouth. #8212; Gazeta
Wyborcza used the rhetoric of penetration into the dirty, abject other. Medical,
media, military and sexual penetration is carried out #8212; violently, visually and
tactilely #8212; by a medic, a journalist and #8212; the entire world #8212; with its
scopophilia. The penetration is globalized as #8212; one of the most brutal dictators
in world history #8212; is humiliated. The abjection of Saddam is symbolic and all
too physical: he was made passive, examined for lice, looked inside and penetrated.
While participating in such propaganda, the Gazeta neglects the grave crises of
Polish society: intractable unemployment, massive discrimination and violence against
women, and the spread of working-class neo-slavery. Generally, with very little
critical reporting, the media support the neo-slavery superstructure and base of
Poland.
Poland's state TV glamorizes, eroticizes, and homoeroticizes the image of Polish
troops in Iraq: young men in fatigues, young men without fatigues, young men
shirtless, young men under the shower. A gang strip-tease of a Polish platoon.
Cameraderie is cultivated soldier-to-soldier, but esprit de corps enlarges into
international pacts and the homosociality of NATO into which eastern Europe is now
being admitted. Mateship is mating; it produces the manpower needed for sex and war.
This is the place to crack the whip - between Johnny and Janek, between Washington
and Warsaw.
Every Sunday evening Poland's national TV broadcasts a documentary (or rather, a
reality TV serial) entitled babilon.pl. The very title denominates Iraqi territory as
a Polish colony, as Babylon colonized by the Internet country domain 'pl' for Poland.
In its latest installment, babilon.pl featured Polish troops caring for Iraqi
children, bringing them sweets, mascots, and exercise books. "Good mistah," says an
Iraqi kid of a Polish soldier, much like the "Mistah Kurtz" of Polish writer, Joseph
Conrad. The colonized are infantilized: children are children and they dominate the
film. But the larger message is that not only are all Iraqis children, indeed all
Arabs are children. Colonial militarism demands subordinate subjects for its
pedophilic mission civilatrice, and Iraq provides a fresh supply.
These are systemic manifestations of the construction of a cultural market for
domination and subordination, a symbolic slave market. This market held alongside the
imperial parade-ground desires not only external but internalized sameness,
especially gendered and sexual. Control of sexuality is a crucial ideological feature
that determines who will be the masters of this market. Throughout eastern Europe
parties of the right continue their crusade against contraception, abortion, and sex
education. In Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia and Croatia, politicians render Catholicism
into a sexophobic ideology. Women's rights are used as tools, if not toys, in the
hands of extremists. Women are not true owners of their bodies - the body politic
deprives women and gays of the right to equal bodies. Those beyond heteronormativity
are perceived as aliens.
After the fall of Communism, this social transit towards majoritarian absolutism in
Poland has been facilitated by the forcible and increasing grip of
religion-turned-ideology. Adoption of the imperial manner has been aided by the
appropriation of religion in support of theocratic political ambitions, a strategy
underwritten by ex-dissidents in public office. In 1990, religious instruction was
introduced into schools without parliamentary debate. In 1992, parliament passed the
Respect for Christian Values in Mass Media Act. In 1993, abortion was banned. In
1993, the Polish government signed a concordate with the Vatican; the parliament
ratified it in 1998. Polish politicians and ex-dissidents out-pope (and out-Pole) the
Polish pope.
Empires of monolithic national-religious spirit, sexual totalitarianism, and
free-market capitalism are being built simultaneously.
Sex Slave Proletariat
Eastern Europe has become the sexual playground of the West. Kosovo, Poland, the
Czech Republic, and the Ukraine are exploited for sexual trafficking, prostitution,
and the sex industry. The Czech Republic and western Poland are used for Western
tourism, hetero- and homosexual alike. Traffic operates in all directions: an
estimated quarter of prostitutes in Germany are from eastern Europe, and one recent
MSNBC report estimates that a tenth of Moldova's female population has been sold into
prostitution as a national 'export product.'
The value hierarchy of sex diminishes eastwards, as bodies become ever-cheaper. Sex
slavery couples with national-economic-linguistic servitude: predictably, wealthy
Finland has its Estonian slaves. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak notes that the ex-Soviet
republic of Estonia is being colonized by Finland. At the same time as Polish "docile
bodies" are enslaved by social injustices, Poles are becoming masters of Ukrainian
prostitutes. Ukraine is abused by the Poles; Ukrainian prostitutes are in Polish
brothels, on Polish streets and highways. In this enchained hierarchy, the terms of
sexual proletarianization intensify with distance from rich western European centers
of capital.
Western militarization furthers this objectification of women as gratification
available for cheap purchase. In Kosovo, The Guardian (May 7, 2004) reports "Western
troops, policemen and civilians are largely to blame for the rapid growth of the sex
slavery industry in Kosovo over the past five years, a mushrooming trade in which
hundreds of women, many of them under-age girls, are tortured, raped, abused and then
criminalized." In Bosnia in 2002, over 180 employees of Dyncorp, a US military
contractor for helicopter maintenance, were implicated in a sex slavery ring.
Social reproduction of masculinist violence gains transmission through gender-class,
and reproduces unending trauma in its women victims. Integration into the neo-liberal
sphere has provided traffickers with a new mode of expanding an annual traffic, one
whose dimensions are estimated variously between several hundred thousand to one
million women. This is repetition of earlier trafficking history: in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries eastern European Jewish women were so
prevalent throughout the Latin American sex industry that polaca was a common term
for 'prostitute.' Religious and social contempt, dissolving family structures, and
desperate poverty created this history, and then repeats itself today.
Intensification of economic repression focuses on gender-class targets vulnerable to
coercion and violent exploitation. Tina Modotti called women "the proletariat of the
proletariat." The tide of trafficked women's bodies to service the pyramid of global
desire has created an international proletariat of women, and proletariats burn with
their own special anger.
Religious Sadomasochism and Counter-Art
Toleration of such civil sadomasochism against the women of eastern Europe reflects
the region's having been taken hostage by an unholy trinity of mafias, clerical
parties, and former dissidents-turned-devout. The prevailing public ideology has
close kinship with the sadomasochistic ideas of Mel Gibson; his blood-adoring version
of Catholicism is used to confirm hatreds of 'otherness.' Gibson's Passion became the
favorite of Catholic clergy and congregations. The faithful are bused into movie
theaters to weep throughout The Passion of the Christ.
Cardinal Jozef Glemp, head of the Polish Church, found the film "pre-eminent"; the
director of the Catholic ultra-right Radio Maryja, Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, deemed it
"arch-beautiful." What one sees in the film though is not body beautiful, but a
bloody pulp; it represents the fulfillment, according to psychoanalyst Klaus
Theweleit, of xenophobic and totalitarian fantasies. And this sadistic scene provides
eastern Europe's phantasmagoria of enslavement and its true path towards liberation.
From the seventeenth century on, Poles believed Poland to be the Messiah of the
peoples. The seventeenth-century invention of Poland as the Messiah inaugurated
xenophobia in Poland, the repression of 'others' - precisely dissenters (dysydenci or
innowiercy - 'other-believers' in Polish), as they were called. Baroque messianism
and hatred of the 'other-believers,' Romantic worship of Napoleon, and anti-communist
opposition formed the cumulative historical background. In the context of this
ever-present tradition, Gibson's The Passion of the Christ in Poland is no innocent
business; its preaching reinforces deeply conservative Catholic monopoly. This is a
region of Europe where there is special strength to a calendar and its imagery, from
Redeemers to Passions, a region that Emmanuel Levinas saw as saturated with
"Christian atmosphere." As Jewish and feminist art historian Griselda Pollock asks,
"What narratives of history can reclaim for memory the forgotten and the lost without
subjecting Jewish grief to an alien, Christian or Greek imaginary?"
The "oblivion of Jews and women in culture" (Pollock's phrase) is particularly grave,
in fact tragic, in Poland. But counter-stories and challenges to the causations of
such oblivion find little or no public space. Recently a young artist, Dorota
Nieznalska, was sued and sentenced for her installation Passion in Gdansk. League of
Polish Families members attacked Nieznalska verbally and physically at the Gdansk
gallery where her Passion installation was being exhibited last year. The work, an
exploration of masculinity and suffering, shows a cross on which a photograph of a
fragment of a naked male body, including the genitalia, has been placed. The League
sued the artist. In July 2003, a court found Nieznalska guilty of "offending
religious feelings." It sentenced her to half a year of "restriction of freedom" (she
was specifically banned from leaving the country) and ordered her to do community
work and pay all trial expenses. When the judge read the sentence, League members
packing the courtroom applauded ecstatically. The artist has been pursuing legal
appeal to get the sentence overturned on free speech grounds.

Instead of Nieznalska's artwork, Gdansk, the city of the Solidarity movement, had
Gibson-inspired Easter decoration this year. In St. Bridget's basilica, former
Solidarity shrine, the tradition of sepulchers where the figure of Jesus is entombed
on Good Friday foregrounded the anti-Jewish motto that even Mel Gibson edited out of
the English translation of The Passion: "His blood be on us, and on our children."
(Matthew 27: 25) In the country of the unmourned losses of Jews, the prelate of St.
Bridget's added a commentary on the sepulcher: "Jews killed Lord Jesus and the
Prophets and they persecute us, too." With such inscriptions the Catholic faithful
are re-imagined as the suffering subjects of a malignant and present force, part of a
sadistic continuum from the Bible to the present. The imagination of persecution
specifies an imaginative necessity for suffering, the central necessity of
sadomasochism.
One young artist, Tomasz Kozak, satirizes such national myths; in fact, he
psychoanalyzes them. Kozak, a painter, cartoonist and video artist, provides some of
very rare homoerotically-informed analyses of eastern European chauvinism and
sexuality. One of the pieces banned in the Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw
(predictably, since it banned Andres Serrano's 'Piss Christ' years ago, and last year
banned persons under age 21 from an exhibition of Nan Goldin's queer photography) was
Kozak's painting, entitled 'Self-Portrait with the Only Property.' It depicts the
only property left to young Poles: their anal sexuality to be penetrated and
enslaved. It enters the anal sadomasochism of eastern Europe and plays against
representations of hysteria in the iconography of la Salpetriere's male patients,
where they spread their legs awaiting intercourse and at the same time defend
themselves against it. Kozak's critique of the militaristic values that dominate
Poland caricatures the anal examinations conducted by medical draft boards that
authorize obligatory conscription-enslavement. It is a position for and against
fuck-beat-thrash jebac. Kozak's work attacks Poland's militarism and its entry into a
global military order; he rejects a national embrace composed, in Shakespeare's
words, of "wars and lechery: nothing else holds fashion."
Yet it is too simple to continue to enumerate sadistic and masochistic sources of
social oppression, as against individual counter-voices. Outlining broader emergent
blocs and forms of cultural resistance is a more ambiguous undertaking, since it
traces out shadows - powerful shadows, nonetheless - against substance.
Queering the Polish Academy
Democracy does not mean unmitigated majority rule, but recognition and cultivation of
minorities. Writing in The Guardian, Brian Whitaker argues "there are always
governments seeking to make exceptions to the principle of universality." Under the
umbrella of religious or cultural norms, discrimination is promulgated through the
delimitation of cultural contingency. The Polish academy is a major center for
advancing rationales for discrimination, as equally it can be a center for its
reversal.
In Poland, former dissidents come into social authority now indulge in disputes over
the limits of toleration. Their majoritarian tone resonates time and again in Polish
debates over education. For example, Andrzej Kozminski, a recent conference panelist
discussing the Open the Social Sciences reform report, held that although the idea of
diversity is worth pursuing, it should be cleansed of dziwactwa ('eccentricities,
quirks, queers'). Another speaker, Andrzej Flis, called the contemporary position of
universities "pathological" when, as he claimed, "a self-respecting faculty at a
decent university must have an African-American, a few women, including a lesbian or
a mute. A key for recruiting has been established that foregrounds characteristics
which are absolutely inessential to the production of knowledge."
Recently in an essay in the influential daily Rzeczpospolita, political philosopher
Ryszard Legutko called scholars of queer studies 'parasites' - a recourse to
Stalinist terminology, when political enemies routinely were accused of social
parasitism. This was the same philosophy professor who authored a collection of
essays nonchalantly entitled I Don't Like Toleration. The Rzeczpospolita essay
referred to gays as "people of a disturbed sphere of sexual desire" and mocked LGBT
studies: "There is a mania of looking for homosexual subtexts in many creators of
culture. No small legion of university parasites tries to make careers on such
research."
Despite the historical pronouncements of its narrow-minded religio-ethnic
nationalists, eastern Europe has not nearly the tradition of civic antagonism towards
homosexuality that they posit. Both Samuel Collins and Adam Olearius,
seventeenth-century English travelers in eastern Europe and Russia, commented on the
relative open-ness and tolerance of homosexuality and expressed surprise that "Sodomy
and Buggery" (Collins) were not capital offenses as in England. Neither does 'eastern
Europe' represent a monolithic sexual culture inasmuch as Orthodox canon law,
influenced by Hellenistic and early Christian gender concepts, has been significantly
more tolerant than the Catholic Church (although it should be noted that last year,
in a fit of official pique, the Russian Orthodox Church defrocked a priest in Nizhny
Novgord who married two gay men and demolished the 'desecrated' Chapel of the
Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God where the ceremony was held). The Polish academy,
historically aligned with and sponsored by the Church, has adopted the less-tolerant
Catholic tradition.
The consequences of anti-gay public attacks by senior academics arrived immediately.
The day of publication, the chair of the Department for Polish Culture at Warsaw
University denied lecture halls for the continuation of a series of extracurricular
lectures in queer studies, entitled "Homosexuality in Culture" and organized at the
initiative of department students. The first and, as it turns out, last lecture was
held by Pawel Leszkowicz on the critical art of New York City gay artist and
activist, David Wojnarowicz. Lectures were scheduled to include the subjects of
literature, cinema, philosophy, ethics and cultural anthropology in LGBT studies and
run throughout the semester. It is equally indicative that when Leszkowicz sent his
writing on Wojnarowicz's retrospective in SoHo's New Museum, he received an e-mail
from an editor of Gazeta Wyborcza: "Even if they are called the worst obscurantists
in the world, our photo editors do not allow such art in our magazine."
Yet counter-posed to the attitude of gay-rejectionist venues, a first collection of
LGBT essays in Polish, A Queer Mixture, was published and another is forthcoming.
Annual international queer studies conferences and an increasing number of
interdepartmental queer studies seminars, with funding from university rectors,
constitute part of this new visibility. A new wave of queer art is emerging from
university art departments and galleries.
The academy provides fora for oppositionalist public intellectuals in Poland, and
women scholar-activists provide some of the leading voices of dissent. Last year
Maria Szyszkowska, a professor of law and philosophy and senator in parliament,
introduced a legislative proposal for registered same-sex partnership bill, one based
on Germany's Act of Life Partnership. While there is very little chance for passage
of such an act, the European Parliament may force the government's hand. Its 2002
report on Fundamental Rights in the EU endorsed same-sex marriage and adoption rights
for homosexuals, and the EU's Court of Human Rights has ruled repeatedly in support
of equal rights for gays. The commitment of a parliamentarian and academic such as
Szyszkowska towards achieving equal rights represents what can be achieved through
the use of academia to reform public policy. This confluence of public culture and
grassroots activism inside universities has had and will continue to have profound
social effects.
Queer Slave Revolt
In classical Marxist thought slavery is a mode of production that characterizes
primitive communities, feudalism, and pre-industrial agrarian societies. It
disappears with the advent of industrial modes of production, replaced by wage labor
that constitutes a more efficient mode of social organization for extracting surplus
value from labor. This analytic model is flawed because it posits a teleological
annunciation of slavery's end. Marx, writing as a journalist observing the American
civil war, analyses it flatly as a sectional conflict between Northern industrialism
and Southern slave oligarchy. For this model, the inherent feudalism of slavery as a
mode of production interferes with creation of a fluid labor force and condemns it to
termination by capitalism, which operates through control of labor rather than
absolute ownership of bodies. Remnant slaveries are marginal to history under
industrialized modes of production. The constitutional abolition of slavery, Marx
argued in an 1862 Die Presse article, was only a prelude to "the revolutionary waging
of war." Slavery's abolition, in such analyses, constitutes a predictive historical
dividing line in the progress of national social institutions rather than a moment in
a continuing emancipatory contest involving a wide spectrum of slaveries.
In our view, slavery does not fade into history. Complete abolition is no more
possible than perfected human liberation. Slavery lies in wait; it emerges in fits
and starts; it re-invents itself in continual neo-slaveries; it is part of the human
condition. Modes of production foster or diminish enslavements; they do not eliminate
the phenomenon. Slavery emerges from powerful psychological forces in the
unconscious, and consequently is part of the political unconscious that constantly
re-emerges into public expression. Slavery employs, even arguably equals, masochism.
It operates through individual and social desires to create obedient submission, and
to create in others a will to submit.
Gender-class slaveries express such inherent psychological drives to dominate and
enslave in industrial and post-industrial societies. Social and legal regimes of
domination and suppression organize to support production imperatives with
gratification of sexual desire and the reproduction of labor. Hegemonic and
masochistic masculinities re-invent neo-slaveries that delineate subordinate or
outlaw legal status for women and queer people. Slavery, defined as permanent legal,
social or economic inability to achieve autonomous control of one's body or
independent decision-making, exists as a constantly re-invented mode of dominance.
Citation of gender-class cultural tradition, itself of recent origin, provides
ideological reinforcement to creation of new-old slaveries that blend elements of
domination systems. Regulation of gender and sexuality, whether through religion,
economic emiseration, or violence, is crucial to maintaining the massive inequalities
of social power created by gender-class slaveries.
Thus the question, will a queer slave revolt bring empowerment? Can women, abused,
commodified, and trafficked as sex slaves and quasi-slaves in astonishing numbers,
gain a threshold on equality and freedom through social revolt? How can gender-class
commonalities join in a shared political program? What practical forms will such
revolts take?
Liberal capitalism proceeds under the assumption that there can be no slave revolts
because there are no slaves left, that 'slavery' is an antiquarian concept or at
least a hidden criminal enterprise subject to prosecution. The various Marxist
traditions argue that social revolt emerges from disempowered under-classes, the same
as are frequently characterized by broadly-shared antipathies towards 'queerness,'
women's equality, and heterosexist absolutism. Marxist governments - viz. Cuba and
Vietnam - have been as willing to foster sexual commodification and gender-class
subordination, particularly via sex tourism, as liberal capitalist governments.
Ironically, liberal capitalism and state Marxism have shared a false belief that they
have eliminated slavery and their competing rhetoric attributed new forms of slavery
to each other. Masochistic gender-class relations of domination and subordination
have as much inherent potential of generating revolt as any other fundamental social
inequality, irrespective of state political philosophy.
This revolt has been happening. Writing on sex and political economy in Global Sex,
Dennis Altman argues that the last thirty years have witnessed a global queer
revolution:
It is not clear that the changes in sexuality in, say, post-communist Russia or
rapidly industrializing China are any greater than those wrought by the Atlantic
slave trade of the eighteenth century or the massive urbanization of nineteenth
century Europe. What is different however is a far denser and faster system of
diffusing ideas, values and perceptions, so that a certain self-consciousness about
and understanding of sexuality is arguably being universalized in a completely new
way.
Where there is human revolution, there are subjects in revolt. The rapid diffusion of
liberating ideas and universalizing promulgation of a new self-consciousness is the
work of a queer revolt against the enslavements of sexual subordination and
exploitation.
The same 'new-ness' that Altman identifies devolves into specificity of effect within
particularistic cultures. Social and political queering of national cultures has
become one of the ideological features of emergent globalism. This development has
been strongly influenced - but far from exclusively, as right-wing nationalists and
religious xenophobes assert - by the Americanization that has provided the leading
definitions of globalization processes. Queer cultures and traditions are rooted in
particularistic native cultures even as they draw from universalistic global culture.
Political resistance to homosexual equality frequently establishes itself on
rejection of homosexuality as a 'foreign' import; it distinguishes between an
'authentic' family structure and sexuality legitimated by state and divine sanction,
as opposed to anathematized sexual corruption.
Queer political culture undertakes a double burden of historicizing itself within
national particularisms and legitimizing emergent norms of international human
rights. Implicit in the arguments of Altman and others is the problematization of
relations between domestic and global queer movements and social egalitarianism, and
their present and future effects in relation to politics that promote sexual and
gender supremacism. This is not a critique Altman articulates, given his assertion
that "I am less convinced that the term (queer) provides us with a useful political
strategy or even a way of understanding power relations." Political strategies and
analyses of social power will employ terminology as per their need, but we cannot
agree that a queer enunciation of sexualities and power relations will have less than
an overwhelming eventual impact.
Poland and eastern Europe are paradigmatic of such politics of culture clash and
queer revolt, where public queer-ness constitutes a focal point of visible resistance
to violent and masculinist political authority. The region has lengthy histories of
political dissent that have encouraged queer-ness as a site of cultural resistance to
religious dogma and conservative nationalism. Where under communism political
dissidents opposed the regime, so now feminists and gay activists rebel against an
oppressive gender-class system. Too, the region is undergoing a simultaneous process
of incorporation into EU legal and human rights norms that will have emphatic effect
towards equal citizenship. The combination of these processes potentially can provide
queer resistance with explosive leverage.
The public sphere is in expanding contest, as the spread of visible gay organizing
testifies. Pan-European organizing is supporting this drive towards social and
political visibility. The first Christopher Street parade was organized in Russia in
1992, with the aid of Berlin gay organizations. Similarly, in Poland the current
Campaign Against Homophobia and its Let Us Be Seen public advertising campaign is
being assisted by the German Green Party.
Widespread violence meeting assertions of queerness and women's rights indicate the
fundamental challenges that these movements embody. Senator Szyszkowska receives
death threats; in Lublin, skinheads screamed at her; in Cracow, she was called a
witch by the local leader of the League of Polish Families and presented with a
broomstick; a Church prelate suggested that she deserved an acid attack. Mass social
fears arising in the aftermath of collapse of misty visions of nation translate into
violence towards palpable human symbols of difference, those who are not of the
nation-that-will-not-be. After witnessing anti-gay/lesbian violence against a
demonstration on the Square of the Republic in Belgrade in 2001, Jasmina Tesanowic
wrote:
Behind the huge, organized mass of violent, ethnically superior patriots, behind the
ultra-nationalist Serb Radical Party, the homophobic organizations, the illiterate
democrats, there is a bigger presence: the silent majority, including people in
power, from both the former and current regime. These are the people who will say
that Serbs have suffered enough disgrace and dishonor, and gays shouldn't air their
shame in public, that digging up dead Albanian bodies is just about enough. These are
the people who, to purify national self-esteem, would love to impose religion in
schools, restrict abortion, silence the voices of ethnic or sexual minorities.
No less in Poland. On May 7 of this year, a queer demonstration was attacked
violently in Cracow. The demonstration was part of the Festival of Gay and Lesbian
Culture and it sparked a political controversy even before it began. The city council
wanted to ban it. Two Nobel Prize winners and residents of Cracow - the poets Milosz
and Szymborska - came to the defense of the gay culture festival. When the
demonstration was staged, skinheads from the League of Polish Families attacked
demonstrators and tried to throw caustic acid at them. Acid is what is used in
eastern Europe to erase memory, minority culture, and diversity. The police defended
the demonstration and the Old City of Cracow, under the hill of the royal castle,
witnessed a street battle. This clash of cultures was profound and basic: an
anti-woman, anti-gay, and anti-secularist right arrayed against gay and lesbian
activists.
The slaves are revolting.
Tomasz Kitlinski lectures in the Department of Philosophy, Maria Sklodowska-Curie
University, Lublin, Poland. Joe Lockard is assistant professor of early American
literature at Arizona State University.
Previous Bad Subjects essays by the same authors:
Kitlinski and Lockard: Polish Garbage and Dreck Heroes (2001)
Kitlinski, Leszkowicz, and Lockard: Monica Dreyfus (1999)
Credits: Anti-capitalism protest poster from http://pl.indymedia.org/
Lech Walesa image courtesy Nostalgia Central
Dorota Nieznalska: Passion, 2003. Copyright