The anti‐LGBTIQ campaign in Poland: The established, the outsiders, and the legal performance of exclusion

• Published date: 01 January 2022
• Author: Marta Bucholc
• Date: 01 January 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lapo.12183

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

The anti-LGBTIQ campaign in Poland:

The established, the outsiders, and the

legal performance of exclusion

Marta Bucholc

1,2

1

Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw,

Warsaw, Poland

2

Centre de recherche en science politique,

Université Saint-Louis Bruxelles, Bruxelles,

Belgium

Correspondence

Marta Bucholc, Institute of Sociology,

University of Warsaw, Karowa 18, Warsaw

00-927, Poland.

Email: bucholcm@is.uw.edu.pl

Funding information

Narodowe Centrum Nauki, Grant/Award

Number: 2019/34/E/HS6/00295; Polish

National Science Centre

Abstract

Since Spring 2019, over 90 local communities in Poland

adopted resolutions expressing their rejection of “LGBT

ideology.”Based on a content analysis of these resolu-

tions, I show how local lawmaking was used in this case

to create and reinforce the social division between the het-

eronormative majority and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,

Transgender, Intersex, and Queer people. In the “anti‐

LGBT resolutions,”majoritarian identities are territorial-

ized by way of a construction of moralized social spaces

designed to cast out the minority. Drawing on concepts

proposed by Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson, I demon-

strate the efficiency of law in the performance of exclusion

in three dimensions: institutional, symbolic, and proxemic.

1|INTRODUCTION

In 2020, an Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Queer (LGBTIQ) activist, Bartosz

Staszewski, produced yellow rectangular signs reading (in four languages) “LGBT-free zone,”

styled to resemble the universally recognizable international signs that mark out military areas.

The signs were then installed at the borders of some of the almost 90 local communities in Poland

that have adopted resolutions declaring themselves “free from LGBT ideology”since March

2020. Next, the author took photos of individual LGBTIQ people living in these communities

posing next to the signs (see Ciastoch, 2020). Staszewski reacted to the official “zooming out”of

non-heteronormative inhabitants; hestressed the paradox and injustice of their simultaneous pres-

ence in and absence fromthe local communities. While it was not the only artistic performance of

its kind, Staszewski’s action was unique in identifying the clash of the territorial reality of local

communities with the physical presence of LGBTIQ people as the frontline of the decades-long

culture war that has culminated in the 2020 anti-LGBTIQ campaign in Poland.

[Correction added on 18 April 2022, after first online publication: The copyright line was changed.]

DOI: 10.1111/lapo.12183

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License, which permits use,

distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

©2022 The Author. Law & Policy published by University of Denver and Wiley Periodicals LLC.

4Law & Policy. 2022;44:4–22.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/lapo

Since 2015, the national-conservative party Prawo i Sprawiedliwo

s

c (PiS; Law and Justice)

has been in power in the country. Its political program is a challenge to the institutional frame-

work of the postsocialist order (Krygier, 2019). It is supported by an extensive reframing

agenda in areas of historical politics and the politics of memory, much like the one pursued by

the government of Hungary, the other protagonist of Eastern European democratic backsliding

(

Agh, 2016; Harper, 2018). Among the groups most persistently targeted by the governing party

in Poland—as in Hungary—are LGBTIQ people

i

(Szymczak & Pacewicz, 2019). However,

while the Hungarian anti-LGBTIQ legislative agenda has been actively pursued by national

authorities (see Polg

ari & Dombos, 2020; Van Drooghenbroeck et al., 2021), in Poland, the spe-

cifically anti-LGBTIQ legislation has been adopted on the level of local self-government.

In this article, I focus on the anti-LGBTIQ resolutions adopted by Polish communities and

regions in 2019 as centerpieces of the ongoing anti-LGBTIQ campaign. On the one hand, this

campaign is a product of a broader agenda aimed at “gender ideology”and other ways of think-

ing condemned by the governing national-conservative Right (see Graff & Korolczuk, 2022;

Korolczuk, 2020; on the political differences within the Right, see Goldstein, 2021). On the other

hand, I argue that the anti-LGBTIQ campaign displays unique characteristics that can only be

grasped adequately by simultaneously studying multiple relational dimensions of exclusion. By

applying a three-dimensional model of analysis to exclusion dynamics based on Norbert Elias’s

and John Scotson’s seminal study (2008), I explore the process of exclusion performed by local

Polish lawmakers. Using Judith Butler’s notion of performativity (Butler, 1990, 1998; see also

Salih, 2007), I show that the synergy of the legal framing of local self-government resolutions with

the use of national symbols works toward construing LGBTIQ identity as incompatible with

membership in local communities. I argue that this exclusion from local communities thus paves

the way for a synergy of anti-LQBTIQ policy measures on the national level.

While my analysis combines the cultural study of law with an analysis of the established-

outsiders figuration, it is not my intention to examine the general framework of the application of

Elias’s theory in sociolegal studies (see Bucholc, 2021; van Krieken, 2019). In this article, I utilize

the concept of legal performativity to specifically argue that anti-LGBTIQ resolutions create

vicarious proxemic effects that result in the exclusion of outsiders in place of direct physical inter-

action. I explore law as a means of territorializing established majoritarian identities and moraliz-

ing social spaces that local lawmakers construct by symbolically removing the outsiders from the

community, despite their continuous bodily presence in the physical space that the community

occupies. Thus, I subscribe to Judith Butler’s tenet that identities are performed by linguistic acts

reiterated in a particular institutional context (see Butler, 1990). The local authorities perform the

exclusion under scrutiny by way of positing a heterosexual identity as the only one legally admis-

sible within a specified territory envisaged as a moralized social space.

I will begin with an overview of the literature on the legal situation of LGBTIQ people in

Poland, against the backdrop of a more general reflection on law as an instrument of social

exclusion. Next, I will introduce the established-outsiders model as my theoretical framework,

and I will state my argument for its unique advantages in studying social exclusion. Then, I will

report the main facts of the rise and workings of the anti-LGBTIQ campaign in Poland, focus-

ing on the emergence of the “anti-LGBT resolutions.”Finally, I will present the findings of my

thematic analysis of the content of resolutions by local communities, and I will offer a critical

review of the elements of the “established”and “outsiders”heuristic.

2|STUDIES OF LAW AND EXCLUSION OF LGBTIQ PERSONS IN

POLAND

Exclusion involves inequality. Summarizing the mission of sociolegal studies in the face of the

growth of inequality in the modern world, Carrol Seron (2016, p. 17) stresses the need to give

BUCHOLC 5