Agnieszka Graff

Verified

Agnieszka verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

Verified

Agnieszka verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

• Dr.
• Associate Profesor at University of Warsaw

If therapeutic discourse is the horizon of contemporary culture and the ideological underpinning of neoliberalism, then the present crisis requires transcending this horizon. The article examines the historical and political dimensions of the therapeutic dominant of contemporary culture. The first part presents the model of subjectivity implicit in...

This paper examines how the term 'gender' has been re-signified by the right-wing actors in contemporary struggles around globalization. First, we offer a chronology of debates concerning global diffusion of gender norms, tracing the consolidation of various groups into the anti-gender movement. The next section discusses how gender and globalizati...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

This article demonstrates how anti-gender discourse – originating in the Vatican and spreading through ultra-conservative networks such as the World Congress of Families – draws on traditions of conspiratorial anti-Semitism. The repressed link takes two forms: displacement (Judaization of sexual minorities) and attribution of blame (Jews having inv...

This article is part of the follow up to a round-table on transnational feminist responses to Putin's invasion of Ukraine, which took place online on May 9, 2022. I examine both the solidarity shown by Polish feminists and (critically) the lack of appropriate response on the part of most Western feminists. I argue that the East/West divide is still...

This book charts the new phase of global struggles around gender equality and sexual democracy: the ultraconservative mobilization against "gender ideology" and feminist efforts to counteract it. It argues that anti-gender campaigns, which emerged around 2010 in Europe, are not a simple continuation of the anti-feminist backlash dating back to the...

Kristen Ghodsee has got a point. Feminism, as it developed in Eastern Europe in the 1990s and later in the period of EU accession, was engaged in a complex “dance” with emergent capitalism in the region. Not all feminists were involved—many were skeptical from the start, but the dance continued nonetheless, with profound consequences for women in t...

While research in right-wing populism has recently been blossoming, a systematic study of the intersection of right-wing populism and gender is still missing, even though gender issues are ubiquitous in discourses of the radical right ranging from »ethnosexism« against immigrants, to »anti-genderism.« This volume shows that the intersectionality of...

Extende essay on the complexities and paradoxes East–West feminist dialogue since the 1990s. In the mid-to late 1980s, postcolonial feminists and feminists of color dismantled Western feminism’s universalist assumptions, revealing the implicit whiteness of the category women. More recently, a number of feminist thinkers have noted with alarm that n...

This article examines the evolving role of national symbolism in Polish feminist discourses and activist practices since 1989. Three case studies involving symbolic appropriation are presented; in each, cultural signs of great importance to the national imaginary are put to work for women’s equality in acts of resistance to nationalist rhetoric. Th...

For this edition of “Ask a Feminist,” Cynthia Enloe-feminist, activist, writer, scholar, and research professor at Clark University-speaks with special issue editors Suzanna Danuta Walters, Ratna Kapur, and Agnieszka Graff about the relations between gender and militarism and imperialism, in particular about the role of gender in the rise of the im...

This article examines the recent wave of grassroots mobilizations opposing gender equality, LGBT rights, and sex education, which vilify the term “gender” in public debates and policy documents. The antigender movement emerged simultaneously in various locations after 2010. We argue that this is not just another wave of antifeminist backlash or a n...

This article analyzes antigenderism as a coherent ideological construction consciously and effectively used by right-wing and religious fundamentalists worldwide. In what follows we examine the basic tenets of antigenderism, shedding light on how it contributes to the contemporary transnational resurgence of illiberal populism. We argue that today’...

The essay examines the dynamics of the politicization of homophobia in the recent period of right-wing rule in Poland, which followed the country's 2004 EU accession. It argues that the question of sexuality became a boundary marker, a reference point for political self-definition and national pride. The essay looks at angry responses to the three...

A collection of essays and analyses by different authors devoted to the intersection of secular and ecclesiastic structures of dominance over the lives of women in Poland.

Admit it: Poland makes you think of Pope John Paul II and the millions of people gathered in the streets to mourn his death in the spring of 2005. Remember the singing, the candles, the way cameras lingered on young women’s tear-smudged faces? Admittedly, Poland’s women’s movement is no mass phenomenon compared with the adoration of the last pope,...

The complexities of Polish gender politics can be conceptualized as a series of paradoxes. Until recently, Polish feminists had deined the very possiblity of a Polish women's movement. This article argues that Polish feminism resists the chronology of "waves": it uses styles and tactics characteristic of the third wave (irony, high theory, camp, cr...