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European Journal of Women's Studies
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The Rest is Silence...

Polish Nationalism and the Question of Lesbian Existence

Joanna Mizielinska

WARSAW UNIVERSITY

This article focuses on questions rarely spoken of openly or written about in Poland. The article investigates what is behind such silence and tells of invisibility. The silence regarding lesbians in Poland is meaningful and reveals a lot about the concept of the Polish nation. This article examines Polish nationalistic discourse, which largely avoids the question of a homosexual orientation. Moreover, the heterosexual orientation is taken for granted as the only possible and natural one. Therefore, invisibility is a major theme of the article. The author illustrates this invisibility by examining two texts: the latest edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the new Polish Constitution. Both discourses are interwoven and deal with a very rigid concept of the Polish nation. The author goes on to look at how these discourses are perceived by Polish lesbians and how this concept of the Polish nation affects their daily lives (e.g. double life, staying in the closet, ‘white marriages’). The article draws largely on the results of the study that the author conducted in 1997 regarding lesbian existence in Poland. She bases her discussion on excerpts from interviews and questionnaires distributed among Polish lesbians. The author argues that the silence and invisibility of lesbians in official discourse influence Polish opinion about them, thus reinforcing homophobia and increasing pressure on lesbians to remain invisible.

Key Words: compulsory heterosexuality • exclusion • lesbianism • nationalism • sexual citizenship

European Journal of Women's Studies, Vol. 8, No. 3, 281-297 (2001)
DOI: 10.1177/135050680100800302
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