Transition in Poland, Poland in transition: tracing the history of gender transition discourses in Polish social media

Joanna Chojnicka

doi:10.32798/zl.1119

Published: 2023-10-16

Vol. 59 No. 1 (2023)

Transition in Poland, Poland in transition: tracing the history of gender transition discourses in Polish social media

Joanna Chojnicka

Zeszyty Łużyckie

Section: Articles

https://doi.org/10.32798/zl.1119

Abstract

The present article explores the history of Polish online gender transition discourses, conceptualized in terms of two main stages – “Transnet 1.0” of anonymous, text-based blogs documenting individual experiences and “Transnet 2.0” of YouTube videos, podcasts and tik-toks created by openly trans activists. It offers an analysis of various kinds of multilingual practices in these narratives and attempts to track the way they have been changing to reveal threads of local and global, conservative and liberal, medical and activist discourses. This is done against the background of Poland’s own transition from a (nominally) socialist state to a modern democracy, which has not followed a simple, straight-forward path to progress allegedly exemplified by the “West”. The history of attitudes towards the transgender community throughout Poland’s democratic transition and its traces in contemporary online discourses paint a more complex picture.

Supporting Agencies

This research has been funded by the Marie Skłodowska–Curie Actions (MSCA) under Horizon 2020. Project reference: 882747 – TRANSlation – H2020-MSCA-IF-2019, Cardiff University.

Keywords:

transition, discourse analysis, transgender, LGBTQ+ rights in Poland

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Chojnicka, J. (2023). Transition in Poland, Poland in transition: tracing the history of gender transition discourses in Polish social media. Zeszyty Łużyckie, 59(1), 79–103. https://doi.org/10.32798/zl.1119

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Joanna Chojnicka

j.a.chojnicka@gmail.com
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2974-3110

Affiliation:

University of Groningen, Faculty of Arts Netherlands

Bio Statement:

Joanna Chojnicka is assistant professor in Linguistics and English as a Second Language at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands (since September 2023). She obtained her PhD in linguistics from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, in 2012, after which she spent 6 years as a postdoctoral researcher in Germany – at the University of Konstanz (2013–2015) and Bremen (2015–2019), where she also acted as the managing director of INPUTS (Institute for Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies). In 2019, she joined Michael Hornsby’s team on the project “Language revitalization without native speakers: The cases of Breton in Upper Brittany and Sorbian in Lower Lusatia”, funded by the Polish National Science Centre, before moving to Cardiff University in Wales to carry out her own Marie Skłodowska–Curie Actions funded project “Trans in Translation: Multilingual practices and local/global gender and sexuality discourses in Polish transition narratives” (2021–2023). She is interested in the relationship between language, gender and sexuality, in multilingualism and minoritized languages, as well as Critical Discourse Analysis and ecolinguistics.