Lost Between the Waves? the Paradoxes of Feminist Chronology and Activism in Contemporary Poland‪.‬

As a Polish feminist, writer and academic, I find it somewhat amusing when well-meaning Westerners, on their two-day stop in the Pope's homeland, voice their concern that, surely, feminism cannot exist in my country, because "you are all so deeply conservative, aren't you?" and "so very Catholic." The truth is that Polish feminism can and does exist, though it is often tormented by self-doubt. As a movement--cultural, political and intellectual--we are growing in numbers and becoming radicalized by the hour. Quite possibly, we are on the verge of something new, something beyond the familiar paths of Polish gender politics, something that resists the chronology of "waves" used to describe feminist movements in the West. The aim of this paper is to explore the complexities of this cultural moment in the context of expectations implicit in the wave metaphor, as well as those written into Poland's national mythology. When Drag-Queens Dress Up as Bishops