Paper Short Abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic material gathered in Wroclaw, Poland, in the proposed paper I analyze how municipal policies and practices as well as grassroot activism aimed at non-heteronormative citizens have been shaped by global, regional, national and local dynamics over the last two decades.

Paper Abstract:

Since the political mobilization of Polish LGBTQ movements due to the country EU accession in 2004, the idea of “sexual citizenship” has provided an important “horizon of hope” (Appadurai 2013: 295) for non-heteronormative persons. Yet, this hope has not been fulfilled as, despite relentless efforts of the activist circles, legal and cultural LGBT rights are still not protected. On the other hand, because Polish right-wing populism and nationalism (including the governmental level) have been capitalizing on politicized homo- and transphobia and anti-EU stance, in recent years support for the EU “sexual citizenship” has become an important sign of belonging to the liberal democratic political camp.

Drawing on ethnographic material gathered in Wroclaw, a city in southwestern Poland, in the proposed paper I analyze how the above historically changing circumstances have been shaping municipal policies and practices as well as grassroot activism aimed at non-heteronormative citizens over the last two decades. Whereas the centrist liberal municipality has been working for an image of Wroclaw as a “truly European” metropolis since the early 1990s, until 2018 its actual policies and practices were marked by a rather anti-LGBTQ stance. This has changed only recently as an act of resistance against the right-wing nationalist government and brought entirely new organizational and political possibilities (and challenges) for local LGBTQ movements. In this context I focus on dynamics of the nexus between municipality and grassroot LGBTQ activism with a special attention given to entanglements of various local, national, regional and global scales.