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Paper short abstract

By exploring how non-Catholic Polish women reclaim the figure of Holy Mary, this paper approaches the awkward positioning of the second world in the admittedly problematic, yet prevalent first/third world binary as an opportunity to nuance feminist understanding of women’s agency beyond resistance.

Paper long abstract

In many contemporary feminist readings, self-authorising female subjects are juxtaposed to positions of oppression, whose only path beyond subjugation is resistance. As demonstrated by the wide misinterpretation of 2012 Pussy Riot’s performance, the attempts of ‘cultural translation’ of women’s practices in post-socialist societies into this North/Western binary fail to understand how women can use religious markers to speak back to religious authorities (Wiedlack & Neufeld 2014). Furthermore, the epistemological favouritism towards the liberal, secular subject results in mischaracterization of post-socialist societies as ‘lagging behind’ sibling of the so-called first world. This paper approaches this awkward positioning of the second world as an opportunity to nuance feminist understanding of women’s agency, via the practice of reclamation. Drawing on the case of non-Catholic Polish women who engage with the figure of Holy Mary through art, performances or tattoos, I explore why she remains meaningful to them. Rather than understanding these alterations of Holy Mary’s figure as rupture from religion, I focus on how these women’s ability to recognise themselves in her allowed them to take her figure with them when leaving the Church behind. By reclaiming Holy Mary and becoming agents of what she signifies, these women begin to rearticulate their gendered sense of self, which allows them to reimagine their womanhood in Poland and connect with each other. Reclamation thus provides an approach beyond viewing women’s actions as resistance in reaction to oppression and offers an alternative path for enabling female subjectivities in heteropatriarchal environments of the post-socialist landscape, and beyond.