Paper long abstract:

The aim of my paper is to overview recent Polish "gender" controversy with slightly transformed Bruno Latour's circulatory model of science (from his "Pandora's Hope"). I view the scientific text here as a ontological generator nested within other circles and nods of the model. The stronger it is connected to them, the bigger the chance for the innovation to be successful and socialized within collective.

The socio-scientific controversy is a clash of different ontological generators, and consequently different possible worlds. The controversy is not just a conflict of different lines of theoretical argumentation, instead the conflict is located within each of the circle of Latour's model.

Such a theoretical approach would be applied to recent Polish gender controversy. I claim that two disparate ontological innovations - gender as part of theoretical sex/gender opposition in gender studies and gender ideology in "anti-gender" approach - require different furniture of collective world (the inhabit disparate possible worlds). The conflict between them locates within different: theoretical connections, mobilizations of the world, autonomisations, friends and allies, and public representations (Latour's model). Yet both innovations require some stabilizing mechanisms (as "facts need rails") in order to circulate within the collective world.

The issue of situated solidarity seems particularly interesting: what kind of solidarities are designed by the innovations? (Are they symmetrical? What actors are included and excluded? How do they distribute agency?), what kind of solidarities are inner features of two conflicting possible worlds?, is there any way to compare them as a sort of profit/loss estimation?