Paperback release of "Intimacy and mobility in an era of hardening borders: Gender, reproduction, regulation"
20 November 2023
The Gender Wars Network is pleased to announce that Intimacy and mobility in an era of hardening borders: Gender, reproduction, regulation is soon to be released in paperback. The edited volume contains a chapter by the Network's co-investigator Agnieszka Kościańska, titled "'The Handbook of Masturbation and Defloration': tracing sources of recent neo-conservatism in Poland."
Chapter Abstract
"Gender ideology", an umbrella term covering sex education, women's rights, LGBTQ rights, and gender mainstreaming, figures at the heart of various political conflicts in Poland (and throughout Central Europe) and is presented as the major threat to the nation. Political analysts assert that the attack on "gender ideology" contributed significantly to the electoral victory of the radical right in Poland, in 2015.
In my analysis, I trace the historical roots of the current attack on "gender ideology". I argue that it had already started by the mid-1980s when the Communist Party, hoping to win the battle over young's people hearts against the Catholic Church, published a progressive sex education handbook to be used in all Polish high schools. The publication ignited a heated debate: reviewers called it "the handbook of masturbation and defloration" and warned about its demoralizing effects. Conservative critics explicitly equated sexuality and gender with issues of national belonging, mobilizing opposition around these concepts. As a result, the Communist Party banned the handbook from schools. In this chapter, I argue that it was at this moment in the 1980s when current conservative thinking about gender and sexuality vis-à-vis the nation was born. I point to the links between now and then, visible on both personal and discursive levels. I show that recent neo-conservative approaches towards gender and sexuality have in fact been forged over the last three decades.
About the book
This book is a collection of articles by anthropologists and social scientists concerned with gendered labour, care, intimacy and sexuality, in relation to mobility and the hardening of borders in Europe. Interrogating the relation between physical, geopolitical borders and ideological, conceptual boundaries, it offers a range of vivid and original ethnographic case studies that will capture the imagination of anyone interested in gendered migration, policies of inclusion and exclusion, and regulation of reproduction and intimacy.
The book presents ethnographic and phenomenological discussions of people's changing lives as they cross borders, how people transgress and reshape moral boundaries of proper gender and kinship behaviour, and moral economies of intimacy and sexuality. It also focuses on migrants' navigation of social and financial services in their destination countries, putting questions about rights and limitations on citizenship at the core.
Citations:
Haukanes, Haldis, and Frances Pine, eds. Intimacy and Mobility in an Era of Hardening Borders: Gender, Reproduction, Regulation. Manchester University Press, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1kgd666.
Kościańska, Agnieszka. "'The Handbook of Masturbation and Defloration': Tracing Sources of Recent Neo-Conservatism in Poland." In Intimacy and Mobility in an Era of Hardening Borders: Gender, Reproduction, Regulation, edited by Haldis Haukanes and Frances Pine, 218-34. Manchester University Press, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1kgd666.17.