Karolina Sikorska

In the article, from a feminist perspective, we look at two visions of “Solidarity,” that was co-created by women, shown in documentary films – Solidarity According to Women, 2014, dir. Marta Dzido, Piotr Śliwowski and Women of Freedom, 2019, dir. Wiesław Paluch, Mirosław Basaj. For this purpose, we refer, i.a., to the concept of situated knowledge (Donna Haraway, 2009), its reinterpretation in the context of the category of care (María Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) or to the category of affective solidarity (Clare Hemmings, 2012). We describe the narrative strategy of Women of Freedom as a story about heroism without heroines, while the one we read in Solidarity According to Women we call heroising of heroines. During the analyzes, we explore different visions of female roles and identities, we also address the topic of sisterhood, both between women involved in the movement and in the relationship between the researcher and the subject of the research. Finally, becoming aware of our own affective dissonance, we consider how critical and sisterly interpretative practices are possible.

The mass public protests against introduction of further limitations on women’s reproductive rights in 2016 become important moment for the Polish feminist movement. Yet, the movement’s structure and semiotic reservoir of justifi cations has visibly changed in the recent years. The young Polish feminism has become more “girlish” than “womanly”. In our paper, we analyze how the “girlhood” artistic practices fi t into the renewal of contemporary refl ection on the gender roles of women and the Polish feminist movement. We analyzed practices of young Polish artivists, involved in girlhood-feminist collectives, and compared their cultural tactics with those of selfi e feminism. The paper focuses on girlhood practices as activities which take place across the individual and collective divide and redefi ne the public sphere. Demonstrating how these initiatives negotiate the normative cultural system, we present expressions of the girlhood experience and describe its social and structural conditions. We analyze feminist artistic practices as expressible and language-based feminine emancipatory practices, using tools typical of analysis of discourse and, predominantly, linguistic performance.

The article is an analysis of life stories of female visual artists connected with the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow (Poland). It explores the specificity of women’s experiences and constitutes an attempt to examine the role models and gender hierarchies which dominate the artworld. The article emphasises two analytical categories – uncertainty and struggle – to demonstrate how they organise the life stories of female artists, and tries to explain how such life stories can lead to re-evaluation of the perception of art as a male profession and contribute to a greater appreciation of women’s activity in the artworld.