Ewa Majewska‘s texts describe and inspire critical feminist thought and action in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond. Beyond singular heroine narratives, her philosophical concept of “weak resistance” opens up possibilities for revolutionary narratives about everyday political action, transversal solidarity and community engagement. Based on the recent women's protests in Poland, Majewska shows that feminist struggles and anti-fascist resistance are once again acutely connected today.

In the last decade in Poland, legal restrictions on the already scattered access to abortion led to an unprecedented mobilisation of women and our allies for reproductive justice as well as for better political representation. Since its beginning, this movement was part of the global International Women's Strike, with people protesting against patriarchy in 75 countries, including Argentina, Mexico, Italy and South Korea. (1) It has entailed a massive popularisation of feminist ideas and organising across social, economic, and geopolitical divisions. In September 2016, the women's protests in Poland continued, culminating in the Women’s Strike held on October 3, when some 250,000 people joined street protests in 150 cities, towns, and even villages in Poland. Since 2016, feminist mass mobilisation has turned into a movement (2) that is not merely a lifestyle for privileged white women, but a collective effort recognising differences among participants and groups acting in unison. Women who are not typically inclined to be politically active have not only joined the movement but have also started grassroots organising.

Such a de-elitisation of feminism allowed “ordinary women” to make the movement, and although the category of the “ordinary” has been met with mixed feelings and criticism, it captures key dimensions of the recent feminist protests, which often remain invisible. The hegemony of the liberal narrative about abortion prevented some from actively defending the right to terminate pregnancy because this defence was based only on individualist, free will–centred arguments. Many women find it easier to discuss their reproductive decisions in terms of their family situation, economy, or health, and thus, unlike most members of the upper middle class, do not see “choice” as the primary question. This preoccupation with context, relations, economy, and the body is more compatible with materialist feminism than with liberal feminist claims.
 

Materialist feminism – the understanding of gendered roles and their performative repetition as always already embedded in the ideological order of capitalist production – allows us to speak about all the elements of parenthood in contextualized, historically and geopolitically situated, embodied ways. Understood in intersectional terms, abortion is not solely a question of choice. If reproduction is the “intersection” (3) where several streets meet and multiple factors compose a situation, then perhaps a person’s choice and rights are only two factors interacting with a multiplicity of historically contextualized, materialized, and embodied elements of ideological reproduction, such as cultural influences, ethics, socialisation, class, gender, and ethnicity. Such contextualized “crossroads” (4) are necessary to understand the performative reproduction of gender. (5) What would change in the debate on reproductive justice if we applied this queer studies perspective to develop a situated, processual, and embodied understanding of abortion?

 The first change would be that the narrative about reproductive justice would cease to be trans-exclusionary. The issue of abortion would be de-essentialized, opening it up to people of different genders and lifestyles. If abortion is not only a matter of choice but also one of socio-economic circumstance, then there is no ideal person who should be allowed to have it, neither in terms of their identity nor their political views.

My second claim is that the efforts to ban abortion are not separate from the return of fascist politics. On the contrary, the effort to severely control women’s reproductive health should be seen as a necessary component of the contemporary “state of exception” (6) that is enacted by many politicians allied with the global return of fascist politics – from Putin to Orban, Kaczyński to Trump, Bolsonaro to Salvini. The “state of exception” has a long history: The early twentieth-century version was conceived by the German philosopher Carl Schmitt and offered a foundation for the fascism of the 1930s. Its central elements are always the same; it involves: 1) subjecting parliamentary and juridical powers to the executive; 2) the constitution of a government or leader who, while creating law, is also always already exempt from it; and 3) naming an enemy group and focusing on its degradation and eradication. In the time of international “anti-gender populism” (7), women as well as LGBTQIA+ persons and groups therefore become an “enemy” in various countries.

The notion of the “state of exception” allows us to signal the appearance of fascism (8) in different political and cultural contexts, including in all the governments led by the right-wing politicians listed above. Taking Poland as the main example of the current situation in the region of Central and Eastern Europe would be misleading. In most of these countries, people have better reproductive rights including access to abortion. The political shifts in Poland are symptomatic, however, to the global tendencies in the fundamentalist right-wing mobilisations which focus on “anti-gender” politics and aim at transforming the state accordingly to the model of Schmitt's “state of exception.”

Fascism requires a heroic vision and practice of subject formation. Restrictions on reproductive rights may be seen as part of this process, which subjects women in the most painful way to the absolute rule of the sovereign. Fascism demands absolute allegiance from the whole of society, and it does so while preserving and strengthening the traditional gender division, militarising men and forcing women to limit their ambitions and lives to reproduction. Fascism's demand for men and women to sacrifice themselves is a symmetry of heroism. LGBTQIA+ persons have no role in this, which is used to strengthen claims for their “elimination” that are sadly echoing in the exclamations of today's fascists and the “TERFs” (9) (when it comes to trans persons).

When Jarosław Kaczyński said in 2016 that women “should give birth no matter what,” he was actually willing to embrace the deadly repercussions of such a vision of sacrifice. As the Polish Constitutional Court ruled in 2020, even in cases where the foetus shows signs of severe illness, a pregnancy has to be carried to term. Since then, patients have been refused necessary medical assistance due to their doctors’ fears of terminating a pregnancy illegally, and some died because of that. These tragedies result from the version of heroism that now affects women’s fate in Poland: we all have to be brave for our sovereign, even to the point of losing our lives.

People in Poland who need abortion seek help from informal feminist organisations and networks, including the Abortion Dream Team, Women on Net, Ciocia Basia (in Berlin), and Ciocia Wienia (in Vienna), or migrate to make sure that the termination of their pregnancy happens in healthy conditions and without leading to unnecessary repetitions of their trauma. Women’s solidarity moves us beyond the heroic paradigm and offers egalitarian means of resisting the “state of exception”’s deadly norms of femininity through what I call "weak resistance" - unheroic politics which fundamentally opposes the political tendencies of fascism. Around 2016, the mainly municipal form of feminism began to be replaced by an unheroic mass movement led by ordinary women. The concept of “weak resistance” helps to explain this shift as it describes the political dimensions of actions that have been denied impact in classical accounts of politics. It is through this shift that we can see how ordinary, everyday strategies of unheroic subjects can and do act politically. 

This politics is not one depicted in most history books, where to engage in politics is to win wars or battles and to behave in ways dictated by the male tradition of hegemonic European socialisation. In the current movements for reproductive justice, these forms of politics – community organising, solidarity actions, and grassroots mobilisations, sometimes working across the social and cultural divisions between institutional and informal, rural and municipal, poor and bourgeois, reformist and radical, antifundamentalist and antifascist politics – are enacted on a daily basis. In “The power of the powerless” Vaclav Havel depicted those who had every reason to think that resistance was futile in late 1970s. Nevertheless, solidarisation and subversion on a large scale led to the formation of the “Solidarność” movement in 1980 in Poland. The International Women’s Strike took place in a similar wave of weak resistance across the globe, expressing the power of powerless in the late 2010s.

The ability to act in transversal ways is crucial to the contemporary international feminist movement.  It is moving across what used to be seen as opposing formats and strategies (reform vs. revolution; grassroots vs. institutional) and, in contrast to liberal feminism, it transforms society as a whole, and not merely the situation of women within it. The ability to take hybrid shapes, to embrace and unite heterogeneous groups and organizations, and to act in unison for the common good, is what makes today's feminism so effective. It also means that there is no antifascism without queer-feminism and anti-racism. Black Lives Matter and the International Women's Strike developed simultaneously, both as predominantly women-led movements, which shows that feminism is to be located at the core, and no longer on the margins, of antifascist politics.  
 

(1)    See Verónica Gago, “Feminist International” (2020), and Elżbieta Korolczuk and Agnieszka Graff, “Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment” (2021).
(2)    That is: a movement as defined by bell hooks in “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center” (1984).
(3)    See Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989).
(4)    See Gloria Anzaldúa, “Borderlands/La Frontera” (1987).
(5)    See Judith Butler, “Bodies that Matter” (2011).
(6)    See Giorgio Agamben: “State of Exception” (2005).
(7)    See Elżbieta Korolczuk and Agnieszka Graff, “Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment” (2021).
(8)    Differently, Roger Griffin focuses on fascism as a combination of restoration (of tradition) and revolution (as mode of it); Slavoj Żiżek speaks about “neo-fascism”, and Jack Bratich focuses on microfascisms.
(9)    Trans-exclusionary radical feminists
(10)A transversal movement as described in Felix Guattari’s “The Three Ecologies” (2000).