‘Don’t Ask for my Blood, Poland!’

Abstract

Since 2015, when the right-wing Law and Justice party came to power in Poland, its rhetoric and political decisions have been aimed at limiting women's rights primarily by tightening abortion laws and restricting women's right to decide about their own bodies. The attempt to change abortion laws in October 2020 led to an outbreak of the largest anti-government demonstrations since those that preceded the fall of communism in 1989.

During pro-choice protests in public space, menstrual blood was ‘exhibited’ to public view on a great scale – not known before in the history of Polish culture. Sanitary towels were not only on banners of thousands of protesters, but they were pasted over shop windows, sent to right-wing politicians. Tampons were hung on trees and protesters were spilling red paint in front of right-wing headquarters in different cities. The visibility of blood, women bleeding from the vagina and menstrual blood has become a strong and dominant visual motif in the public sphere. It crossed private space to enter and dominate the streets. In the text ‘Don’t Ask for my Blood, Poland! ’Pro-choice protests and the visuality of women’s blood Agnieszka Sosnowska claims the visual representation of women’s blood during pro-choice protests in Poland has had a transformative power and can also be seen as self-affirmation practices aiming at the empowerment of women and their subjectivity.

Notes

1 One of the examples to mention is the situation from 14 November 2020 when the door of the building where the Law and Justice deputies’ office in Malbork is located was taped with sanitary towels. See jw 2020.

2 As part of the campaign ‘I kindly report: I’m not pregnant!’ launched on 29 November 2020 by several feminist organizations against the pregnancy register project, women sent sanitary towels, tampons and menstrual cups (photos alone were also sufficient) to state representatives.

3 The law was in force from January 1991 to December 2020.

4 The text comes from a post published by Hana Umeda on Facebook on 5 April 2016, accessed 15 May 2022.