“Homosexual men whose lives turned out unsuccessful”: Polish aunties in the transition era

ABSTRACT

This article investigates how the term ciota (aunty) was employed in mainstream media in the 1990s to exclude some gay men from visibility politics, and also how it was appropriated to counter these exclusions. The social, economic, and political changes of the 1990s disadvantaged “aunties” who were accused of hindering emancipation. I argue that ciota became what Judith Butler refers to as the “constitutive outside” to the masculine, restrained, and monogamous gay man. However, when given voice in the media, aunties presented gay femininity and cruising as a historic or even noble tradition, thus troubling the dominant condemnatory narrative.

KEYWORDS:

• Homosexuality
• gay
• queer
• Poland
• media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The noun “homosexuality” (homoseksualność) and the adjective “homosexual” (homoseksualny) sound neutral in Polish; unlike English, they have no clinical or homophobic connotations, probably because Polish sexology of the time employed different terms homoseksualizm and homoseksualista. In contrast, “gay” was introduced to the mainstream media in the 1990s by activists as a label of self-acceptance and a tool in respectability politics. I will use both terms in this article: “gay” in the narrower context of the gay rights movement and “homosexual” more broadly for queer men.

2 Tolerance – one of the key words of the 1990s – was often invoked in the media as a quality which post-1989 Polish society must learn to become more modern and European. This was also declared as the main goal of the early gay and lesbian rights movement. The success of “tolerance” in the public discourse stemmed from the perceived differences between homogenous Poland and racially, religiously, and nationally diverse Western countries.

3 As Butler puts it, “the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, ‘inside’ the subject as its own founding repudiation” (Bodies that Matter xiii).

4 Here, the fact that “ciota” is grammatically feminine makes it analogical to other grammatically untypical words that describe clumsy men but are either grammatically feminine or they decline as if they were feminine: fajtłapa, łamaga, ciamajda, niezdara, niedojda, oferma, gapa, and finally cipa [cunt]. This list attests to the misogyny underlying the Polish language, in which feminine declination codes the lack of traits such as strength, success, or dexterity.

5 It is, therefore, unclear whether the statement is authentic or was prepared for the sake of the film. This is, however, irrelevant to the argument.

6 One interesting testimony to this ambivalence is a recollection printed in the Inaczej [in a different way] gay magazine, where a gay man reveals that it was from a documentary movie about “a poor old fag” – quite probably Moch’s movie – that he learnt where men met for sex, and then he started to go there himself (“Zakazane piosenki”).

7 These attitudes stemmed from the teaching of the Catholic church, an institution endowed with the status of moral authority in social matters, whose position was also in line with, first, the communist party’s policies that reflected traditional peasants’ and workers’ culture, and then, after 1990, the policies of early democratic parties in Poland (Fidelis; Kościańska; Stańczak-Wiślicz et al.).

8 As E. Patrick Johnson explains, while the distinction between an authentic and a fake way of performing an identity is always arbitrary and political, it may be employed by underprivileged groups to resist their oppression and thus should not be indiscriminately dismissed (3).

9 In another article, I show that unlike cioty, drag queens were imagined as Western and successful in the 1990s public discourse, see Janion “The Rise and Fall.”

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the “New Ideas” IDUB program at Uniwersytet Warszawski.