Rural masculinity in protest: farmer’s political movements in modern Poland as sites of rural masculinities’ reproduction

ABSTRACT

The article examines how farmers participating in the Polish rural political movement Agrounia (re)enact a certain brand of rural masculinity, opposed to the hegemonic model of urban, political masculinities. Agrounia, a political movement and party, is concerned with economic issues affecting farmers; however, the article poses that its’ members strive to elevate the status of rural masculinity by contrasting it with the hegemonic, urban model. Agrounia uses a discursive dichotomy between rural, ‘true’ masculinity (hardworking, honest, straightforward) and urban, ‘fake’ masculinity (lazy, dishonest, fake, dismissive). A clashing point between the masculinities is the protest esthetic, with hegemonic, urban masculinity opposing Agrounia’s chosen methods of protest, painting them as vulgar, boorish, unnecessary, cruel. These concerns are, in turn, considered to be an expression of the effeminacy of urban men, their delicacy, sensibility. The battle for recognition and status between the two masculinities is fought over the monopoly on honesty and truth, the status of ‘true’ masculinity, with both sides entrenched in the practices that are supposed to ensure their domination. The article aims to analyze how members of Agrounia and protests participants construct rural protest masculinity; second, to analyze how this masculinity is presented and depicted in the analyzed newspaper coverage.

KEYWORDS:

• Rurality
• farmers’ movement
• Poland
• Agrounia
• Samoobrona
• protest masculinity

In 2001, the Polish political scene was shocked by the parliamentary election results. The third power in the lower house of parliament was Samoobrona Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej (Samoobrona; Self-Defence of the Republic of Poland), a political party emerging from farmers’ movement, which gathered 10.2% of all votes cast. Samoobrona’s leader was a farmer from North-West Poland, Andrzej Lepper, a charismatic man who enacted masculinity differently than most of his fellow MPs. His body bore marks of his occupation and class position: with large, red hands and red face, a sturdy figure, and a booming voice, he seemed visually out of place among other politicians, who were mostly representatives of the urban intelligentsia.¹ His discursive style was also typical of the marginalized, in terms of mainstream media representation and material status, rural masculinity: he spoke simply, bluntly, sometimes loutishly. He remained a fixture of the Polish political life until his death in 2011 (see Drozd-Piasecka, 2012).

Almost 20 years later, another farmers’ political movement (and, eventually, a political party) burst into the Polish political scene. Agrounia (Agricultural Union) was initially a trade union based on an association of farmers, led by Michał Kołodziejczak, who operates a large farm in central Poland.² Known for a discursive style reminiscent of Andrzej Lepper, Kołodziejczak has inspired a wave of protests against the Polish government’s agricultural policies. Comparisons between these two leaders and movements abound. First, both Samoobrona and Agrounia are led by rural men, both of whom have at one point in their political career entered a majority coalition in the parliament (Lepper in 2005, Kołodziejczak in 2023). Second, both of them use their status of rural men and farmers to position themselves as outsiders to the political mainstream, even though they eventually enter the establishment themselves. My main assumption is that members of Agrounia, like those of Samoobrona before them, enact a particular model of marginalized rural masculinity, which in turn may allow them to – at least partially – enter the world of mainstream, hegemonic masculinity represented by national-level politicians. While there were women MPs in Samoobrona, and there are women activists and parliament candidates in Agrounia (Kowalewska, 2023), they are relatively less-known and visible than their male leaders, possibly due to the fact that farming is also perceived, albeit simplistically, as a quintessentially ‘man’s job,’ relegating women to the background (see Drąg & Gorlach, 2019; Ni Laoire, 2002; Whatmore, 1991).

The goals of the article are twofold: to describe the way members of Agrounia construct their brand of rural protest masculinity; and second, to analyze the depiction of rural protest masculinity and associated protest tactics in newspaper coverage. The structure of the article is as follows: I will begin with a brief overview of works on rural masculinities, then move on to the explanation of the concepts of protest and political masculinities. The next section will provide the necessary context to and analysis of rural-urban masculine power relations in the current Polish political scene.

The article employs available media coverage – especially texts from a Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza – to decode how rural masculinity is constructed and enacted via participation in Agrounia’s protest actions. In this regard, I build on the findings of Stenbacka (2011), whose analysis of Swedish popular media revealed that there exists an implicit urban hegemony in the media depictions of masculinities.

The article describes how the rural men who participate in the Agrounia political movement (re)enact rural masculinity through this participation. Nevertheless, Agrounia is strongly associated with its leader. Kołodziejczak is a charismatic leader (see Fuller, Patterson, Hester, & Stringer, 1996) who strongly influences Agrounia’s character and actions. Therefore, my analysis will include articles on Michał Kołodziejczak himself, as he is perceived as an extension of the entire political movement.

While farmers’ political movements and parties may not seem such viable research subjects as other parties are much bigger in size and support, 40% of Polish population lives in rural areas (World Bank, 2022), and 8.2% of the working population in 2022 was employed in agriculture (OECD, 2022). Thus, the movements and parties that target Polish rural population, farmers specifically, are vying for the support of this group of potential voters. Farmers’ protests across Europe in late 2023 and early 2024, while not discussed in this paper, are a poignant reminder of the importance of studying rural (political) masculinities to understand these contemporary movements.

Who is a (Rural) man? A brief overview of scholarship on masculinity and rurality

The foremost framework for understanding male gender norms has become Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity (see Connell, 2005; Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). In short, hegemonic masculinity is the form of masculinity that allows men to exercise power and control over other men and women; the notion of inequality and dominance of one gender over another is key in Connell’s writing. The most important implication of this framework is that there exists a plethora of masculinities, differing depending on social, economic, or historical contexts (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). There is no universal hegemonic masculinity. The hegemony of a given model of masculinity does not stem from the number of men that subscribe to it; on the contrary, few men fulfill the ideal of hegemonic masculinity. The hegemony lies in the values ascribed to those who enact hegemonic masculinity: they are perceived as ‘true’ men that are admired and respected; henceforth, whenever I refer to hegemonic masculinity in the Polish context, I take it to mean a national, urban-centric masculinity, taking into the account the relative ethnic and national homogeneity of Polish society and the urban dominance over the rural areas, which will be elaborated on in latter part of the article. As Connell explains, there exist subordinated masculinities that are discredited or oppressed, such as homosexual masculinities, which is also applicable in the Polish context (Connell, 2005). In 2011, Katarzyna Wojnicka wrote that interest in men and masculinities in Poland is new and insufficiently explored (p.73); unfortunately, with the notable exception of Wojnicka herself and some other scholars (e.g. Kluczyńska, 2021; Leszczyńska, Zielińska, & Urbańska, 2022; Wojnicka, 2011, 2012, 2016; Wojnicka & Kubisa, 2023; Wojnicka & Pustułka 2017, 2019), the situation is not drastically different over a decade later when it comes to the amount of work done on masculinities in Poland.

In some contexts, certain models of masculinity are subjected to the threat of losing their position in the hierarchy of masculinities, namely the traditional model of masculinity that values physical and emotional strength is being replaced as hegemonic masculinity by the model that values emotional intelligence, openness to dialogue, and performing care duties (Yang 2020); of course, such changes occur in certain contexts of class, place and cultural capital, namely in – to simplify – more liberal, left-leaning contexts. Yang (2020) elaborates on the progressive potential of the concept of hegemonic masculinity, remarking that its conflation with rigid, heterosexist norms may be a simplification and an overly pessimistic outlook. Nevertheless, changes in the ‘celebrated models of masculinity’ may result in grievances of those who enact ‘dethroned’ masculinities – or models of masculinities that are no longer considered desirable and respectable – and attempts to defend the status they have previously enjoyed. Such defense is called defense by proxy, which is created, for example, via participation in the gun lobby (Gahman, 2015), or enlisting in the army (Woodward 2000).

I believe that in some instances, such practices may also serve as an offensive strategy to uplift certain marginalized masculinities to the hegemonic status. I will argue that participation in farmer’s political movements such as Samoobrona and Agrounia should be viewed an offensive practice for uplifting the status of rural masculinity.

A concept similarly elusive as masculinity is rurality. In this article, I subscribe to the view held by Sommerville and Bosworth (2014): next to a set of concrete social practices, meanings, and contexts, the rural is a ‘thought category’ that includes the physical experience of rurality, as well as cultural representations, ideals, and practices connected to rural space. Such cultural representations are varied: from idyllic images of rural life to almost horror-like stories of oppressive life of backwardness. In post-transformation Poland, rurality is socially constructed either as idyllic spaces for vacationing and ‘simple life’ (Radowska-Lisak, 2008) or as backward places filled with people unable to adapt to market economy reality (Struzik, 2016). The latter image is especially widely used to describe political strategies of Polish rural voters, who tend to vote for conservative parties (Bartkowski, 2022, p. 175).

Within Polish masculinities, however, Polish rural masculinity is culturally and economically marginalized, as is the rural population as a whole. According to Struzik (2016), rural dwellers are still considered backward, uneducated, boorish; the urban–rural tensions remain high due to rates of rural-urban migration, with the urban population being dissatisfied with the influx of new migrants, who are perceived as unsuitable for city life and lacking manners (2016, pp. 98–100). The deep-seated mutual distrust stems from Poland’s long feudal history, with its stark divide between serfs and gentry. Recent trends in Polish historiography attempt to bring the peasants into the spotlight, making them the main actors in Polish history (see Gospodarczyk, 2024; Gospodarczyk & Kożuchowski, 2021); these attempts have not eliminated the existing prejudice. Material standing of the rural population is worse than the urban population; the average disposable income per capita of rural households stands at 1639 PLN compared to 1919 PLN in urban households (Chmielewska & Zegar, 2022, p. 137).

It is safe to say, that the cultural representations of rurality in Poland, especially rural masculinities, are similarly unfavorable. Rydlewski (2019) employs strong language to describe the cultural representations of rural masculinities in Poland, by comparing popular TV shows focused on Polish rural areas to human zoos or anthropological exhibitions, devoted to presenting ‘the other’ to white audiences. Similarly, Stenbacka (2011) indicates that rural masculinity is used by the dominant social class as ‘the other’ to the unspoken norm of urban masculinity, which stems from a dichotomy of capable versus incapable and deviant versus normal. I believe rural masculinity in Poland may very well be called marginalized in the fields of cultural representations and material capital.

Bell and Campbell (2000) propose a differentiation between the masculine in the rural and the rural in the masculine. Masculine in the rural is to describe how masculinity is enacted in rural communities, in the rural context, while rural in the masculine is to concern traces of rurality found in traditional masculinity, no matter the context of its enactment. In other words, traditional masculinity includes elements associated with rurality such as physical and mental strength or lack of emotionality. Bell and Campbell’s reasoning is important because it shows the lack of set boundaries of what it means to be a rural man; rurality and urbanity intersect and interact, and so do masculinities. As there is no masculinity without femininity, and no rural masculinity without urban masculinity. I am interested in what practices and dispositions are (de)coded as rural or urban masculine, and what are the normative assumptions ascribed to them.

In previous work, I reviewed the literature on rurality and masculinity to identify three key areas in which rural masculinity is (re)produced and enacted: agriculture and farming; homosocial practices, often including alcohol consumption; heterosexuality and marriage (Gospodarczyk 2019; for a discussion of connections between rural masculinity and heterosexuality see Silva, 2021). The figure of a farmer is most commonly associated with rural masculinity as it is connected to qualities such as hard work, resilience, physical strength, and responsibility (Barlett & Conger, 2004; Peter, Bell, Jarnagin, & Bauer, 2006). This connection is bolstered by the very nature of modern farming, increasingly reliant on sophisticated machinery, as masculinity has historically been associated with the world of machines and technology (see Brandth, 1995; Saugeres, 2002). Homosocial practices that often entail alcohol consumption serve as space for the reproduction of rural masculinities via interactions with other rural men (see Campbell, 2000). Heteronormativity is an omnipresent norm that organizes the lives of rural men, especially in Poland. While there are some studies on the lives of queer rural lives (see Annes & Redlin 2012; Bell & Valentine, 1995; Silva, 2021), virtually no such literature on Poland exists, other than one study on the lives of non-heteronormative women (Struzik, 2012). Heteronormativity remains unquestioned, and any deviations from it are rare and treated with suspicion.

Masculinity in protest: an overview of the concept of protest maculinity

Models of masculinities are shaped by the economic, spatial, and historical contexts. To borrow from Connell’s approach (2005), scholars should focus on describing the ‘processes and relationships through which men and women lead gendered lives’ (p. 71) rather than attempting to simply describe masculinity as an object or norm. To believe in gender essentialism would be to infer that there is only hegemonic masculinity, and all men would benefit equally from their enactment of gender (Cheng, 1999; Yang 2020). Intersectional feminism has made it clear that hierarchy – connected to material, cultural, and social capital – is crucial for the experience of gender for both women and men.

In situations of economic deprivation and social marginalization, i.e. unemployment or degradation of skilled physical labor (see Walker & Roberts 2018), masculinity can be used as a cultural resource. To compensate for their marginalization, certain men will employ hypermasculinity as a way of counteracting the negative consequences of their social position, by emphasizing their sexual prowess or physical strength (Connell, 1991). In line with Maruska (2010), I understand hypermasculinity as an acceptance and enactment of rigid gender divisions and hierarchical gender order, which can be manifested by performances of overt sexuality or violence (Bengtsson 2016). This mechanism lies at the heart of protest masculinity: the protest stems from feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness. Protest masculinity can be enacted for example by engaging in criminal activities, street fighting, drinking, and looting. I share the views of McDowell (2002), Tomsen (1997) and Connell (1991), who treat enactments of protest masculinity as symbolic protests against social norms, which are set by the dominant class, as well as material life conditions. As such, these protests integrate marginalized men, serving as proxies through which non-hegemonic masculinities may be reinforced and enacted. They bond men together via shared opposition to social norms.

Protest esthetics and respectable masculinities

I argue that the actions of both Samoobrona and Agrounia are symbolic protests against urban upper-class morality and dispositions, projected by members of the political establishment. In post-1989 Poland, politicians counted among the most distrusted professional groups, with the dominant discourse branding them as false, deceitful, and hypocritical (e.g. Ipsos, 2022). In turn, the farmers’ movement members and leaders positioned themselves as honest people who ‘tell it like it is.’ When elected as an MP, Andrzej Lepper claimed to attempt to end the politics based on fake niceties, politeness, and ‘empty promises.’ The farmers’ protest was not just born out of economic frustration. It was also a clash of two masculinities: the urban upper-class masculinity of established politicians, restrained and careful, and the rural masculinity, supposedly honest and straightforward, if sometimes offensive and coarse.

What offended the political establishment and most commentators were not so much the political demands of Samoobrona and Agrounia, as much as how these demands were presented. The objections were in part due to the ‘aesthetics’ of the protests (see Kubisa, 2016, p. 341). Loud protests, often disrupting the daily lives of urban dwellers and resulting in clashes with the police; uninhibited, sometimes vulgar, and boorish speeches offended the sensibility of many used to the politics as a sphere of certain upper- and middle-class habitus and decorum. The preferred mode of protest by Samoobrona – road blockages – was also perceived as a nuisance for other citizens. Twenty years later, Agrounia adopted some of these tactics. They organized road blockages (Brzuszkiewicz, 2021) and, in widely contested actions, spilled apples and pig carcasses on the streets of Warsaw or brought live pigs to the protests to the disdain of animal-rights activists (Gzyra, 2021). These tactics were framed as necessary to shake ‘city slickers’ and, most importantly, politicians so that they would notice the farmers’ plight. The criticism toward farmers’ treatment of farm animals, for example, was treated as an expression of city dwellers’ naivete and excessive sensibility, contrary to the farmers’ toughness and knowledge of agricultural production. The farmers occupied the position of defenders of common sense and economic interests of the rural population.

Kubisa (2016) analyzes two trade union protests and their gendered character on the examples of miners and nurses. In Poland, nursing is a feminized profession, with men making up merely 2.67% of all the employed nurses (Naczelna Izba Pielęgniarek i Położnych, 2021). Nursing is associated with empathy, caring, and emotional labor, which symbolically ties the profession to femininity. On the other hand, mining is a masculinized trade due to its association with physical strength and danger. The gender makeup of the two professions results in different protest and strike strategies. Miners have organized protests in the capital city of Warsaw and smaller cities periodically since the 1990s, and their protests often include burning tires and general loutishness, which have led to the image of miners’ protests as being aggressive and militant. On the other hand, nurses have typically organized fewer protests, facing the need to protest without harming their patients. Thus, the nurses usually opt for occupying government buildings and still performing their care duties, which undermines their bargaining power. Kubisa’s, 2016 study revealed that the gender makeup of professions influences the protest strategies employed by them. Seeing as farming is a masculinized profession, it is hardly surprising that both Samoobrona and Agrounia used more aggressive tactics in their protests.

To borrow from Wayne Walker (2006), the protest masculinity in Samoobrona and Agrounia is a disciplined protest masculinity. While the farmers protest against urban middle- and upper-class morality and sensibility while breaking commonly accepted norms of conduct in the public sphere, they remain disciplined as they do not engage in violence for the sake of violence: it is not anomic (Walker, 2006). As defined by Durkheim (2014), anomie is a state of societal unrest in which restraints of commonly accepted norms and regulations are gone, and so are common values and ideals. Both Samoobrona and Agrounia avoid (physical) violence in their protests and explicitly frame their actions as deeply patriotic. They employ the image of farmers as defenders of Polish land and nature, often recalling the slogan ‘Żywią i bronią’ (They nurture and protect), which dates back to the eighteenth century, when it was used to describe the role of peasants and farmers in feeding and defending the nation (Gmitruk, 2001). Thus, both farmers’ movements clearly appeal to patriotic ideals, which they perceived as values. For example, Agrounia presents itself as an advocate not only for the interests of farmers but also consumers, or Poles in general (Bilewicz et al. 2022).

Rural masculinity as political masculinity

This article also considers political masculinities in that the analyzed leadership figures’ primary fields of action are politics and political movements. Both Andrzej Lepper and Michał Kołodziejczak aim to enact political change; Lepper eventually entered the political mainstream and was deputy prime minister between 2006 and 2007, while Kołodziejczak has just recently (October 2023) been elected to the lower house of parliament under the patronage of the biggest opposition party, Koalicja Obywatelska (Civic Coalition; KO), which at the time of writing is on its way to form a broad coalition government.³ Following Starck and Sauer (2014), I understand ‘political masculinity’ as masculinity enacted by or associated with actors in the political field, such as politicians or activists. There is no one fixed type of political masculinity but a plethora of ways in which masculinity is enacted in the political sphere; and it is wholly dependent on the larger context, whether a given model is being hailed as a dominant or most legitimate one. For example, Smith (2016) analyzes the enactment of masculinity by two heads of state – Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama – with the former representing the traditional model of political masculinity (tough, aggressive) and the latter a model of ‘new masculinity’ (engaged in family life, unafraid of displaying emotions). Smith claims that with the rise of ‘celebrity culture’ and the rapid flow of information, the personalities of leaders are at the forefront of most political debates. The way in which leaders’ masculinity is constructed depends on the broader societal culture. It is no coincidence, that the former American president performed the ‘new masculinity’ and the Russian president attempts to uphold the traditional model of masculinity, strongly connected to aggression and ruthlessness. These enactments were on par with the dominant attitudes toward gender roles in their respective countries (Riabov & Riabova, 2014).

I posit that Michał Kołodziejczak enacts a version of political masculinity that is distinctly rural. It is difficult to categorically position his version as traditional or ‘new’ as he does not fall neatly into either one of these categories. What Kołodziejczak and Lepper have in common is that they enact a version of masculinity that is symbolically and practically connected to rurality, using it as a resource to enter the world of hegemonic, urban political masculinity. Below, I will decode the enactment of rural masculinity in Agrounia’s protests, based on newspaper coverage.

Method

The basis for the article was media coverage of Agrounia, with a focus on press articles. I considered the framing of farmers’ protest movements in the media, which presented them as loutish, brutish, and sometimes dangerous, therefore further marginalizing rural masculinities in economic, political, but also cultural sense (see Stenbacka, 2011; Struzik, 2016). The relationship between farmers’ movements and media is twofold. On the one hand, the farmers are often presented unfavorably; on the other hand, the farmers themselves understand that media presence is an essential condition for a successful politician. While the impact of the media, especially newspapers, on public opinion may not be as uniformly strong as it perhaps was in the previous decades, the media discourse may be an extension of the opinions and sentiments held by the media conglomerates or certain interest groups (see Christen & Huberty, 2007; Mutz & Soss, 1997). The assumption is that the use of language is political, and that the way in which people, groups, and phenomena are presented reflects the power relations and hierarchies within a particular society (Richardson, 2007, p. 16). Therefore, the way in which protesting members of Agrounia are presented in the analyzed news articles may contribute to their further marginalization, and in turn, fuel their desire to defend their status of ‘true’ or respectable masculinity.

The newspaper I selected for analyses was the Polish daily newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza (Electoral Daily), which circulates approximately 62,000 physical copies every day, and as of December 2022, had 300,000 subscribers to the online version. According to the country-wide information on newspaper sales, it is the third biggest newspaper in terms of sales of physical copies and visitors to its’ website (PBC 2022), in both of these instances lagging only behind two tabloids: Fakt and Super Express. However, it remains the biggest opinion-making Polish newspaper, usually presenting news and opinions from a liberal perspective. Gazeta Wyborcza’s target demographics is urban middle and upper class rather than rural and poor population. While there are other, similar large dailies like Rzeczpospolita, it was a decision on my part to use only one newspaper as to not overwhelm the analysis with the size of the material.

The query was done using the online version of the newspaper at wyborcza.pl, which provides a searchable archive of news articles. The keywords I used in the searches were ‘Agrounia,’ ‘Michał Kołodziejczak,’ ‘protest rolników’ (farmers’ protest). The query produced 781 results: from long-read profiles to opinion pieces and short news articles on traffic jams resulting from Agrounia’s protest, as well as protest actions from farmers unrelated to Agrounia. The starting point for the query was July 2018 – the date of the official establishment of Agrounia as a non-profit – until October 15, 2023, the date of the parliamentary elections in Poland. Therefore, the query covers a five-year timespan, which is sufficient to track the newspaper coverage and critically identify the themes that emerge. The articles chosen are representative of the coverage between 2018 and 2023, in that they represent the main themes of the analyzed corpus.

‘Rural justin bieber:’ Michał Kołodziejczak as a totem of (New) rural masculinity

In 2019, Gazeta Wyborcza ran a profile of Kołodziejczak, titled ‘Lepper or Polish Rural Bieber? Kołodziejczak is Moving on the Capital’ (Rutkiewicz, 2019). The title itself positions Kołodziejczak somewhere between the militant rural masculinity of Andrzej Lepper – always a reference point for anyone attempting to understand Agrounia – and the new, celebrity version of masculinity exemplified by a global pop star Justin Bieber. The title also implies that Kołodziejczak must choose between Lepper and Bieber, which he seemingly has done: ‘Kołodziejczak says he would rather be the “Justin Bieber of Polish agriculture,” but is glad to be compared to Andrzej Lepper. He appreciates Lepper’s energy and courage.’ In another article, when asked about the similarities between himself and Bieber, Kołodziejczak answers: ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s the white shirt?’ Kołodziejczak is seemingly distancing himself from Lepper, choosing a different version of masculinity, that is more attractive to the celebrity-obsessed modern culture. He is strategic in his reminiscing of Lepper, sometimes distancing himself from his political predecessor, as seen above, yet sometimes evoking Lepper outright, as evidenced by this quote from a meeting with voters during the 2023 election campaign: ‘I am an heir to the political thought of Andrzej Lepper. We will not abandon him. This was a great man, of extraordinary courage’ (Derdzikowski, 2022). The above shows strategic choices of words, depending on the particular audience: potential rural voters or a Gazeta Wyborcza journalist.

In the 2019 profile, the journalist repeatedly alludes to Kołodziejczak as being difficult to work with and prone to arguments, which are traits usually associated with politically active farmers in general (Struzik, 2016). Kołodziejczak is also presented as dominant and sullen: ‘Michał [Kołodziejczak] enters, he is quite sullen. He reminds his father to remember that he cannot say whatever he wants to the journalist. From this moment on, [Michał] Kołodziejczak is the only one speaking,’ writes a journalist about his visit to Kołodziejczak’s family home (Rutkiewicz, 2019). These profiles present Kołodziejczak as a representative of traditional rural masculinity: difficult to work with, blunt, dominant.

Kołodziejczak is young (36 years old), and he presents himself differently than Lepper. Appearance is one of the signifiers of class distinction (see Bourdieu, 1986; Skeggs, 1997), and while Lepper bore marks of his class position (red hands and face, ill-fitting suits, stocky build) at least at the beginning of his political career (e.g. Stachowicz, 2018), Kołodziejczak is more ambiguous in that respect. He is young, thin, with well-trimmed facial hair, and is usually seen in front of cameras and at protests in the white shirt and dress trousers. He adapts outward signifiers of hegemonic masculinity, perhaps in an attempt to gain respect from the media and political establishment. It is not to say that Agrounia’s tactics are more restrained – and therefore perceived as more respectful – than Samoobrona’s. In December 2021, a group of Agrounia-affiliated farmers attended a meeting with representatives of the government in Baranowo, a village south-west of Warsaw. The Polish government planned to build an international airport in Baranów, one of its most high-profile investments. However, the construction would require evicting hundreds of local farmers from their homes, which, understandably, causes their anger and anguish. Baranów was a site of Agrounia’s most fervent protests, with Kołodziejczak often present there. He was present in December 2021 during the mentioned meeting, which was described in the article in Gazeta Wyborcza by Jarosław Osowski (2021) and captured on video by a local news station (e-Sochaczew.pl). The farmers entered the fire station, where the meeting was held, with manure and eggs, which they threw at the government officials. Then, Kołodziejczak addressed a female government official: ‘As a man, I would have never let you stand here at the frontlines! But your hero colleagues have put you here,’ to which she responded with assurances, that her gender was irrelevant to the matter. The truth of that statement aside, this interaction reveals how Kołodziejczak shapes rural masculinity as the true traditional masculinity that would have not allowed a woman to be exposed to high-tension situations, in opposition to the hegemonic political masculinity that sends female officials into the field to face angry farmers. Therefore, the marginalized rural masculinity here is presented by Kołodziejczak as chivalrous, concerned with the well-being of women, and aware of gender differences, while hegemonic masculinity is to attempt to erase such differences and put women in dangerous situations in the name of ill-understood progress. Generally, rural men tend to hold more conservative views about masculinity than their urban counterparts (Silva, 2022), and the conservative view of masculinity and gender roles often erases women’s agency. Kołodziejczak assumed that the female officer was ‘put there’ by her male colleagues and that they should not have ‘let’ her be put in this position. Whether the female official had a say in her presence in Baranowo was to be of little importance as her actions were to be certainly determined by the men around her. Kołodziejczak openly undermined the agency of this female official by performing the traditional version of masculinity and using the language of ‘chivalry’ to do so. Kołodziejczak evokes the logic of men as protectors, which defines male roles as physical and financial protection, which is strongly connected to traditionally understood hegemonic masculinity (Wojnicka, 2021).

Rural masculinity is not a wholly respectable version of masculinity, due to the existing deep-seated prejudice toward the rural population in Poland (e.g. Struzik, 2016). The dominant habitus is one of the urban middle class and intelligentsia, while the rural habitus is classified as ‘less than’ (e.g. Zarycki, 2015). The characteristics of respectable hegemonic masculinity on the national level are white-collar jobs, university education, and urban upbringing. In this light, both Lepper and Kołodziejczak seem alienated from the norm, as they grew up in rural areas, worked as farmers, and did not acquire university degrees. However, they both used their distance from the hegemonic version of political masculinity to their advantage. Lepper and Kołodziejczak subverted the image of hegemonic political masculinity by depicting it as corrupt, dishonest, and out of touch with reality, while fashioning themselves as honest, hard-working, and aware of others, especially the rural population.

Distrust toward hegemonic masculinity represented by rural politicians and activists is one of the most important characteristics of rural protest masculinity. Their deep conviction of politicians’ corruption, deceit, and lack of competence resounds in speeches by Kołodziejczak. Kołodziejczak openly demonstrates his contempt toward politicians, especially agricultural ministers and the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki. In one of his speeches, Kołodziejczak says:

The prime minister is sneering at us, he is sneering at our judgment and our work. He is insulting us with his inaction … . His knowledge of agriculture is fictitious. … We are starting a war for the rural terrains, for the backwoods. (video material from e-farmer.pl, 2021)

Kołodziejczak framed the protests not only in economic terms but also in terms of farmers, not politicians, as experts on rural life. In another instance from 2023, Kołodziejczak gifted Janusz Kowalski – then vice-minister of agriculture – a set of crayons and paper on live TV, while saying: ‘So that you can draw fields, pastures, and tractors, and end your adventure with agriculture there’ (Gazeta Wyborcza, 2023). Clearly, the strategy here was to ridicule and patronize representatives of the urban political masculinity with their perceived incompetence.

Another strategy entailed appealing to the typical populist division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – the people versus the elites – as evident in this excerpt from Kołodziejczak’s speech during a campaign meeting in Łódź in central Poland:

Poles must understand that they are at home, not a home of politics, corporations, the mega-rich, in a country where someone else calls the shots. We are at home. … it is us who are supposed to feel good here: people work hard and work honestly, not politicians, thieves, and the mega-rich. (Derdzikowski, 2022)

Again, this strategy sought to paint politicians and hegemonic masculinity as opposed to the hard-working honest masculinity espoused by Kołodziejczak and Agrounia. The choice to have ‘politics’ and ‘thieves’ in a sentence next to one another was to appeal to the deeply grounded distrust toward the elites, a method also employed in the past by Andrzej Lepper (Stanley, 2008). In this vein, it is especially fascinating to observe the currently developing situation around Kołodziejczak, who was elected to the parliament under the patronage of an establishment political party – Koalicja Obywatelska – and continues to cooperate with its leader, Donald Tusk. As a former prime minister of Poland (2007–2014) and President of the European Council (2014–2019), Tusk is as much an established politician as one can be; however, Kołodziejczak swears that him and Tusk have a ‘common vibe’ and that Kołodziejczak will be devoted to advocating for the farmers, as he underwent ‘a metamorphosis’ that allows him to be more conciliatory (Ogórek, 2023). This conciliatory change in rhetoric would suggest that subjugated masculinity may at some point enter into a coalition with the hegemonic model – but only after scaling down the anti-hegemonic masculinity rhetoric.

Kołodziejczak used to frame Agrounia’s actions by using martial vocabulary like ‘recapturing rural Poland’ or ‘fighting in the name of Polish consumers,’ along with dramatic appeals to emotions, such as ‘Warsaw will hear our anguished screams, screams of rural Poland’ or ‘We [farmers] will not die silently’ (Szaflarski, Borowicz, Bukłaha, & Kowalik, 2019). An opinion piece by a prominent non-fiction writer Wojciech Tochman (2019) documents his distaste toward the gory form of Agrounia’s protest: in 2019, the protesting farmers threw a pig carcass on a street in Warsaw to demonstrate their discontent with how the government reacted to the African swine fever virus decimating their herds:

I will tell you honestly: I do not know what Agrounia is, who are these people … . I do not want to know. Let them protest, let them shout, their agenda does not interest me. What interests me is the pig whose body was thrown on the street.

The clash between urban masculinity, which values order and peace, is confronted with rural protest masculinity, which chooses to engage in visible disruptive forms of demonstration. Tochman deems the protest’s form unacceptable and, thus, the farmers’ demands unimportant. The discord between rural and urban masculinities is therefore the most visible in esthetics. While for Tochman it is immoral and disgusting to use dead pigs in protests, Agrounia members may consider such objections as evidence of the urban dwellers’ overt sensibility and disinterest in the rural plight. Agrounia members often treat concerns for animal welfare as a fad among naive urban consumers.

In other words, Agrounia members frame the clash between rural and urban masculinities by constructing the former as deeply pragmatic and the latter as idealistic: the idealistic urban hegemonic man can afford to be concerned with animal welfare, while the pragmatic rural man sees his livestock as an economic resource, rarely able to consider the animal rights discourse. Thus, we may perceive this diminutive concern for animals as tied to the symbolic construction of ‘true masculinity’ not as emotional or sentimental and drastically different from femininity. Evidence shows that women are more likely than men to be concerned with animal welfare, and so are people from larger cities; similarly, people who identify themselves as liberals are less likely to express dominionistic views, which emphasize the domination of humans over animals (Miranda-de la Lama et al., 2019). I believe that the model of ‘true’ rural masculinity espoused by Agrounia can by defined by the pragmatic, profit-oriented approach toward farm animals.

Conclusion

The article mapped the tensions between rural masculinity ‘in protest’ and the urban hegemonic masculinity, using the farmers’ political movement Agrounia in Poland as an example. The source material were articles published in the biggest Polish daily. The article contributes towards more detailed and nuanced understanding of rural masculinities, especially in the context of the recent wave of farmers’ protests that swept through Europe (i.e. Poland, Germany or Belgium) in early 2024. While these protests were directed at the EU climate policies that would introduce significant changes in farming, I believe that some insights from the analysis in this article will be of help in decoding these protests further.

The most visible members of Agrounia are young men, farmers who feel marginalized and threatened by the expansion of new hegemonic masculinity, which is white-collar and urban. Agrounia’s protests are equally aimed at defending farmers’ economic interest and defending traditional rural masculinity. In this fight, Agrounia creates a stark dichotomy between rural ‘true’ masculinity (hardworking, honest, straightforward) and urban ‘fake’ masculinity (lazy, dishonest, fake, overly sensible). Agrounia’s leader Kołodziejczak dismissed political masculinity (identified with the hegemonic urban masculinity) as dishonest and fake, juxtaposing it with Agrounia’s members as examples of honest hard-working men who have no other choice but to engage in protests to draw attention to their plight.

A clashing point between the masculinities lies in protest esthetics. The urban hegemonic masculinity opposes Agrounia’s protest methods by painting them as vulgar, boorish, unnecessary, or even cruel. In turn, these concerns are considered by Agrounia members to reveal the effeminacy of urban men, their delicacy and overt sensibility. The battle for recognition and status between the two masculinities is fought over the monopoly for honesty and truth, the status of ‘true’ masculinity, with both sides firmly entrenched in practices that are supposed to ensure their domination. This offensive strategy on the part of rural men can result in their partial breaking into the sphere of political hegemonic masculinity, namely the national-level parliamentary politics. As of now, we may clearly see that Kołodziejczak’s entry to the political establishment has made him scale down his unrestrained and highly critical manner of speaking, which reveals the uneasy alliance of urban hegemonic political masculinity with its subjugated rural counterpart.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Julia Kubisa for her unwavering support in the shaping of this article. I give my thanks to Marta Bucholc for her encouragement. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and immensely helpful feedback, and Mikołaj Golubiewski for proof-reading the article.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

I acknowledge the support of the National Science Center in Kraków [grant number 2019/34/E/HS6/00295].

Notes on contributors

Marta Gospodarczyk

Marta Gospodarczyk is a PhD candidate at the University of Warsaw, Poland (Doctoral School of Social Sciences/Faculty of Sociology). Her research interests lie in the nexus of rurality and gender, especially rural masculinities. Her doctoral project attempts to investigate the consequences of drought on farming households, with a specific focus on changes in gendered labour patterns.

Notes

1 For a discussion of intelligentsia as a social class specific to Central and Eastern Europe, see Zarycki, (2003).

2 The current status of Agrounia is complicated. As of now, there are four different political parties registered by current or ex-members of the movement, but in the last parliamentary elections eight Agrounia members ran for MPs under the wing of the centrist Civic Coalition (KO). I will elaborate on this matter below.

3 As of December 2023, Kołodziejczak enjoys the position of vice-minister of agriculture in Donald Tusk’s cabinet.