While the Polish ‘war on gender’ initially focused on sex education and abortion rights, analysts suggest that since 2019, LGBTQ+ people have become its main target, with the term ‘LGBT ideology’ replacing ‘gender ideology’ as the shibboleth of threat. The present chapter focuses on a symbolic act that arguably marks a critical new stage in the politics of anti-genderism in Poland: the proclamation of ‘LGBT-ideology-free’ zones, declared in 2020 to cover over 30% of Poland’s territory. To investigate their ideological underpinnings, the analysis zooms in on the content of the motions adopted by numerous local councils. In a corpus of original documents, I examine framing devices, argumentation strategies, and metaphors that construct ‘LGBT ideology’ and its opponents. Taken together, the linguistic strategies are shown to contribute to the discursive effect of dehumanization of LGBTQ+ people: they become an ideology, a dehumanized mass that crucially comes from outside, so the spatial conception of ‘LGBT-ideology-free’ zones is naturalized as a pre-existing, balanced state of the nation. The analysis allows me to consider the broader role of language in constructions of anti-genderist positionings, including the concerning new trajectories of spatial geopolitics.

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The Language of Anti-Gender Takeover of Space: The Case of ‘LGBT-Free’ Zones in Poland

  • Joanna Chojnicka

摘要

While the Polish ‘war on gender’ initially focused on sex education and abortion rights, analysts suggest that since 2019, LGBTQ+ people have become its main target, with the term ‘LGBT ideology’ replacing ‘gender ideology’ as the shibboleth of threat. The present chapter focuses on a symbolic act that arguably marks a critical new stage in the politics of anti-genderism in Poland: the proclamation of ‘LGBT-ideology-free’ zones, declared in 2020 to cover over 30% of Poland’s territory. To investigate their ideological underpinnings, the analysis zooms in on the content of the motions adopted by numerous local councils. In a corpus of original documents, I examine framing devices, argumentation strategies, and metaphors that construct ‘LGBT ideology’ and its opponents. Taken together, the linguistic strategies are shown to contribute to the discursive effect of dehumanization of LGBTQ+ people: they become an ideology, a dehumanized mass that crucially comes from outside, so the spatial conception of ‘LGBT-ideology-free’ zones is naturalized as a pre-existing, balanced state of the nation. The analysis allows me to consider the broader role of language in constructions of anti-genderist positionings, including the concerning new trajectories of spatial geopolitics.