ABSTRACT
Since early 2019, around 100 municipalities, counties and regions (voivodeships) in Poland have declared themselves ‘LGBT-free zones.’ None of the documents passed by the local councils with titles like ‘Local Charter of the Rights of the Family’ or ‘A Resolution Against LGBT Ideology’ mentions LGBT people explicitly; they refer instead to “gender ideology” or pledge “defence” of the “fundamentality” of the binary-gender family, a structure that is allegedly anchored in the Polish legal order and is a condition for prosperity in Poland. While some of these documents were turned down by the courts or were withdrawn in the face of funding cuts from the EU, I want to show how the emergence of the so-called LGBT-free zones in Poland has deeper roots and is entangled with long-lasting global racist dynamics which are perpetuated by processes of Europeanization. The establishment of these zones is also an effect of the historical inter-imperial positionality of Poland. If we look at these zones from a postcolonial and decolonial, race-critical perspective, they emerge as a local version of global and European race and gender dynamics that have been present in Poland for a very long time.
