ABSTRACT
This chapter examines feminist efforts to counteract assaults on gender and sexual equality. Its focus is mostly on Poland’s Black Protests: the mass movement of 2016–2018 against the total ban on abortion proposed by the Ordo Iuris Institute. The chapter explains how mass resistance emerged and developed over time, successfully counteracting the plan to further restrict women’s reproductive rights in the country. We conceptualize the Black Protests as a movement responding to the rise of right-wing populism. Whereas the ruling Law and Justice party claims to represent the majority of the population, allegedly oppressed by the liberal elites (including “genderists” and feminists), in reality it promotes a highly exclusionary and narrow definition of “the people.” This political construct has been challenged by the mass mobilization of the Polish women, who constituted a new political subject: angry women opposing patriarchy, state violence and social injustice. The rhetoric of righteous anger, resistance to cruelty, disrespect and injustice, is marked by high level of emotions, forging a new type of affective solidarity among previously unengaged women. Similar feminist mobilizations emerged in Argentina, Spain and the United States. These developments are interpreted as part of a broader trend of women’s leadership in resistance against right-wing populism. The new feminist articulation of “the people” – a populist feminism – is inclusive and pluralistic, effectively challenging the ethno-nationalistic and patriarchal imagery promulgated by the right.
