1. "This attack is intended to destroy Poland": bio-power, conspiratorial knowledge, and the 2020 Women's Strike in Poland.
- Author
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Polynczuk-Alenius, Kinga
- Subjects
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ABORTION , *BIOPOLITICS (Philosophy) , *CONSPIRACY theories , *STRIKES & lockouts , *WOMEN , *REPRODUCTIVE rights - Abstract
This article analyzes how conspiratorial knowledge and bio-power were entangled in the Polish government's discourse to undermine the 2020 Women's Strike protests against the curbing of access to legal abortion. Theoretically, it uses Foucault's "bio-power" to conceptualize both the assault on reproductive rights and the securitization of ensuing protests based on "conspiratorial knowledge," which uses conspiracy theories as a heuristic device to understand social changes. Empirically, discourse analysis is deployed to interrogate a video-recorded speech by Jarosław Kaczyński, the country's de facto leader, posted on YouTube in response to the protests. First, the article exposes how the protests are recast as a conspiracy bent on the legal, biological, and moral destruction of the Polish nation. Second, it examines how a small sample of remediations of the video by oppositional media and women's rights activists refutes the conspiratorial knowledge it promulgated. Throughout, the article also identifies the "(quasi-)cognitive" and "affective" forms of epistemic capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2022
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