From Solidarity to Foreign Bodies: Ewa Hołuszko and the Polish Trans Archive

• In Event: Queer(ing) Archives: Alternative Intimacies, Histories, and Subjectivities

Abstract

This paper centers around Ewa Hołuszko–opposition member of the Solidarity Movement, physicist, and transgender activist–and her literary representation in Julia Holewińska’s 2010 play Foreign Bodies (Ciała Obce). Blurring fact with fiction, Foreign Bodies follows Adam/Ewa Hołuszko, a Solidarity activist who, after the Fall of Communism, transitions and undergoes gender-affirming surgery in a newly democratic Poland. Drawing on transfeminist theory, this paper examines how the play both constructs transness and deconstructs the violent gendering of subjects under various hegemonic orders: totalitarianism, biopolitics, and neoliberalism. In addition, I consider how binaristic discourses of man/woman perpetuate hetero- and homo-normativity, contributing to the continuous erasure of transgender histories from both national and queer archives. Ultimately, I read Ewa Hołuszko’s story and its artistic refractions as opening possibilities, or “lines of flight,” to trans Polish narratives of freedom and to theorize trans troublings of gender and sexuality as pivotal to Polish queer archival projects.

Author

• Marta Lasota, Northwestern U