Poland for Poles: Nationalist Imaginaries and the Reproduction of Sexual and Racialized Otherness

This dissertation examines the complex relationships between both sexual (LGBTQI and otherwise) and racialized (subjects who are read as neither white nor Catholic) others and nation|empire-building. It theorizes Poland as concept (meaning sociological entity shaped by multiple competing actors with shifting degrees of definitional power) and method (meaning process and reading theory) while also seeing it as a site of experimentation of power relations (where these actors are vying for different projects) in order to trace its multiple social reproductions (as transitional; postcolonial; fascist; eastern other within) which are theorized in co-production with EUropean global order (Jasanoff, 2004). It argues that doing so allows us to understand the (necro)political significance these social reproductions hold for the nation-state (on a global scale) and its O/others. This project brings together and in conversation transnational feminist and queer and postcolonial scholarship and Edward W. Said's (1993) method(ology) of contrapuntal reading, Reiner Keller's (1993) sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD) with Teun A. van Dijk's (1993) critical discourse analysis (CDA) while engaging in-depth interviewing and participant observation. In doing so, it shows how centering post-socialist Poland moves us to question tensions between national and transnational as well as local and global political and economic forces, and, in this particular space and time (meaning current geopolitical moment as interconnected to my understanding of the site of Poland), LGBTQI|racialized subjectivity and Polish national identity which is framed against these O/others by the (far-)right.