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Reproducing Life, Reproducing the Nation: Social Reproduction Abortion and Nationalism in Poland

Ringvorlesung 2026: Anti/Feminism & Nationalism

Veranstaltungsdaten

Abstract

My presentation focuses on the relationship between social reproduction and national reproduction in order to understand the centrality of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationality in Poland. I place particular focus on abortion activism, understood as work, in the context of pro-natalist and nationalistic policies promoted by right-wing political forces. First, I argue that feminist responses to the abortion debate are central to Polish debates on democratization and gender backlash. These responses are frequently framed as cultural value conflicts or as a matter of democratic backsliding. I suggest that they should instead be re-situated within a political-economic analysis of social and biological reproduction, drawing on debates within social reproduction theory and the pluralizing approaches to SRT (Mezzadri et al. 2024). Drawing on my past research on democracy and abortion, as well as a current study of the political economy of reproduction, I argue that the reproductive work carried out by feminist groups becomes functional for a post–state-socialist form of capitalism. This form of capitalism is sustained by a conservative state that combines neo-liberal marketisation, socialist productivisation, and conservative, nationalistic moral regulation. I therefore suggest that shifting the analytical lens from democratic backsliding to political economy is necessary in order to better understand various aspects of the current “gender backlash.” Second, I explore the relationship between the so-called “crisis of social reproduction” or “care crisis” and “security crises” and “migration” crises. I argue that the right-wing focus on nationalism or military conflict may serve as a form of distraction, diverting attention from the exploitation of the reproductive labor carried out by activists in the sphere of social reproduction. I further propose that pro-natalist, nationalistic projects aim to seize control over the material conditions that sustain everyday life, as well as over the labor resources needed for the reproduction of life, broadly understood.  Within that nationalist project, the racialized migrant family, as well as the reproductive labor of queer people and women with disabilities, play a central role in marking the boundaries of the nation, as material and symbolic constructions mark these groups as undeserving of care and reproduction.

Bio

Magdalena Grabowska is a professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Her research spans the history of emancipation movements under state socialism, systemic transformation, and contemporary grassroots mobilizations for reproductive justice and social reproduction. She is a graduate of Rutgers University in New Jersey, United States, where she earned her doctorate in Women’s and Gender Studies.

She was a recipient of the Marie Curie Fellowship Programme of the European Commission and serves as the project leader on social reproduction funded by the National Science Centre in Poland. Her most recent publications include: “Social Reproduction as Resistance: Abortion, Refugees, and Illegitimate Care” (with Marta Rawłuszko), forthcoming in Social Politics in 2026; “Towards the New Political Subjectivity: Abortion Protests, Social Reproduction Theory, and Democratization Processes,” published in Przegląd Socjologiczny (72(3), 39–67) in 2023; and “From ‘True Believers’ to ‘Cultural Feminists’: Polish Identity and Women’s Emancipation in Post-1945 and Post-1989 Poland,” in Rethinking Modern Polish Identities (eds. Agnieszka Pasieka and Paweł Rodak, University of Rochester Press, 2022, pp. 161–191). She is also the author of the monograph Broken Genealogies: Women’s Social and Political Activism after 1945 and the Contemporary Women’s Movement in Poland (Wydawnictwo Naukowe SCHOLAR, Warsaw, 2018).