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Aleksandra Gajowy

Aleksandra PhD project sets out to explore queerness in performance and body art in Poland since the 1970s to the present, with particular focus on HIV/AIDS narratives, censorship, Polish politics, and the Catholic Church. Aleksandra examines how queerness presents itself in the body through and against these narratives in the particular Polish context; what it might mean to be queer and Polish/queerly Polish; and how this reading from “the margins” may disorient and destabilise the Western-dominated queer theories. This project, drawing upon theories of queer archives and queer utopias, strives to challenge the hegemonic, heteronormative, linear history-writing in Poland through tracing and unearthing queer temporalities and spatialities, as well as radical queer/queen/faggot anti-assimilationist countercultures present in Poland throughout the researched period.