Polonistica e studi di genere : intersezioni, contaminazioni, incroci di saperi

The article aims at presenting the emergence, the evolution and the most recent trends in Gender and Queer Studies in Poland, paying specific attention to their impact on research in Polish literature. The author shows how gender-related theories started to be widespread in Poland only after the sociocultural changes that occurred in 1989. During the first half of the 90s, groundbreaking writings of Anglo-American scholars were translated into Polish, while key concepts and ideas begun to be disseminated. In the meantime, a debate on their applicability to the reality of a post-communist country took place. In the second half of the 90s started to be published the first monographs that tried to reinterpret Polish women writers from a feminist and a gender-sensitive point of view. Meanwhile, Gender Studies programs were established in many Polish universities. In the new millennium, gender binarisms and essentialist conceptions begun to be criticized and subsequently deconstructed, while Polish scholars increasingly focused on queer and until then marginalized topics and authors. At present, Gender and Queer Studies in Poland show an eclectic, intersectional and multifaceted nature, mainly due to such factors as their belated reception, their dissemination together with other theories and methodologies, their rethinking and reworking carried out by Polish scholars, the interplay with other branches of knowledge. Providing new instruments, conceptions, and approaches, Gender and Queer Studies have proven to be an essential instrument to reread Polish literature in a new light. Furthermore, they are part of a wider process of reevaluation of the role of ‘minoritarian’ subjects (women, Jews, LGBT+, non-Polish authors) in the creation of the national literary canon.