By storing documents of the Hyacinth action in provincial headquarters, the Polish police continue to feed prejudice and stereotypes against homosexuals, which reinforces negative attitudes towards LGBTQIA+ people today, says Professor Ewa Majewska in an interview with Paulina Malochleb.
This text has been auto-translated from Polish.
Paulina Malochleb: One of your strong theses, expressed in your book "Feminism as Social Philosophy. Sketches in Family Theory" says that the Western legal subject was created by John Locke and was based on the idea of an adult male having full privileges, knowing the law, having full authority over the family and a strong voice. Is this the reason why most of us are unable to obtain justice in court? Like victims of bullying, rape, or immigrants?
Ewa Majewska: Our understanding of the subject and who a person is is very much based on Western criteria of rationality. A great inspiration for me in thinking about these categories is the artist Zorka Wollny, author of the project "Ophelias. Iconography of Madness." For this project, she invited actresses between the ages of 25 and 80 who had the character of Ophelia in their careers. I realized that such voices will never be heard in public debate or taken seriously. If someone in front of the court cries or pansies - like Ophelia, they can't expect to be understood.
This system is changing, of course, and gradually the court is learning inclusiveness, and allowing experts who are able to derive a story understandable to the high court from these "informal" statements. But in most cases, if someone who is crying or unable to construct a sentence correctly stands before the court, he will hear: "Madam, calm down." Meanwhile, our most pressing need is to create a space in which different voices - including those traumatized and those that do not adhere to the principles of linearity and rationality - are treated on an equal footing. Legal discourse, but also civic discourse, is very much geared toward a subject who can speak a language of a certain type and who feels empowered to build claims in that language. On this point, I follow a very different path than some feminists and queer researchers.
What is the difference?
These people go on the assumption that the prevailing language in public debate should be abandoned altogether, not used. To me, on the other hand, it seems that it is necessary to fight to reclaim the language, to change it and control it and stigmatize abuses, otherwise we will allow people like Trump or Musk to act. They, in turn, using the language of hatred, are able to do more harm than we do good in the performing arts. At the same time, it is necessary to insist on a discourse built on other principles, allowing different actors to speak, including those who feel less confident in public space or who have been erased from it altogether. The reason for the weaker reception of their voice is often an unfamiliar-sounding accent, other patterns of narrative construction - our auditory clichés work very strongly and they too are educated on national-male patterns.
The division between strong and weak actors today goes paradoxically hand in hand with the division between violence and care - with strong actors determining who needs to be defended, and often presenting violence as a form of care. How is the rationalization of violence as care accomplished?
The moment of the introduction of care as a concept in the order of the state, the Enlightenment, is the birth of the dispute between two imperatives - dignity and control. Liberals, while offering us dignity, exclude women from it right away. Olympia de Gouges, author of the "Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Citizen," but also of the drama Zamor and Mirza criticizing France's colonial ambitions, was beheaded in 1793. The surplus of pre-Enlightenment state violence was consumed in the control that the Enlightenment took to its banners. As in the song by the band The Police - "Every step you take, I'll be watching you." - the state, instead of punishing harshly, began to track and control individuals, also forcing us to internalize its laws.
Foucault never said that the repressive power of government has disappeared - no, it still exists and has also found other forms of expression. Since the turn of the 17th century, the state has begun to take care of citizens, the Paris police, as Foucault writes in Supervise and Punish, want to "guide the citizen towards happiness." The question is, did the Polish gays, whose doors the police knocked on in 1985 as part of Operation Hyacinth [which involved the militia's collection of information and repression of the homosexual male community in communist Poland - editor's note], feel happier? Did they have a sense of state care on November 15 of that year, when they began to be dragged to police stations without being informed of their rights, the purpose of the interrogation, without any procedure?"
Arrested then, they later recalled that they were questioned about their sex lives and preferences.
Yes, often at home, in front of their families. They were also asked if they knew other "fags" (that was the language used in the 1980s), where they met with them, etc. Regular interrogations were held at police stations, which was traumatizing for most detainees a few years after martial law was lifted. Regular attempts were made to blackmail them into revealing their psychosexual identity to their families or workplace.
Since 2008, however, we know that this action was considered "legitimate," legal by the Polish authorities.
This is how Janusz Kurtyka's prosecutor [the then head of the Institute of National Remembrance - ed], Edyta Myślewicz responded to Szymon Niemiec and Jack Adler's application in 2008. They filed a joint lawsuit to declare the Hyacinth action a crime against the Polish nation. In my opinion, this is a very interesting lawsuit, because they assumed that homophobia is a threat to the whole society, not just to gays, which I absolutely agree with. Operation Hyacinth was homophobic because it regarded LGBTQIA+ people as an environment to be cracked down on, and as a result treated gays and others as criminals. The state - and this was true both before and after 1989 - explained the Hyacinth action as an expression of concern for citizens, because gays were victims of murders and there were murderers who specialized in finding non-heteronormative victims, and there were also cases of AIDS in Poland, which the authorities immediately stereotyped as being associated with gays.
First investigators of the Hyacinth action assumed that it was purely repressive, that the state wanted to punish someone. All in all, they were right - from the police documents and witnesses' recollections, which I reached around 2015 and later, it is clear that Polish gays were on the target of the police and the services, even though the ban on homosexuality was thrown out of the criminal code as early as 1932, and was not reinstated after the war. The documents of Operation Hyacinth formulated at the MO Headquarters in Warsaw were written in the language of alleged concern - that gays have more and more international contacts, and mainly through Austria, and because of the HIV-AIDS epidemic, these contacts carry a potential risk of spreading the disease, that they are victims of murder. At the same time, there is an expressis verbis order to investigate "homosexual circles."
It is hard to argue with such documents, since they themselves did not mandate repression, only surveillance. However, the practice of Operation Hyacinth was often quite different: blackmail, detentions, interrogations, searches. And here we get to the question: who defines what it means to care about gay people? Not just from whose perspective, but rather: who has the right to define security, how such a directive can be implemented by the state? Shouldn't it be publicly announced?
The Hyacinth action was never publicly announced, and did not have its Jaruzelski instead of "Teleran". In November 1985, no one knew what was going on or what the purpose of the militias was. I also recently discovered, which makes matters even worse, that almost all provincial police headquarters still have the documents collected during all three Hyacinth operations (from 1985, 86 and 87) and continue to use them. With this they explain their inability to make them available to me and others investigating the case.
Other police operations involve prosecuting criminals or preventing crimes - meanwhile, homosexuality has not been criminalized in Poland since 1932, so there was no basis for taking action labeling gays as a criminal group. A similar kind of abuse of power, of apparent care, was used in 2016 against people active in the Labor Initiative trade union from Poznań, when the police prevented their Warsaw from attending black protests [against the project to tighten the abortion law - ed. note], searched the car, and the passengers were detained in custody and personal checks were made. Today, after several years of trial, it turns out that the police had no right to detain them.
How is this transformation of care into violence building up?"
With a simple mechanism - extending the criminal category to non-offenders. When one says "here there is suspicion...". Meanwhile, with regard to gays in 1985, suspicion was based on the homophobic premise that gays have some connection to crime. Therefore, the rest, the healthy part of society should be protected from them. This is a universal mechanism. There was also a bizarre creation of a group that the militia in the documents already definitely referred to as criminals, namely "homosexual prostitution." Neither sex work nor homosexuality was subject to legal prohibition in Poland, but the combination of these categories in the militia's documents causes some unhealthy aggravation in its officers, that here a crime seems to be lurking. But let's see - perhaps here lurks only a unique concentration of negative stereotypes - homophobia and unjustified dislike of people who use their own bodies for sex work?
What scale is this? How many people have been put on portfolios?
The files of the Hyacinth action collected in Warsaw speak of about 5,000 people from the capital region alone. From Szczecin, for example, a list of more than 600 people "suspected" of homosexuality was sent to the KGMO in 1987. This is a verbatim quote from the protocol, in which the commandant gives full details of the detainees and identifies them as "suspected homosexuals." What does "suspected of homosexuality" even mean? One can be suspected of theft or murder - of a crime, not of a legally neutral psychosexual identity, right? By storing documents of the Hyacinth action in provincial headquarters, the Polish police continue to feed prejudice and stereotypes against homosexuals, which unfortunately reinforces arguably negative attitudes toward people LGBTQIA+ today.
It is interesting that if we compare the scale of Hyacinth and other nameless militia actions against homosexuals, we find that it was not much smaller than the repression of those in the Solidarity opposition. In 1988, Professor Nikolai Kozakiewicz, Speaker of the Sejm, wrote in a letter to Czeslaw Kiszczak about the 11,000 files generated during Operation Hyacinth. The documents I've come across confirm this scale, although I can't confirm it exactly, because the documentation is scattered around the provincial police headquarters and in the IPN, and there is complete chaos. But a rough scale can already be determined.
The concern that is slowly becoming the center of power discourse - at least at the level of declarations - is not a bad veil?
Care is a practice that sustains life - it is needed for our species to survive. Its marginalization in culture, law and political philosophy, however, has been immense, and has caused the work done by generations of women and those persistently "raptured" to completely escape the eyes of intellectuals. The work done in the U.S. and other colonial countries by multitudes of non-white mothers, nannies and caregivers in the homes of the American white middle and upper classes was not only sucked into the capital of these two strata, but was done at the expense of the traumas of these non-white individuals and their families, and to this day is only marginally researched and recounted.
On the other hand, concern is subject to various perverse transformations when the state explains to us that in the name of our well-being, security, out of concern it must restrict the freedoms or rights of some group, or another group must follow. Our times Zygmunt Bauman has called "liquid surveillance," liquid surveillance. This is a phenomenon typical of neoliberalism, when the Leviathan's watchful eyes turn on society as a whole. We can speak of the appropriation of certain forms of care by the state under neoliberalism, it manifests itself through the introduction of censorship and surveillance, supposedly as a remedy for the simultaneous liberalization of the market, the abandonment of social security and the abolition of the welfare state. This restoration of conservative values, strengthening the atomized family with the father at the center, contesting modern forms of kinship and sexuality, is only a pretense of concern. In order to realize the conservative model, the state packages it as "care": the wall on the border with Mexico, the wall on the border with Belarus, the Hyacinth action - here there is no difference between the RP and the PRL, in each case this supposed "care" is essentially a perversion.
This is the other face of the state?
In the rhetoric concerning the state, we use paternal and divine figures all the time - the state watches our backs, the state is strict, like a father. Meanwhile, the state increasingly behaves like an overprotective mother, speaking of us in the language of concerned concern: "this is for your own good". And this is not at all an attempt to say that the state today treats us only with tenderness, and that its oppressive arm is disappearing. But if we want to make a meaningful critique of the state, we need to take into account the fact that some of its functions have become - I call this for short - maternal functions. Care and concern, the discourse of protection - whether of embryos or children from gay pornography - this is the language we have associated for centuries with the power of the mother in the home.
Is there any way out of this pseudo-family embrace?
Whether with regard to the state or the Church, which masks its predatory nature even more efficiently with rhetoric of care, one must be especially careful, have critical tools and expose language that serves violence. Forensic Architecture, a well-known journalist-artist-investigative group in Poland that uses new technologies and investigative methodologies to investigate the circumstances of murders and abductions of people by the apparatus of power, uses the distinction between criticism and investigation. The criticism knows the solution in advance, the investigation is just looking for it.
My examination of the Hyacinth plot has more of an investigative dimension, but is not devoid of criticism. I did not assume in advance the intentions of the authorities or the course of events, but now, after eight years of reconstructing the course of this action, I can clearly point out its problematic elements. It is clear from my study, for example, that what often sounds like concern is often, in fact, exploitation and abuse. What's more, it is possible to fight such perversions of care and win. An example from a slightly different field: in Poland, the Labor Initiative trade union won three times in court against Amazon. In one of these cases, the judge found that Amazon was perverting the very notion of work, so it's clear that we have a whole dictionary of terms to examine.
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Ewa Majewska - feminist cultural theorist; professor at SWPS Warsaw University and head of the project "Public Against Will. Production of the subject in the archives of the Hyacinth action" (NCN 2022-25). She has taught at UDK in Berlin, at UW and UJ, and led projects at: University of California at Berkeley, IWM in Vienna and ICI Berlin. She is the author of seven books, including: Feminist Antifascism (Verso, 2021), Popular and Feminist Counterpublics (2018), Tram called Recognition (2017), Art as Appearance? (2013) and Feminism as Social Philosophy (2009), as well as a number of articles and essays published in journals and collective volumes, including e-flux, Signs, Third Text, Journal of Utopian Studies and others. She was co-curator of an exhibition of works by Mariola Przyjemska at the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw (2022-2023). In 2023, she received the Flex Foundation's Emma Goldman Award for equality-oriented research.
