Homeless at Home: The figure of the proto-queer woman in cinema of communist Poland (1970s – 1980s)

Abstract

Abstract: The late phase of state socialism of the 1970s and 1980s in Poland abounds with political upheavals and social anxieties. The films made in this specific atmosphere are traditionally rendered political, while the recognition of and new approach towards other aspects of this cinema remains under researched. This project undertakes the investigation of the ephemeral trails of female homoeroticism encoded in cinematic form. More specifically, I will read a number of films made in this period to explore the new forms of femininity I call proto-queer. ‘Proto-queer’ is used here to conceptualise the figure of woman bearing a gendered and sexual instability that, I shall argue, carries the hallmarks of what subsequently has become known as queerness. Some of the protagonists actively oppose the system’s impositions of the rules impossible to be accepted without the tarnishing of what is private, which is examined in Chapter One, in Interrogation (Bugajski, 1982) and Man of Marble (Wajda, 1976) to pursue female gender instability at the intersection of the political. The paradigms of the closet are productive in Chapter Two in which the analysis of erotic otherness, In Custody (Saniewski, 1983) and By Touch (Aazarkiewicz, 1985), in the context of isolation and social exclusion foregrounds the affective power of shame and its transformative abilities. In Chapter Three, I look at the specificity of the intimate interactions between women protagonists in the public spaces of their workplace where rivalry, admiration and jealousy occur to foreground the uneasiness beneath the seemingly ‘safe’ and stable surface in Woman and Woman (Bugajski, 1979), Debutante (Sass, 1982), Woman in a Hat (RóA¼ewicz, 1984) and Ivy (WA‚odarczyk, 1982). My analyses of these films in Chapter Four concentrate on how the specific genre of dream and the intertextual vocabulary address and reframe ‘deviant’ attractions. In exposing the intermingling workings of fantasy and ‘reality’, I sketch the canvass for the exploration of temporal asynchrony in Revenge (ZygadA‚o, 1982), Sérénité (Skiba, 1988) and Whirl (Schoen, 1984). Across these four chapters, this thesis explores the forms of fledging queer femininities which are neither fully developed nor clearly legible at this historical conjuncture; yet they can be regarded through their vernacular Polish/(socialist) inflections to pre-figure transgressions that would later be more available for reading through a queer lens. This project is concerned with cinema as a site of political resistance and transgression and the figure of the woman as the locus for this resistance, and her sexuality as the articulation of more general transgressions.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Jacqueline Stacey (Supervisor) & Stephen Hutchings (Supervisor)