Authors

Discussion

The goal of this paper is to present the ways of ascribing and questioning gender roles in literature written by woman in post-socialist Poland. I look at the depiction of the changing social, economic and cultural situation of woman and ask what role did gender-specific inequalities play in the creation of literary narratives in the transformation period. The texts reveal by means of women the exclusion of social groups and minorities to show the role they play in the dominant collective narrative. Following Judith Butler, I view the category of gender as a result of symbolic representations, which she evaluates as a process of the emergence of inequalities. At the same time, gender is also a structural category that proves the existence of inequality structures, which strongly connects it with social inequality. Further, in the texts we see the representation of post-socialist expectations and the disappointment in the new system along with the continuities between the previous and the current system. For the analysis, I use texts that depict the changing role of women in the transformation period and whose authors, as activists or publicists, also take an active role in the public debate, like Sylwia Chutnik or Manuela Gretkowska. In this way, the connection between literary narratives and public debate is examined more closely.