On Attachment and Belonging: Or Why Queers Mourn Homophobic President? The Polish Case

In this presentation, I look at the aftermath of Polish President Lech Kaczynski's tragic death in a plane crash in April 2010, and I am concerned with understanding why gay and lesbian people mourned their infamously homophobic president. In examining this extraordinary case of national bereavement and the collective performance of grief, I point to complex models of attachment that position Polish homosexual subjects in a locus where they are able to enter the national discourse as subjects, and not only as abjects.

I also highlight the role of identification rather than identity in grasping the dependencies between discourses of the nation and homosexuality. With the insistence on relationality, processuality and performativity of identifications, we can understand the tie-up of nationhood and homosexuality, to be a wilful subversion of culturally and traditionally sanctioned performative recollections of nationhood (Polishness). Thus homosexual subjects attaining to the rituals of national bereavement break the chains of interlinked subject positions (who is/is not legitimate) and the practices assigned to them (to do/to be what one should do/be, according to their social role/position). And even if in doing so, they deploy some traditional (i.e. perhaps normative/normalising) tropes of nationhood, still, the nation is rendered a “hybrid” space of identification for the homosexual subject.