The anti-LGBTIQ campaign in Poland: The established, the outsiders, and the legal performance of exclusion

Abstract

Since Spring 2019, over 90 local communities in Poland adopted resolutions expressing their rejection of “LGBT ideology.” Based on a content analysis of these resolutions, I show how local lawmaking was used in this case to create and reinforce the social division between the heteronormative majority and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, and Queer people. In the “anti-LGBT resolutions,” majoritarian identities are territorialized by way of a construction of moralized social spaces designed to cast out the minority. Drawing on concepts proposed by Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson, I demonstrate the efficiency of law in the performance of exclusion in three dimensions: institutional, symbolic, and proxemic.