Backlash

I checked that the average rating that TERAZ POLIŻ received in the reviews section of Google Maps is 2.6. Two five-star reviews and three one-star reviews (two of which say ‘ridiculous’ and ‘pseudo artistry’). Google offers a peculiar kind of map – it’s an attempt to reflect the territory together with a categorising, policing and evaluating, yet whimsical bonus. It is a series of overlapping maps, morphing into a successive series that communicate with each other. In this perspective, ‘’places‘’ such as TERAŻ POLIŻ also produce an isothermal map representing the temperatures of social tensions. Of course, the online evaluation can be an actual review of the work, but in this case it is very likely that it is a backward reaction, a punishment for committed, feminist-oriented action. This kind of narrative, which strikes at the artistic qualities of feminist art, is present in many conservative media as part of their official agenda.

“I’m warning you. You can’t unsee it. Click the link at your own risk”, tweeted one right-wing columnist, sharing the video called “Macica to moja republika” (en. The uterus is my republic) created as part of a collaboration between TERAZ POLIŻ and a group of female artists. “Quasi-pornographic contortions, intrusive LGBT and nihilism propaganda, an anti-Polish attack from Germany” – conservative media saw no artistic value in the project, and treated it as a threat to the Polish raison d’état. One method of subjugating emancipatory initiatives is also contemptuous mockery – like when a Catholic politician described Pussy Day as revealing a ‘sandbox taboo’, and a right-wing journalist described information about the event as ‘a ready script for a Monty Python sketch’.

Backlash is literally a sudden backward movement. In a metaphorical sense, it is a violent reaction of opposition to progressive movements, a political counter-attack combined with an angrily voiced disapproval. The backlash against feminism is, in the words of American scholar Susan Faludi, an ‘undeclared war against women’ that aims to stop social acceleration. However, this war also has its less violent battles – these include attempts, disguised under the mask of protecting ‘traditional values’, to put women in the position of the guardian of the family – caring, fragile creatures who are withdrawn from public life and don’t belong in the civil society.