Some things are not negotiable: Gender, sovereignty, and Poland's integration into the European Union

Abstract

Looking at gender within Polish public discourse during the European Union (EU) pre-accession, and ongoing integration, process highlights the importance of symbolic politics to integration, and illuminates ways in which national identity and sovereignty are being renegotiated in response to European unification. This work explores how gendering the analysis improves our understanding of European integration, and points to the emergence of a logic of resistance that is generalizable to both other issues areas and to other contexts, beyond the Polish case. There is an extensive literature that explores resistance to gender equality policy within the nation-states, yet, the specific tensions provoked by the confrontation between supranationalism and nationalism require additional investigation.

Citation

Gerber, A. (2008), "Some things are not negotiable: Gender, sovereignty, and Poland's integration into the European Union", Texler Segal, M. and Demos, V. (Ed.) Advancing Gender Research from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries (Advances in Gender Research, Vol. 12), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 79-98. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1529-2126(08)12006-9