Political Street Stickers in Resistance to Biopower in Poland: The Case of Krakow During the 2020 Polish Presidential Election Campaign

Abstract

Though largely ignored by scholars of political participation, stickers are an increasingly common means of expressing socio-cultural identities and a staple of contemporary protest movements. In Poland, the “LGBT-Free Zone” stickers sold with the newspaper Gazeta Polska in 2019 provided a clear demonstration of ruling party Law and Justice’s (PiS) hegemonic and exclusionary bio-conservative discourse. A year later, during the 2020 presidential elections, as issues related to LGBT+ rights became a key battleground revealing socio-political divisions in the country, a series of pro-LGBT+ stickers appeared in Krakow. This paper first evaluates the combination of linguistic and visual elements that makes political stickers a unique genre of expression. Multimodal discourse analysis of the pro-LGBT+ stickers posted in Krakow subsequently reveals an alternative conceptualization of “Polishness” that includes the LGBT+ community rather than excluding it on biopolitical grounds.