“This attack is intended to destroy Poland”: bio-power, conspiratorial knowledge, and the 2020 Women’s Strike in Poland

Abstract

This article analyzes how conspiratorial knowledge and bio-power were entangled in the Polish government’s discourse to undermine the 2020 Women’s Strike protests against the curbing of access to legal abortion. Theoretically, it uses Foucault's “bio-power” to conceptualize both the assault on reproductive rights and the securitization of ensuing protests based on “conspiratorial knowledge,” which uses conspiracy theories as a heuristic device to understand social changes. Empirically, discourse analysis is deployed to interrogate a video-recorded speech by Jarosław Kaczyński, the country’s de facto leader, posted on YouTube in response to the protests. First, the article exposes how the protests are recast as a conspiracy bent on the legal, biological, and moral destruction of the Polish nation. Second, it examines how a small sample of remediations of the video by oppositional media and women’s rights activists refutes the conspiratorial knowledge it promulgated. Throughout, the article also identifies the “(quasi-)cognitive” and “affective” forms of epistemic capital.