Beyond Agon: The Decolonization of the Feminist Tradition in Arleta Galant’s and Agnieszka Gajewska’s Literary Criticism Projects

Beyond Agon: The Decolonization of the Feminist Tradition in Arleta Galant’s and Agnieszka Gajewska’s Literary Criticism Projects

Monika Świerkosz

A b s t r a k t

The article examines changes in the way feminist literary criticism has been practiced in Poland since 2005 in the context of identity politics, location politics, the female tradition, and the female reading community. The author emphasizes the significance of (not only gender-related) “difference,” defined in a non-essentialist, nomadic, and non-antagonistic way, in two feminist literary criticism projects by Arleta Galant and Agnieszka Gajewska respectively. Both critics revise second-wave feminist critical tools and yet remain within the feminist reading community, seeking new non-antagonistic ways of reading the same and the different.