The aim of this article is to reread The Polish Peasant in Europe and America as a representation of the fears and modernisation fantasies of its era. I analyse the patterns of gendered family relations and ideals of femininity and masculinity constructed by Thomas and Znaniecki within the framework of rural–urban discourses. As I will show, in The Polish Peasant we find huge contradictions between the liberal and conservative perspectives presented. On the one hand, the authors introduce the concept of “organisation – disorganisation – reorganisation,” which is supposed to be scientific and thus non-ideological. On the other hand, the authors’ patterns of interpreting empirical data show numerous gender bias and patriarchal schemes. As a result, the authors create an opposition in which whatever is rural is the cradle of authenticity, of naturalised national and gendered family values, and whatever is urban is dangerous and demoralising due to escaping the former strong rural social control. In The Polish Peasant the authors thereby construct the “morally healthy” model of a national and patriarchal rural community of families untouched by individualisation and women’s emancipation. Such a model had a patriarchal division of gender roles within a religiously devout, strong (meaning indissoluble), multi-generational family. In The Polish Peasant we can find both a nostalgia – which was typical of its era – for a “pre-modern,” rural, conservative civilisation, and worry about the moral health of women in the urban world. However, it is an ambivalent nostalgia accompanied by a conviction of the inevitability of social change.
This article discusses and expands on two related issues. The first is the unexplored reasons for the departure of Polish migrant women: the forced migration phenomenon. The author describes the system behind forced migration as created at the intersections not only of care, gender and migration regimes but also of legal regimes. Second, the author points out that the close relation between forced migration and the process of ‘unbecoming a wife in the transnational context’ creates a distinctive type of transnational motherhood experience. In order to explain the specificity of these types of experiences better the author introduces a new typology of transnational motherhood biographies. The case study of Aldona is representative of the experiences of some Polish women in the period under study, 1989–2010.
In this article I discuss the need for more systematic integration of approaches dealing with religious beliefs and practices into the discussion about sources and areas of gender social changes that occur in global migration. Firstly, starting from the discussion about negative representations of religiosity in contemporary debates, I consider from theoretical and methodological perspectives why we should move the religious dimension from the margins more to the centre of analysis. Secondly, basing on an exploratory review of empirical research about intersections of religion and gender in the lives of international migrants, I discuss findings that reveal about religion as a potential mediator in the gendered revolution. I answer how they help to understand the complexities and ambivalences of social changes and identify the areas they concern. I argue that the revolutionary potential that arises at the intersection of migration, gender and religion is not limited to changing gender orders in religious organisations. It is religious beliefs themselves that influence migrants’ everyday lives and challenge the existing gendered contract in lay areas, in work relations, civic and political participation.
W artykule analizujemy konstruowanie męskości przez polskich migrantów zaangażowanych w działalność polskich organizacji Kościoła katolickiego za granicą. Przedstawiamy wyniki badań, które przeprowadziłyśmy w latach 2016–2018 z aktywnymi religijnie polskimi mężczyznami migrantami, w trzech krajach: Anglii, Belgii i Szwecji. Ramą heurystyczną analizy jest koncepcja męskości hybrydycznej, rozumianej jako konglomerat społecznych praktyk i reguł społecznych wywodzących się z różnych wzorców płci. Pokazujemy, jak w procesie selektywnego włączania znaczeń przypisywanych np. kobiecości konstruowany jest nowy wzór męskości. Omawiamy, w jaki sposób religia staje się mechanizmem stratyfikacji i mobilności w ramach hierarchii płci. Osadzenie męskości w znaczeniach religijnych wynosi polską religijną męskość na dominujące pozycje w porządku symbolicznym.
EN
In the article we analyse the construction of masculinity by Polish migrants involved in Polish organisations of the Catholic Church abroad. The results of the research that we conducted in 2016–2018 with religiously active Polish migrant men in three countries – England, Belgium and Sweden – are presented. The heuristic framework of the analysis is the concept of hybrid masculinity understood as a conglomerate of social practices and rules derived from various gender patterns. We show how, in the process of selective inclusion, meanings and practices attributed to e.g. femininity are incorporated into the new religious masculinity pattern. We demonstrate how religion a mechanism of social segregation, stratification and mobility within gender hierarchy that elevates Polish religious masculinity to dominant positions in the symbolic order.
Since the beginning of the 1980s, the previously one-dimensional economic approach that was once dominant in migration studies has been critically reviewed and, as a result, migration has become problematised. The incorporation of other dimensions in the analysis of the processes of migration allowed for more complex diagnoses of global inequalities and related socio-cultural phenomena.
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