FROM GYM TO GUILDS

Abstract

My grandmother once told me that the whole lineage of women in my family is cursed. It was a little unexpected to me that someone who is a religious Polish Catholic shared this type of superstition. My mother and her sisters couldn’t find a proper partner, and each had at least one daughter. In single mothering, my grandmother saw the doom.1 This curse was manifested in small rural areas in Poland, where I come from. Soon I found out that the vast majority of my female friends, and colleagues from a Polish university were raised by single mothers. This encouraged me to move beyond personal context to reflections on the marginalisation of the lived bodies of young girls and women. I became fascinated with how, in this form of being together among other women in an enclosed environment, we can think about forms of challenging broader political issues, how subjectivity and relationships with body/bodies can be developed, and what tactics we can observe in everyday situations.