On attachment and be<i>longing</i>: Or why queers mourn homophobic president?

Abstract

<jats:p>In this article I ask why gay and lesbian people in Poland mourned their infamously homophobic president Lech Kaczynski, and, in turn, what it means to mourn one's own enemy. In examining this extraordinary case of national bereavement and the collective performance of grief, I point to complex models of attachment that position Polish homosexual subjects in a locus where they are able to enter the national discourse as subjects, and not only as abjects. I stress the role of identification rather than identity, relationality, processuality and performativity in understanding the relations between nationhood and homosexuality. Homosexual subjects attaining the rituals of national bereavement break the chains of interlinked subject positions and social expectations. In doing so, nationhood is rendered a “hybrid” space of identification for the homosexual subject. Consequently, mourning becomes an act of “queering” the nation, a wilful subversion of culturally and traditionally sanctioned performative recollections of nationhood (Polishness).</jats:p>