This article examines some elements of queer rural life in England between the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries. It discusses a selection of queer people who had a profound relationship to the English countryside and considers how they established their personal lives in rural contexts and how far their significant interactions with rural England might be said to be queer. Taken together, their lives and work illustrate three themes that will encourage further debate among historians of the queer rural: the creation of queer home in the countryside; a desire for the preservation of nature, the landscape and rural life; and an ‘alternative’ spiritual connection to nature and the rural.

This paper studies a body of hybrid non-fiction works that lie at the intersection of queer and nature writing and which articulate a new conceptualisation the queer subject’s relationship with rurality. Those pioneering narratives – which for the purpose of the present research have been labelled “queer new nature writing” – do not offer a simple reversal of the traditional mode of thinking about the agonistic character of the queer-rural dyad. Instead, having recognised the very potential and possibility of the queer life beyond the city, they remain deeply aware of the need to imagine new ways to think and write about their experience of queer belonging in the rural space. The major aim of the paper is thus to identify the signposts of queer new nature writing and argue in favour of acknowledging the micro-genre’s unique (eco)poetics: one that is distinguished by such markers as the exploration of queer rural heritage, counter-pastoralism, or the presence of the auto(eco)theoretical impulse.

The aim of the article is to problematize two complementary phenomena: the queer Arcadia and contemporary art practices concerned with the intersection of non-heteronormative sexualities and the rural. The first part of the text is devoted to the history of the concept of queer Arcadia, with special emphasis on the idea of Aaron Betsky’s idea of the third scene/third space. The second part of the essay addresses contemporary reinterpretations of the queer Arcadia in the field of visual arts – especially in Central and Eastern Europe, including Poland. This part discusses the works by three visual artists: Jaanus Samma, Daniel Rycharski, and Małgorzata Mycek, whose works are interpreted vis-à-vis the concepts of (queer) utopia, dystopia and heterotopia, as well as Nancy Fraser’s idea of the subaltern counterpublic.

The text discusses the work of the Polish artist Adam Łucki in the context of the “rural turn” in queer studies and visual arts. Referring to the notion of “metronormativity” and the American discourse of the “anti-idyll,” I examine how these concepts can be applied to discuss the Polish rural queer experience and cultural constructions of the Polish countryside. In my interpretation of Łucki’s work, I argue that visual practices engaged in queering the countryside work against existing stereotypical perceptions of the rural space as backward and hostile. I also show how, in Łucki’s artistic practice, the countryside as a space and the rural as a temporal construct become symbolically decolonised through a performative queer appropriation.

The integration of queer themes with rural issues in contemporary Polish cinema creates a coalition, united against traditionalist perspectives. Within rural culture, largely subordinate to a Judeo-Christian viewpoint, spaces with a more inclusive nature are emerging. The discussed films relate to more egalitarian positions such as pastoralism, paganism, animism, folk culture, and zoocriticism. Moving away from heteronormativity in the context of rurality leads to a different way of perceiving nature, the environment, and the human place in the world. This different view of rural life and nature opens a new perspective for non-heteronormative identities.

In 2014, Helen Macdonald published a bestselling non-fiction text, H Is for Hawk. Building upon an inherited cultural practice of keeping and taming goshawks, she offered to the readers a compelling presentation of her personal journey of mourning after the death of her father, parallel to a rebellious maturation in the margin of cultural normativities. The relation between the austringer, that is, the keeper of goshawks, and the bird of prey is presented not only as a process of introspection and healing, but also of almost complete identification with the non-human partner. In parallel to this experience, Macdonald reads the personal history of yet another traumatised austringer, the homosexual author T. H. White. She builds thus a triangle of (mediated) human and (actualized) non-human relationships. This triple line of experience counters and deconstructs the narration of the dominant heterosexual male as a hunter and introduces a maternal element into the interspecies relationship.

This article considers the many important functions of Joe Brainard’s summer retreat in rural Vermont: as a haven from city life, as an opportunity to spend time with his long-term partner Kenward Elmslie and their mutual artist friends and as a space to fully devote himself to work. Brainard’s representation of his summers in Calais, Vermont, is examined in the context of Scott Herring’s postulate of queer anti-urbanism and of the concepts of queer pastoralism, the homosexual Arcadia and rural idyll. The article argues that Brainard ultimately embraced both the urban and the rural instead of privileging either of them. The analysis draws mainly on Brainard’s autobiographical writings and on Ron Padgett’s Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard.

This paper is an attempt at analysing the queer biodrama O mężnym Pietrku i sierotce Marysi (On Manly Peter and Mary the Orphan) written by Jolanta Janiczak in 2019. The underlying playwriting strategy applied by Janiczak in this “fairy tale for adults” is based on revising the existing biographical narrations that incorporate selected facts from the lives of Maria Konopnicka and Maria Dulębianka, and the prevailing social discourses and mindsets typical of the turn of the 20th century. The biographical facts used in the drama are subject to continuous revision and constitute an outset for a critical look on the lives of both characters and their life stories prevalent in literature and culture. The method for presenting factual content — created by the author — becomes subject to an autothematic and metatextual strategy which provides the play with additional meanings and defines it as a queer metabiography constructed on the borderline between past memories and annexation of the present.

The author attempts to reflect on the representation of rural areas and non-normative teenage biographies in M. L. Rijneveld’s debut novel Discomfort of Evening (2021). Using analytical categories derived from research on childhood, trauma, rurality, gender and sexuality, the author shows how the metro- and heteronormativity, and the experience of trauma affect the condition of literary characters and their ability to resist violence.

The article deals with a segment of the cultural transfer that took place between Polish and South African poetry in the 1980s and 1990s. The analysis of the interactions between the actors and texts involved in this process allows for the identification of the stakes of the alliances formed between them, as well as the mutual projections and/or misunderstandings. The research focuses on interpretations of Zbigniew Herbert’s poetry by Stephen Watson, a South African poet and essayist working on a model of poetry that would support the post-totalitarian transition of his national community. Through a close reading of Watson’s texts, set within the broader context of the global reception of the so-called Polish school of poetry, the ideas activated in South African culture as a result of the transnational relationship with Poland will be identified and discussed.

The article presents an examination of game biopolitics in relation to life interfaces in digital games and operationalizes the notion of biopolitical marker. The aim of this study was to describe and analyze meaningful interface elements related to the concept of life. The first part of the article introduces the general philosophical and theoretical framework for the study of life biopolitics in games. Here, I operationalize the concept of biopolitical marker. The second part consists of game descriptions focusing on the ways life is construed and mediated via their interfaces. In this part I present different interface conceptualization of health, life and hit points. The article concludes with a typology and problematization of a set of biopolitical markers distinguished in the previous sections.

In this article, referring to Sunaura Taylor’s research on disability as a construct also imposed on non-human animals, I propose a critical reading of Anna Augustyniak’s book of poems entitled Między nami zwierzętami [Between Us Animals] (2020), whose reception was relatively favorable, but which has not yet been read from consistently non-anthropocentric positions. I demonstrate that by detailing the various practices of violence against animals, the author not only employed familiar tricks but, above all, deeply marginalized and appropriated the perspective of non-human victims, clearly highlighting her own experiences. This leads to the normalization of victimizing and ableist notions of animals as deprived of autonomy, weak, dependent, and ultimately, disabled beings, thus counteracting the liberation of animals on their own terms.

The aim of the article is a new reading of the most famous novel by the French-Spanish author Jorge Semprùn entitled The Long Voyage in terms of the philosophical concepts contained in Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. As I would like to show, in his novel about the experience of deportation, Semprùn is inspired not only - as has been pointed out many times - by Marxist ideology, but also by the ideas of the French existentialist, critically combining and transforming them. Based on them, the author of The The Long Voyage creates a multi-level autobiographical narrative about the search for freedom and authentic existence of a man who experienced war and a stay in a concentration camp.

Summaries of feature texts of the present issue in the Polish language.

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