Activism, Art, and Gender. The Case of Polish Hydro_Femino-Artivism

The author of the lecture focuses on three issues: hydrofeminism, activism, and broadly understood art concerned with care for water and the well-being of river and marine ecosystems.

Hydrofeminism is treated as one of the strands of ecofeminism, while activism combined with artistic practice is understood as contemporary artivism (art + activism). To incorporate all these elements into the terminology, Gajewska uses the term hydro_femino_artivism. The main emphasis is placed on the Polish context of hydro_femino_artivism: its ideas, implementations, methods of increasing social and institutional support for these concepts, and attempts to legally implement posthumanist/non-anthropocentric ideas into the Polish legal system.

The researcher analyzes the postulates and activities of several artivist groups that have recently made their presence felt in the Polish socio-cultural space: the Osoba Odra Foundation, the Sisters of the Rivers collective, the Spotkania i Twórcy Foundation, and the duo cyber_nymphs. These groups—their protests, demonstrations, happenings, as well as educational and cultural activities—set the main directions of contemporary artivism, whose central theme is water.

Grażyna Gajewska is a professor of literary studies at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. For twenty-five years, she has been engaged in feminist theory, gender studies, and posthumanism, and for the past decade also in ecocriticism. Her favorite genre is speculative fiction in its various forms: fantasy, science fiction, weird fiction, climate fiction, and eco-horror.

She is the author of four monographs:

• Arcynieludzkie. Przez science fiction do antropologii cyborgów, Poznań 2010;
  Erotyka sztucznych ciał, Poznań 2016;
  Eroticism of More- and Other-than-Human Bodies, New York 2020;
  Ekofantastyka. Ujęcie sympojetyczne, Poznań 2023.

She has authored over one hundred articles in the fields of posthumanism and ecocriticism. She has also co-edited several books and two reports resulting from research projects funded by Polish and international institutions and scientific foundations.

Title of the illustration: Osoba Odra
Author: Justyna Kulikowska