Gendering Memory: Intersectional Aspects of the Polish Politics of Memory

The article is devoted to the process of gendering memory as a counterpoint to the politicization of memory observed in the Polish context. The core problem of the paper is a description of a local case of this type of gender ‘memory practising’ in the area of the public urban sphere, specifically one created by the Łódź Women’s Heritage Trail Foundation (https://www.facebook.com/ŁódźkiSzlakKobiet) – a gender-profiled female grass-roots initiative that is concerned with the city’s past. The article consists of three main parts referring to, respectively, the functioning of memory in the urban public sphere as a form of dialogue (hemerneutic-interpretative anthropology with Jurgen Habermas’ and Seyla Benhabib’s theories is the theoretical foundation here), the process of gendering memory (appearing alongside the narrative phrase and feminist proposals for the interpretation of memory as a form of its pluralization), and the presentation of the activities within the Łódź Women’s HeritageTrail Foundation’s particular initiative – namely ‘Women Routes in Łódź’ – as a kind of case study for the city as a landscape of memory. The paper deals with the tension observed between the politics of memory and the political practice, and the alternative memories that arise from the idea of multiplicity and polyphony, including the voice of women. The authors raise the issue of the genderization of memory in the context of an inquiry into how the pluralism of collective memory and the diversification of the public sphere develops as a result of the discourses and operation of the alternative memory, including gender-focused memory.

Since history is a closed structure, it can be assumed that memory is open to individuals and collectives, and thus susceptible to various activities that they extract from it, giving it various contexts at the same time. These individuals and groups seek a justification by "inventing" the past and memory (cf. Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) not only for themselves, but also for larger communities to which they refer (it can be a nation, a state, or another kind of community, including ethnic ones) which is important because of the value system that unites its supporters. The process of "inventing" is common for all micro, meso, or even meta memories, and so also for groups so far considered as those suppressing their voice (Muted Groups Theory, cf. Ardener 2005:50-54), such as women's discourses and herstorical practices, which is what this paper addresses.
Collective memories reconstruct rather than record the past due to various goals pursued by the group, including those resulting from conflicts of memory. These conflicts reveal dividing lines among interpretations and assessments of the past that exist within various social groups, countries, as well as in the international context. They expose myths and stereotypes, but also gaps and deformations in thinking about the past and ideologies that have been confronted (Forecki 2014:193-194). This type of tension is related to the competitiveness of memory (not only of the past, because it also translates into the present), rivalry between different images co-existing within the group, and the distinction between the 'familiar' and the 'other.' Competitive stories are rejected or reinterpreted to serve the community's purpose, which is preserving the community and stability, i.e., staying within the frames, supporting the effort of self-identification. It should be mentioned that -according to Michel Foucault -counter-narratives refer to bottom-up historiographies of excluded minorities or marginalized groups. Therefore, alternative images of the past and subversive epistemologies of remembering (Gajewska 2012:13-30) are, first of all, a reaction to the selectivity and principality towards the past and memory that characterizes mainstream, and, secondly and collaterally, they are also a sign of the pluralization of memory that manifests in the form of various micro-narratives (cf. Korzeniewski 2010 as cited in Lipiński 2015). These are also created by various types of minority movements and, hence, by female groups as well. These circles in Poland, most often associated with non-governmental organizations (human rights, developmental, awareness-raising, and education) and academic centers.
They are characterized by the insider's approach, i.e. the majority of created stories or herstories and meta-discourses, or polemics with the mainstream, are created by people who are personally involved in the description of their own worlds 1 .
The situation in Poland provides cases for analysis regarding the trends prevailing in a wider context. This specific research area, as well as the direction of interpretation, has been determined by the fact that, first, the intersectional and gender perspectives are treated as minor issues in the Polish research of the politics of memory; second, the gender category itself is not part of the mainstream paradigms occurring in the Polish public discourse; third, Poland is an interesting example of a country undergoing a transition within just one generation (the last thirty one years since the year 1989), i.e. it has 1 See some Polish achievements of this kind, including selected academic publications, textbooks, catalogs of artistic exhibitions, and non-formal education texts, such as: Abramowicz, Biedroń, and Kochanowski 2010;Penn 2014;Niziołek 2016aNiziołek , 2016bKowalczyk 2018;Majewska 2018. moved from the system of the centrally-controlled socialist state to the democratic one. Although this transformation cannot be perceived as evolutionary or progressive, during the process of change the Polish people had to face antithetic messages, competitive visions of the past, present, and future, as well as their own myths. These are the grounds for our thesis herein, namely that a change like the one observed in Poland is not one of the processes that progress evenly as a stable transgression to the new reality. On the contrary, it entails adding new elements to the existing cultural core, which changes the existing perspective.
The authors of this article gravitate towards an approach based on the hermeneutic method of Hans Georg Gadamer (Gadamer 1993). Hermeneutics is an attempt at understanding Others. Our study refers to the situation of an inquirer. An inquiry presupposes a situation of a conversation, i.e. a dialogue that leads to cognition. This dialogue concerns the relationship between the past and the present, the old and the new, the tradition and the change. There is an understanding generated in the process of these two time horizons meeting. The same occurs when ideological and mental perspectives meet and confront. This method influenced the interpretative approach in social sciences, including the development of interpretative anthropology, and inspirations from Paul Ricoeur's theories (Ricoeur 1973;1976;1984). The most distinct representative of the interpretative school in anthropology is Clifford Geertz (1983;.

Anthropological interpretation is a construction of
examining what is happening, what specific people do, speak, and think. Cutting off this kind of interpretation from what is happening, and thus from its locality, makes it an empty composition (Geertz 2005:33). Locality takes on a special sense in the situation of the most basic feature of the modern world that various theories, including the interpretative ones, had to confront, namely the phenomenon of progressive diversion. The disintegration of large, coherent systems into weakly connected smaller structures makes it difficult to demonstrate the relationship of local realities with superordinate entities. Thus, if there is a task for a theory, it opens here.
One has to create new, general concepts or modify the old ones in order to be able to penetrate the chaos of heterogeneity and say something useful about its forms and future (Geertz 2005: 274-275). We need ways of thinking that are perceptive to details and individual cases, to singularities, discontinuities, contrasts, and unique things, i.e. what Charles Taylor calls "deep diversity" (Taylor 1993:155-186). By extension, this approach cannot ignore the question of self-determination that the modern concept of agency entails. It was discussed from a feminist perspective by, among others, Bronwyn Davies (1991). This is exactly what the feminist movements have shown -in the public-private division they have identified the foundation of the discourse of domination that justifies the female oppression and exploitation in the private sphere (Benhabib 2005:87).
On the other hand, Habermas' discursive model that defines the public sphere comes from the egalitarian norm of reciprocity and designs the democratization of social norms, including those concerning family and gender (Frazer 1987: 31-56).
Here, Hannah Ardent's concept with regard to the public space seen in the context of appearing (Arendt 2000) is also worth mentioning. It is used by researchers of intercultural relations in a way which is similar to our approach herein (see: Göle 2016). It emphasizes the fact that the desire to reveal oneself, to speak up, to show oneself, and, therefore, to leave the shadow is important. This is what our metaphor about pluralistic memories refers to -speaking up and appearing in the public space in a distinctive way (Göle 2016:69). By dint of such gestures 4 it is becoming more and more common, i.e. shared. The more 'Other People' fill this gap and become visithat negatively affect one's life opportunities and the abolition of asymmetrical social relations, as well as the differences between, e.g., the ruling and the ruled, rich and poor nations, contemporary and future generations, women and men, the white and the non-white, the supervised and the supervising, the infantile and the mature, and other artificial divisions like these. 4 Thus, it is a case of social behaviorism, i.e. the issues related to who (and how) appears in the public space and how they act in it. In other words, the individual enters such space with a selected type and repertoire of motoric and oral actions -as well as other actions performed with specific artefacts -and, hence, transforms a particular topography and triggers a specific reaction. ble, the more it has a chance to become commonly shared, i.e. with all people granted the same rights. it is based on the already mentioned "anarchic" face of the discourse, in which the public opinion is shaped in an informal way (Habermas 2005:337).

Feminist Approaches to the Politics of Memory and Gendering Memory
The concept of gendering memory belongs to the same category as the concepts of body gendering, care gendering, etc. Therefore, it entails a kind of analysis of social phenomena that are treated as constructions based on the cultural and social dimensions of gender. The gender of memory is one of the points of view of the analysis of the contemporary memory policy, understood as official, leading, bottom-up, alternative, inherent, and specific narrative that is associated with various social movements, minorities or, among others, women's movements, which are not homogeneous. According to the theoreticians of gendering memory (i.e.; Hirsch and Smith 2002;Leydesdorff, Passerini, and Thompson 2009;), "[C]ultural memory [its part constitutes also the gendering memory -E. P., I. B. K.] is located in a specific context rather than subsumed into monolithic and essentialist categories" [Leydes- Gendering memory enters into a dialogue with postfeminism, as well as, earlier, with both the second and the third wave of feminism in the West. In the case of the second wave, it was about a key concept, which was female or women's experience. The thirdwave theorists, however, recognized in the notion of female experience "a suspicious concept," which was based on critical voices coming from two sides, namely from poststructuralism that acknowledged both the experience and subjectivity as discursive effects, and from postcolonial theory, which pointed out that this notion introduced differences between women and functioned as a hegemonic norm (Sieracka 2015:76-77). The problem of experience returned with postfeminism, but it was privatized and underwent extensive individualization; people turned away from the old "private is political" slogan. This is linked to concepts constituting Western neoliberal democracy. Moreover, the former feminist language of liberation from oppression and the rejection of the role of victims by women ceased to be compatible with the experience of those women who did identify with the values of this political and economic system. These women, who denied the 'rhetoric of victimization', did not want to articulate the experience of oppression, treating this type of discourse as an attempt to relinquish responsibility for their own helplessness, laziness, and bad choices, and blame it on external factors. Being a victim was identified by them as a culpable personal fail-ure. It is also connected with the neoliberal imperative of success, which in the postfeminist discourse takes the form of slogans such as "girl power" or "you go, girl" (Sieracka 2015:79). These gestures of rejecting the perception of women as victims also occur alongside the contemporary return to the idea of difference and being different, which is claimed to be a source of individual strength as well as pleasure. The current popularity of gendered female experience shows that the rejection of this concept during the third wave could have been too hasty, because, as consequence, one of the most important existential experiences of women has been forgotten.
It has, however, come back and revealed women's need to experience, among others, their own corporeality, physicality, and presence. A woman, according to postfeminism, is not an object of observation or someone else's action, but an agent of the system,

Gendering of Memory as a Counterpoint to the Politicization of Memory
In the Polish politics of memory 5 , we have been dealing with two important memory turns. The first one is based on the radicalization of memory, while the second one on introducing alternative memories -memories 'emerging from the shadow.' The turn of the 1990s and the 2000s, which was the time when new countries joined the European Union (Poland did so in 2004) was important for the latter trend. Those were specific milestones for shaping a different memory and changing the approach to remembering. Memories that emerge from the shadow also refer to diversity understood in a broad sense. 6 the former term has much worse connotations than the latter one. Namely, historical politics means that the state funds scientific research and institutions dealing with the memory, and supports educational activities in this area by organizing public holidays, defining attitudes and values, as well as labeling the heroes or using polyphony in the narrative in order to gain some benefits related to the development of national identity (Wawrzyński 2014). In Poland, historical politics is an issue which triggers stormy debates and is often perceived as an element used to manipulate the public opinion and shed a particular light on history in a way that suits the ruling political elites. The politics of memory, on the other hand, is a less politically charged term; the focus here is placed on the collective memory rather than on its politicization. Nonetheless, both terms are very often used interchangeably. They also refer to the concept of collective memory (Halbwachs 2008), which is associated with the identity of individuals and communities. In this light, the past in our memory is adapted to our identity and results from the ethnic origin, social class, or power relationship. However, in addition to the relationship of the collective memory and identity, the relationship between politics of memory and the authorities is also vital. It is like this due to the fact that collective memory refers to the legitimization of the existence of a given community, its structures, and forms of the political power. Time management and the attitude of the community to time is the source of power and, at the same time, the way in which the power is exercised. It is the political power that determines what and how should be remembered (Szacka 2006). Therefore, the issue of women's commemoration and raising the topic of their participation in history has a political meaning. 6 In traditional socio-political organizations, manifestations of diversity such as age, sex, ethnic origin, religious faith, physical agility, social status, or sexual orientation functioned either on the margins of the public sphere or only in the private sphere, repeatedly giving rise to exclusion. Currently, we are observing a global process of shifting the position of the representatives of diversity from the periphery of the political scene to its center, and the growing strength of the voices of the hitherto marginalized minorities. See : Parekh 2000;Naser and Honneth 2003;Kymlicka2007;Putnam 2007. The first turn has launched the values identified with the 'far right' movements and strengthening the national identification -which consists in politicizing -and, thus, it has given a political character to memory 7 .There are also gender-related threads in this trend, but more in the context of maintaining the patriarchal understanding of gender roles. A radical breach from the pluralistic discourse of memory led to the political and cultural breakthrough in 1989 that consisted in strengthening the identity of the group seeking national identification. In this case, the desired social model (reflected -but at the same time strengthened and justified -by memory) was a monolithic and static system based on a classical cultural mechanism built upon the binary system of opposing values, spaces, and communities. It manifested in the most evident way by the opposition "orbis exterior -orbis interior" (the 'I/not-I' model, the 'we/they' kind of thinking). This system emerges from some kind of social consciousness, which can be compared to the isolationism of consciousness described by Ludwik Stomma (Stomma 2002).
In the theory of politics, this opposition is also described by, among others, Carl Schmidt (2000) and developed by Chantal Mouffe (2008) in the context of the opposition between friends and enemies. For that reason, the radicalization of memory in Poland depends on its politicization -there is an ad hoc social game with the memory in its center; the game reflects the already existing social divisions, but also deepens and fosters them. The "orbis exterior -orbis interior" opposition is repeated at each level of the social structure. According to this thought, 7 Politization is a multi-faceted process of adding a political character to the phenomena that were not political originally, e.g. spiritual culture or artistic creativity. Consequently, it is an influence of politics on the functioning of the administration, media, and the everyday and private life, which manifests in the tendency for politics to permeate all areas of life, subordinating social phenomena and transformations to the rules of the politics (Karwat 2010:64,70). usually also means closing it to everything that is considered foreign. It is also related to a patriotic attitude centered around the homeland, i.e. a common territory treated as the material core of identity. Radicalizing memory sharpens the image of the world and creates a black-and-white landscape in which a nation (typically, the term 'people' is not used in this context) 'get up from their knees' and find, e.g., the dignity and pride taken away from them as a result of changes (according to trauma-based discourses). The transformation that was synonymous with change was oriented towards polyphony, where the previously ignored and not taken into account discourses were now debated, often contrary to the lead-ing Great Narrative and, hence, belonging to minorities in the broad sense, as well as to the excluded or to "muted groups" (Allport 1954).
It is this kind of memory, or rather memories, that emerge from the shadows that create the second recollection of memory. It is an alternative memory, defined by contestants as "bad memory" -became an ally and mentor. Since the 1990s, the research trend for memories that revised the mythological heroic history has become stronger. Given the current political situation in Poland 8 , the Polish-government-controlled media and opinion centers treat this tendency as awkward and harmful, because it can spoil the good memory and advantages of the country. The reason for this approach is that this trend contradicts the re-mythologization of memory that is a consequence of -and also a driving force behind -its radicalization. The recent radicalization is not really anything new, but, rather, constitutes an enhanced response to explicit pluralism of memory that is 'polyphonic' on many levels,  It is also about emphasizing formal associations using a different angle in order to include them in the dialogue and, finally, deconstruct them and read the past in accordance with the 'female key.' In Łódź, this practice engages in a dialogue with stereotyp-ical images of the city, such as "a city of women," 9 "a city of many cultures," 10 or "a city without history/tradition," and, finally, "a city difficult to live in." These selected features of the city, treated as essential elements of its identity (perceived through objects, circumstances, and places), evoke specific attitudes among the inhabitants. They are also components of tradition. This tradition, however, is not impersonal and, therefore, it should be treated as suitable for people. This approach is supported by the understanding that people have traditions and they have the right to have them. These forms -especially those developed at a grassroots level by animators -introduce the memory of everyday lives of people, ordinality of life, and non-heroism, which is usually associated with the existence of women. Fleeting everyday life, usually enclosed in individual memory, must be present and inscribed in a particular space and discourse so that it can be perceived, identified, memorized, and 9 As part of the Women's Heritage Trail, the history of Łódź contains many elements related to factories and workplaces, where the most important problems of everyday life of a large number of city residents once occurred. These factories were the place of the initial (though partial) emancipation of women. Urban identity had its origins in the 19 th century and was the result of many Łódź inhabitants' participation in unions and political actions, including street demonstrations, education, cultural life, etc. Life in the city gave an opportunity to interfuse and mix lifestyles represented by different groups of women. This is why the Trail gives voice back to the folk class. 10 Łódź was established in the 15 th century. Just before the First World War, the small agricultural town transformed into a textile industry center. Immigrants from Silesia, Czechoslovakia, Moravia, Brandenburg, but also Switzerland, France, and England flowed to the city. The city became a "promised land" (as it was easy to get rich here) and a place of coexistence of many cultures and religions -a place of the permeation of influences as well as a cultural and ethnic borderland. The multicultural atmosphere in Łódź prevailed until the outbreak of World War II. so that it can supplement the previous memory and be applied in space, thus inscribing a different way of perceiving that space and being in it. This alternative herstory should be shown, i.e. created, or new ways which would allow others to feel it should be looked for. It would have to be added to the public discourse, which, in consequence, would generate a real diversity within it. In order to achieve this, one needs real faces, names, and memories, i.e. real heroines and events. This is why the Łódź Women's Heritage Trail is primarily focused on creating indi- what should be understood by the "private is political" slogan: the women, mainly working women, most often pointed to supply problems and insufficient infrastructure, the improvement of which was necessary to perform caring functions. These are, of course, social spheres that are culturally attributed to women. They also raised the issues of wages, working conditions, and sexual abuse.

The City as a Remembrance Landscape Related to the Radicalization and Feminization of Memory
When visitors to Łódź go to the Women's Heritage Trail, a new process of gendering the city -as well as its history and the memory of it -occurs. In other words, the city's re-establishment takes place (Pink 2011:139). The foregoing perception changes, just like the context and understanding of what was happening in the city, who lived in it, what they did, and who they were. Recalling the stories of Łódź's women and the events in which they took part i inevitably accompanied by issues related to ethnicity, religion, economics, as well as the political ones, linked with education, reproduction, care functions, age, and others. It is something unavoidable whenever the topic of women, including women from Łódź, is raised 11 , because Łódź has been a multicultural and multi-religious city from the very beginning of its existence.
Women have always had a certain "spatial capital" (Erbel 2010:73) as well as, it should be added, a memory capital that corresponds to female representations in space, history, and in memory, which are elements also responsible for the expression of women themselves. However, the use of only alternative discourses against the dominant one seems insufficient in order to carry out a significant subversion and to exist in space and memory in one's own right. A physically transformed space is a pre-11 In a sense, this is a reference made by the creators of the Trail to the postulates of the third wave of feminism, which emphasized social class, ethnicity, religious beliefs, etc., which -alongside gender -are indicative of diversity between individuals. Focusing solely on gender and not including the other categories does not provide a sufficient explanation. requisite of achieving it. Therefore, one needs to create a new (real) space for themselves or annex an existing one in order to use it in one's own way.
When bearing in mind the thesis of de Certeau that says that walking can become a sign of rebellion, disagreement, and a reversal of order, following the Heritage Trail belongs to that category -there is a clear return to everyday life. Places, people, and events that had previously been marginalized or treated as so obvious that they seemed transparent and were ignored (e.g. women and their daily activities) are now re-discovered. The subversive practice of the Women's Heritage Trail is reinforced by a city map, which is distributed to the walkers or during meetings. 12

Photo 1. Map prepared by the Łódź Women's
Heritage Trail. 12 An example of the first and main herstorical trail and the map of Łódź city center, prepared by the Foundation of Łódź Women's Heritage Trail (available only in Polish). The presented map is the first of the created walking maps on women's routes for the needs of guided tours (it was created in 2012, the presented graphic shape was obtained thanks to funds obtained in 2013). They are also routes for independent sightseeing of the city (thanks to the attached descriptions), prepared by activists of the Łódź Women's Trail Foundation. This route is called classic -centered around the very center of the city and tells about women from different eras.
Despite the eclecticism of this first women's trail in Łódź, which primarily stems from different times in which its heroines lived and acted as well as the diversity of their professions, the criteria for selecting women are about many features that they had in common. Among them, there is, on the one hand, independence and decision-making -including financial and professional independence (wives of manufacturers, a librarian, pharmacists, textile workers, women engaged in resistance, a midwife) -and, on the other, creativity and ingenuity (artists from various fields of art) and the involvement in, among others, matters important for women, from education to health (a suffragist, a school headmaster, and artists). Finally, some of the heroines represented typical "muted groups," such as physical workers (textile workers), women without formal knowledge and power (the alleged witches -women who most often came from rural underclass and had indigenous knowledge), or artists belonging to ethnic and religious minority groups, including language minority groups (e.g. Yiddish writers and poets).
The process of situating the heroines in a specific space of the city, i.e. in its central part, results from the fact that in these places the majority of the women worked or lived (except for two places; the first one was selected, because it is a point dedicated to witches and herbalists, while the second one -the Museum of Pharmacy -commemorates the pharmacists symbolically). Despite the fact that many of these women were commemorated with plaques or by naming public spaces or public buildings after them (e.g. a hall in the University Library, a city square, a square in a shopping cen- On maps, places related to women's stories are marked with points that show their connections with specific spots. Those women lived at different times and differed in social background, religious beliefs, views, and activities. However, the apparent lack of convergence between the heroines is not as important as the freedom to create one's own routes and the act of seeking similarities and differences between particular women. Moreover, the above-mentioned temporal and thematic eclecticism creates a network of new connections, and also reflects the structure of memory or its palimpsest character in a more realistic way. Map users decide what is interconnected and what meanings they will take out of the city. The herstorical map provides them with the key, but not ready solutions. This type of reading undermines the perception of history and memory as objective and static structures. On the contrary, it enables creation based on traditional formal concepts, which reveals new contexts (Vuković 2007).
The Łódź Women's Heritage Trail, like other initiatives of this type, is an alternative to local history and memory habits. It problematizes the space, perception, and discourses about the past in points where they seem neutral and familiar. Cultural and social heterogeneity is manifested through these types of activities, because the herstoric memories "drawn from the shadows" reveal alternative contents and perpetuate them in the human perception.

Concluding Remarks
The aim of this paper was to outline the dynamics of transformations taking place in the public sphere, in which various discourses of memory -as well as possible ways of translating it into the political practice -appear. The authors gravitate towards an approach based on the Hans Georg Gadamers' hermeneutic method, which is an attempt to comprehend Others. In the process of meeting two ideological and mental horizons and their confrontation, an understanding is created. The hermeneutic structure which we develop during our research is based on the classical model of the hermeneutic circle and it goes through the following stages: