Neoliberal transition and the making of the Polish gay subject

This article examines the formation of gay identity in Poland as a product of the country’s neoliberal transition and semi-peripheral incorporation into global capitalism. Drawing on a queer-Marxist framework that brings Marxist categories of alienation, reification, and combined and uneven development into dialogue with queer-theoretical concepts of performativity, homonormativity, and homonationalism, the article analyzes how the shift from socialism to neoliberalism restructured the material and discursive conditions of sexual subjectivity. While socialist Poland shared certain welfare features with Western Fordism, its social provision operated outside the wage-labor and mass consumption nexus through which gay identity crystallized in the capitalist core. The abrupt transition to neoliberalism compressed identity formations into simultaneity, producing a distinctive semi-peripheral configuration of queer life. Three analytical concepts— collective anonymity , collapsed transition, and combined and uneven emancipation—are proposed as theoretical resources for analyzing how global capitalism produces, distributes, and forecloses the possibilities of sexual life.