Body, Sexuality, and Passive Victimhood in the Post-1989 Reimagining of the Polish City of Wałbrzych

This article explores how the changes in commemorative culture in postcommunist Poland, namely, the loss of status of the traditional self-sacrificial martyr/hero at the expense of the passive victim, have produced new models for individual and collective identification based on vulnerability and suffering. Through the analysis of Pilgrim/Majewski’s surrealist plays The Peregrinations of the Black Iza of Wałbrzych (2009) and The Testimonies of the Ups Downs Ups Ups Ups Downs and so on of Antek Kochanek (2012), I examine the artistic transformations of two nearly forgotten city legends into victims of communist gender oppression and cultural icons of tolerance and inclusiveness for the purposes of reinventing the Lower Silesian Town of Wałbrzych’s postcollapse identity. I argue that Pilgrim/Majewski’s plays challenge the centering of Wałbrzych’s post-1989 identity discourse on the traumatic loss of the coal-mining industry by undermining hegemonic male heterosexuality’s exclusive claim on collective trauma and inscribing female and queer trauma into collective suffering. By heroizing two marginal characters with “socially inappropriate” sexual behavior, the playwright brings to the fore alternative subjectivities predicated on gender, sexuality, and the body, thus advocating for a more inclusive, polyvalent citizenship. More broadly, the author questions essentialist understandings of the self as a set of immutable core attributes (hinting at Wałbrzych’s clinging to its traditional identity as a coal-mining center) and promotes the social constructivist approach to identity as a fluid entity, a product of human definition and interpretation shaped by cultural and historical contexts.