Patriarchy in Post-1989 Poland and Tokarczuk\u27s Dom Dzienny, Dom Nocny (The Day House, the Night House)

In her paper Patriarchy in Post-1989 Poland and Tokarczuk\u27s Dom Dzienny, Dom Nocny (The Day House, the Night House) Justyna Sempruch analyzes Tokarczuk\u27s 1998 narrative in the context of the post-communist revival of patriarchy in Poland as well as the parallel Western feminist impact on women\u27s writing in Poland. These two distinct socio-cultural developments, as reflected in Tokarczuk\u27s novel, expand the concept of a subversive household into a transnational dis/order that abolishes borders between domestic (national) and foreign structures: an increasing masculinization of the power structures (political arena and scientific practices) impacts the management of the social and the most private aspects of women\u27s lives in post-1989 Poland while the growing popularity of intellectual feminism, borrowed from U.S. and French second-wave feminist positions, encourages a local digging into a collective feminist past. Tokarczuk\u27s narrative belongs to a category which draws on Irigaray\u27s theories and displays preoccupations with the failure of the sexual revolution. Sempruch argues that Tokarczuk\u27s narrative reflects on the Western feminist formulations of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis as a discourse normalising patriarchy, as well as on re-evaluations of hysteria as the unheard voice of the woman whose language is reduced to psychosomatic symptoms