“This attack is intended to destroy Poland”: Bio-power, conspiratorial knowledge, and the 2020 Women’s Strike in Poland

This paper analyzes the entanglements between conspiratorial knowledge and bio-power in the Polish government’s discourse on the 2020 Women’s Strike protests against the near-total ban on abortion. Theoretically, it conceptualizes as “bio-power” both the assault on reproductive rights and the securitization of ensuing protests based on “conspiratorial knowledge”, which uses conspiracy theories as a heuristic device to understand social changes. Empirically, Foucauldian discourse analysis is deployed to interrogate a video-recorded speech by Jarosław Kaczyński, the de facto leader of the country, posted on YouTube in response to the protests. First, the paper exposes how the protests are recast as a conspiracy bent on legal, biological, and moral destruction of the Polish nation. Second, it studies how a small sample of remediations of the video by oppositional media and women’s rights activists refutes conspiratorial knowledge promulgated therein. Throughout, the paper also identifies various forms of “factual” and “affective” epistemic capital.