CBOS. (2020, June). Komunikat z Badan: Religijność Polaków w ostatnich 20 latach. https://cbos.pl/SPISKOM.POL/2020/K_063_20.PDF

Izienicki, H. (2017). Catholics and atheists: A cross-cultural qualitative analysis of religious identities. Sociology of Religion, 78(3), 1-26.

Korolczuk, E. (2020). The fight against ‘gender’ and ‘LGBT ideology’: new developments in Poland. European journal of politics and gender, 3(1), 165-167.

Yip, A. K. (1997). Dare to Differ: Gay and Lesbian Catholics’ Assessment of Official Catholic Positions on Sexuality. Sociology of Religion, 58(2), 165-180.

Poland is a predominately Catholic country, with as much as 91% of the country’s population identifying as Catholic (CBOS, 2020). The Catholic Church is widely known for its strong stance on the topic of queer identities which, for many non-straight and/or non-cis Polish Catholics, means struggling with the pressure to choose sides (Izienicki, 2017). Especially lately, as Polish political actors become more and more vocal about fighting “LGBT and gender ideology” (Korolczuk, 2020) reinforcing divisions within Polish society, this issue gains relevance. By concentrating on people who resist the pressure to choose between those parts of their identification, this paper investigates how Polish queer Catholics manage the dissonance between potentially conflicting queer and religious identities in the process of discursively constructing coherent selves. I study this navigation of identities in conflict by examining the discursive strategies used by my participants in order to linguistically construct coherence in life narratives and resolve the tension in interaction.

My data is drawn from 17 hours of semi-structured interviews in Polish with 13 members of a queer Catholic community in Warsaw. Narratives within the interviews were identified, and individual speech acts within narratives were then subjected to topic and stance coding. Initial analyses demonstrate that participants adopt three primary strategies for constructing subjective coherence in talk (Yip, 1997): harmonious incorporation of both identities, disidentification with one of the identities, and compartmentalization of identity positions. Harmonious incorporation of both identities is used to reframe Catholic dogma to accommodate queer identities, a strategy that younger speakers are more likely than older speakers to engage in. Older speakers tend to rely more on the disidentification strategy which they do through the use of lexical items that dissociate them from queer identities (e.g., “homosexual tendencies”).

When compartmentalizing identities, speakers split their alignment with the church into two categories, thereby constructing the church as double-natured. The first category is divorced from spirituality, and the vocabulary used to describe the relationship with the church reframes it as one where queerness is not relevant. For example, the speakers use concepts that are typically associated with corporations (e.g., calling the other people in the church “coworkers”), hobbies (e.g., “I didn’t have anything better to do on a Saturday”), high performance (e.g., reframing the altar as a “stage”), and activism (e.g., treating youth group as a form of activism) to describe their place in the church. The other side of this double-natured construction centers on spirituality, an aspect that was rarely raised unprompted and was often negatively evaluated via stances of disalignment and the use of terms such as “churchy” or “clerical”.

In the talk, I describe in more detail how such patterns of lexical and semantic variation are deployed by participants to navigate their affiliations with both queerness and Catholicism and discuss the relevance of these findings to our understandings of the discursive negotiation of identity more broadly.