Abstract Book of the 8th Global Conference on Women’s Studies
Year: 2026
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Transgressing Masculinity: Femininity in Prison Narratives in 20th and 21st-Century Polish Literature
Jagoda Kurnikowska
ABSTRACT:
This paper examines how Polish women writers from 1920 to 2012 depict prison in their literary works. It focuses on Zofia Nałkowska (Dzienniki t. III, 1929; Ściany świata, 1931), Ewa Szelburg-Zarembina (Dwie godziny z minutami, 1955), Stefania Sempołowska (List otwarty w sprawie więźniów politycznych, 1926; W więzieniach, 1960), and Sylwia Chutnik (Proszę wejść. Więzienie. Historie nieprawdziwe, 2012), highlighting recurring narrative structures across nearly a century. These authors share the perspective of engaged, left-leaning intellectuals advocating for the improvement of prisoners’ lives. The analysis emphasizes the challenges of representing prison – a male-dominated, “wild,” and “foreign” space – from a female perspective. Women’s narratives operate through cultural distance, sometimes postcolonial language, and engagement with social roles, offering a unique lens for critically examining incarceration. Drawing on Foucault’s theory of the emergence and function of prisons, the paper argues that women writers destabilize the male-centered carceral space, redefining its boundaries and norms. It explores how femininity, as a socio-cultural construct, resonates with and transforms the prison, and how female narrators enact subtle forms of resistance, expanding the symbolic and social roles of women in a male-dominated environment. The study also considers the experiences of women writers who entered prisons and how these encounters shaped their texts.
Keywords: gender; literary analysis; postcolonial perspective; prison space; women writers