Disability Disruptions: Gender, Family, and Care in Post-1989 Poland: Disability Histories

In post-socialist Poland, the state offers no support for its disabled citizens and often abandons families to care for them. Natalia Pamula draws on memoirs, novels, journalistic accounts, protest statements, and interviews to excavate the voices of disabled people and caregivers caught within a system that both privatizes care and denies aid to families.

Polish politicians regularly idealize the family. But, as Pamula shows, such rhetoric coerces people into a state of violent intimacy that forces the burden of care onto family members bound by love, dependence, and responsibility. As the narratives show, disability destabilizes national myths, challenges heteronormative and patriarchal family ideals, and exposes continuities between socialist and capitalist regimes in their treatment of disabled citizens.

A rich blend of activism and analysis, Disability Disruptions ventures outside Anglophone notions of disability to highlight how Poland’s disabled people and caregivers overcome lack of recognition, resist social death, and rewrite public memory.