About
Welcome to the website of the research project Public against their will? The production of subjects in the archives of ‘Hiacynt Action’ conducted by dr hab. Ewa Majewska, associate professor at the SWPS University in Warsaw, Poland in the years 2022-2025 (grant nr NCN2021/43/B/HS2/00579). The project investigates the production of minoritarian subjects in the archives of the police operations codename ‘Hiacynt’, targeting gay men in the late 1980s in Poland in order to better control their population, perceived by the state functionaries as potentially dangerous, but also endangered by crime, interesting from the point of view of possible enforced collaboration and underresearched. The course of events resulting of these operations reveals various degrees of institutional ignorance, but also a plethora of biopolitical tools interesting also from the perspective of researching today's states of exception, sometimes still designating the LGBTQIA+ people and groups as their nr 1 public enemies. What were the plans of ‘Hiacynt’ operations? How were they conducted? What were their results? How their disorganized and scattered, traumatized archives still contribute to the socio-political forming of minoritarian subjectivity? What kinds of justice are and could be enacted in order to recognize the minorities and their losses? These are just some of the questions asked in this long project, which in fact started with my first presentation about the ‘Hiacynt’ operations in the international conference “Can we have some Privacy?” organized by the ICI Berlin in May in 2015. I published an expanded version of my presentation in the Interalia. Journal of Queer Studies in 2018 (submitted in 2016), and since then I have been working on the questions of archive, resistance and queer counterpublics. This website offers some publications, media materials, documents and useful links about the topics related to my work. It was generously sponsored by the National Center of Science (grant nr NCN2021/43/B/HS2/00579).
The research project Public against their will. The production of subjects in the archives of Hiacynt Action was conducted by one person —Ewa Majewska, sometimes in collaboration with other people, experts in the fields of data protection, human rights, law, queer art and activism. The solitude in confrontation with the mostly homophobic and biased state machine was sometimes difficult, and the diversity of my tasks, overwhelming. I spent endless hours reading and writing theory of state, policing, biopolitics, archive and restorative justice; I entered several archives, incl. the National Library, the Institute of National Rememberance (IPN), the queer/LGBTQIA+ grassroots archives in Warsaw, London, Amsterdam, Vienna and Berlin. I conducted long interviews with the men targeted by the Hiacynt operations, those who were inside the state apparatus in the time of these operations and today's activists and archivists. I discussed queer art of today and yesterday, to see how it serves as perhaps safest archive form for such archivalia, and the literature, film and media engagements with the Hiacynt operations in the 1980s and today. An unexpected twist in my research appeared in the second half of the project's realization - in fall 2023 suddenly my correspondence with the regional police's headquarters and the Main Police Headquarters in Warsaw intensified, and became a study object on its own, together with the Hiacynt documents I was provided within it between December 2023 and summer 2025. From these complex exchanges I learned that the Hiacynt operation's police documents became part of archives only in a very small part, and the majority of them is still used by police in current operations, 40 years after they were generated.
In my research, I planned to combine the archival research of documents with the reflexive interviews with the men targeted by the Hiacynt operations and the functionaries of the Polish state's apparatus of then and now (I conducted 20 reflexive interviews with representatives of these groups and LGBTQIA+ archivists from Warsaw, Vienna, Amsterdam, Berlin and London), analysis of literature, visual arts and media of the then and of now of the discussed events. I planned to theorize such notions as biopolitics, archive, police and the state's accountability for the abuses committed against the LGBTQIA+ persons and groups. In the course of the project however, the presence of the current police forces became a new entity, in form of my extensive exchanges with the 17 regional police's headquarters - almost all that there are in Poland (12 months, approximately 100 letters, phone calls and emails were exchanged). This provided me with new material and shifted the planned course of the research in ways demanding a more extensive discussion of the queer theory of state. The analysis of the queer restorative justice is part of that endeavor.
This project's main question quickly became: what is the nature of the relations between the queer theory and the LGBTQIA+ persons rights and interests? Subject formation approaches this question in an individualized perspective, but it is a question about the social, collective formation, responsibility and representation. In the 1920s critical theory established not just an understanding of causality between knowledge and society, but also a responsibility of scholars, who should not only diagnose the social bias and stereotypes, but also challenge them. While the large part of queer theory claims its critical roots, only some of its authors openly declare the need to challenge the social inequalities. Some theorists mute this responsibility, due to postcritical or other corrections, some proceed tacitly, and some openly reject not just the responsibility of queer theory for the LGBTQIA+ persons and needs, but also contests the very ontological grounds of such representation. My take is surprisingly Marxist - the notion of ‘interest’ borrowed from Althusser's analysis of ideology proves vital for establishing a critical position aiming not only at analysis, but also reclaiming social change.