Sprache als Waffe
摘要
In October 2020, a wave of women’s strike demonstrations against stricter abortion laws swept through Poland. The women’s demonstrations became a space to express their views on the aforementioned law and gave impetus to the creation of many protest slogans, with the help of which the participants of the demonstrations expressed their opposition to the political actions of the ruling party. The slogans were spontaneous and often humorously but also vulgarly thematized their irritation and dispute with the said political actions. The foreground of the analysis in the article is the 120 protest slogans of the women’s strike. The aim of the study is to show how language is used as a tool to express one’s own – contrary – position towards the newly introduced regulations on abortion. The article considers the slogans studied as a special form of protest communication. The analysis attempts to provide an overview of the linguistic practices used to express contradiction, dissatisfaction and criticism on the pragmatic and lexical level, thereby also indirectly providing access to the Polish discourse on abortion.