Critical anthropology seems nowadays to operate as an empty signifier filled in with various meanings. Yet, it is still envisioned as a device for designing imaginaries that would make a difference in the contemporary world. Drawing on thus understood critical approach, I use my personal experience of a scholar situated at the intersections of anthropology and activism to analyze how the concept of LGBT rights has been adapted and contested in the field of political aimed at achieving social justice for non-heteronormative persons in Poland over the past two decades. The early 21st century brought political mobilization of the LGBT movement on the national level. Its further developments were closely related to a (neo)liberal concept of sexual citizenship and the Pink Agenda of the EU. Yet, it became clear that neither the EU accession, nor activities of the movement have been able to significantly diminish discrimination of sexual minorities. For the last twenty years mainstream initiatives rooted in identity politics have managed to unsettle the notion of heteronormative citizenship, but cultural and legal rights of non-heteronormative persons have not still been recognized by the nation state. Furthermore, from the outset activism modelled upon the other LGBT movements in the EU has been questioned by circles critical of the (neo)liberal concept of sexual citizenship, the Pink Agenda and related ideas of sexual/gender identities. In the proposed paper I discuss how the above processes, shaped by entanglements of various scales, have been all materialized in the field of political on the grassroot level of Wroclaw, a city in southwestern Poland. In this context I pay particular attention to my own changing visions of critical anthropology understood as a way of enabling social justice for non-heteronormative persons and beyond.
