Welcome to the website of the research project Public against their will? The production of subjects in the archives of “Hiacynt Operation 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 main publication - my book The Caring Leviathan? “Hiacynt” Pink Files, Biopolitics, and the Queer Weak Resistance will most probably be published with Brill in 2025/2026.
Between 1985-1987 several operations were conducted by the police and secret services of the state of Poland under the code name “Hiacynt” to examine, interrogate, infiltrate and analyze the gay persons and communities under the pretexts of the need to investigate their international connections, as well as the possible spread of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, as well as in order to close the unfinished investigations concerning crimes in which gay men were involved, often as main victims. Although planned as a “caring for the population”, “Hiacynt” often resulted in fear and trauma, allowing further criminalization of the already marginalized and discriminated LGBTQ+ communities.
The operation’s scattered and dispersed, heterogeneous archives include the state archives of the IPN (Institute of National Rememberance), the National Library, state institutions (such as those belonging to the ministry of health and of internal affairs), the private archives of the men targeted by the actions, the artistic archives created based on said witnesses documents and testimonies, as well as media articles and scarce academic articles. Approaching the “Hiacynt” operation almost 40 years later means confronting scattered and chaotic archives of very different kinds – those created by various state agents as well as those produced by terrified individuals and groups, those of the media, public debate, and the artistic ones. In this project the focus is on the minoritarian subject formation in those perplexed and disintegrated archives, on the subjectivity (de)formed in the process of state intervention, criticized as a brutal one, but also defended as an example of the caring operation of the state conducted to protect the supposedly vulnerable parts of the population.
The main academic gain of this research project lies in the comprehensive reconstruction of the “Hiacynt” operation dispersed and heterogeneous archives, under the main denominator of the minoritarian subject formation in the confrontation of the state apparatus and individual/collective bodies of the non-heteronormative persons and communities in Poland of the late 1980s emerging 40 years later from the scattered documents and accounts. In a search for the minoritarian subject formation patterns, emerging on the intersection of the vulnerable ontologies and epistemologies of weak resistances and the biopolitical repressive state action, this project builds an interdisciplinary methodology of researching scattered, heterogeneous archives, it also reconstructs the patterns of state repressive biopolitical action, thus allowing in-depth study of the usually separated aspects of contemporary state surveillance apparatus, and reconstructs the subjectivity formed in such traumatizing conditions. The paradoxes of “caring” hands of the Leviathan will be discussed beyond the strict separation of repression and control, and a critical feminist-queer analysis of the notion and abuses of care are an added element of this research. The smooth transition of welfare into repressive, militarize care, performed as surveillance, control or state of exception, designating a minority to subsume the place of the "enemy" is another part of this project. Yet another one is the reflection on the gendered evolution of the state apparatus. Perhaps the most important theoretical part of the planned publication revolves around the question of the archive, presented as necessarily dialectical in its intertwined immanent core dimension (archont, researcher, files) and the transcendental, yet also permeating dimensions of politics, cultural norms and habitus.
The “Hiacynt” operation is an important case demonstrating the contradictions of subject formation in late modern state. The subject formation of the gay men targeted by the “Hiacynt” operation emerging from its individual, community, media and state archives, as well as from art and literary works, is one of many faces, one of trauma and recovery, of suppressed and overtly expressed affect. It is one abandoned because of the painful conditions it emerged in, but also because of the complexity of their ontology and production and the heterogeneity of its archives and traces. The “Hiacynt” operation only has partial analysis and summaries. Its archives are scattered and procedures of justice are still until now refused. This project offers such summary, to be published as articles and a monograph, as well as a methodology, which could be applied in other archive studies of similar complexity. The project’s website and conference presentations will allow further dissemination of the project’s findings.