163 Chapter 5 Denying the Right to Speak in Public: Sexist and Homophobic Discourses in Post-1989 Poland. Natalia KrzyĪanowska The Poznań University of Economics Women and Homosexuals as the Other of the Polish Public Sphere What social categories such as „women‟, „lesbians‟ or „gay/homosexual men‟ have in common is their generally very limited access to the major areas of the Polish public sphere. Voices and activities of those groups are also gradually becoming less audible and visible in the Polish public domain. Their public audibility, as well as visibility, could enable those social actors to articulate their viewpoints as well as to point to those mechanisms in the broader society which to date hinder or, in fact, eliminate them from a proper functioning within the non-private domains. Such public articulation of their postulates could also help convince the broader society to undertake change in many of its key areas. However, recent national debates about the social „other‟ – women and gay people alike – in the context of ant-discrimination laws, same-sex marriages or improving gender equality (incl. the idea of „parity‟ in the political domain, etc.) – have shown, Polish society as well as Poland‟s state and legal system are indeed far from acknowledging even some of the basic rights of the aforementioned groups. This chapter aims to point to the major problems encountered in the Polish public sphere by its standard „other ‟ – mainly women, including lesbians, and homosexual men. The major aim of the article is to show how/where those „other ‟ are positioned in the Poland‟s post-1989 transforming public sphere. The chapter also explores how the public visibility and audibility of the „other‟ is consequently disallowed or diminished with the key „symbolic‟ representatives of the suppressed categories